Her father might have ended his life with one heck of a finale, but his death and the investigation, if not the suspicion, were behind them now. She could quit being afraid. She could move on and forget….
Shoving the memorabilia off to one side, she rummaged around some more and eventually came up with the punch bowl. She was about to drag it to the entrance when she remembered the box of Barbie dolls she’d packed up when she was twelve. They were probably down here, too, she realized. If she could find them, she could give them to her own daughter, Brianna, who’d just turned six.
Following the curve in the wooden path, Madison came across some leftover tiles from when they’d redone the bathroom, a dusty briefcase, an old ice-cream maker, and some of her baby things. Near the edge of the plastic, where bare dirt stretched into complete darkness, she found a few boxes that had belonged to her half brothers, along with the denim bedding her mother had bought when Johnny and Tye came to live with them.
As she pushed past Johnny’s old stereo, she promised herself she’d write him again this week, even though he never answered her letters. He’d been in and out of prison for years, always on drug charges. But he had to be lonely. Tye stayed in touch with him, but her mother pretended he didn’t exist. And he hated his own alcoholic mother who, last Madison had heard, was living somewhere in Pennsylvania in a halfway house.
She squinted in the dim light to make out the writing on several boxes: “Mother Rayma’s tablecloths…” “Mother Rayma’s dishes…” “Aunt Zelma’s paintings.”
No Barbies. Disappointed, Madison rocked back into a sitting position to save her knees from the hard planking, and hugged her legs to her chest, trying to figure out where that box might have gone. Brianna had had a difficult year, what with the divorce, their move to Whidbey Island thirty-five miles northwest of Seattle, her father’s remarriage, and the expectation of a half sibling in the near future. Madison would love to have fifteen or more vintage Barbie dolls waiting in her back seat when she collected her daughter from her ex-husband’s later today. Danny certainly lavished Brianna with enough toys.
Maybe she needed to dig deeper. Pushing several boxes out of the way, she slid the old mirror from the spare bedroom to the left, and the avocado bathroom accessories that had once decorated the upstairs bathroom to the right, to reach the stuff piled behind. She was pretty far from the light at the entrance, which made it difficult to see, but she was eventually rewarded for her efforts when she recognized her own childish writing on a large box tucked into the corner.
“There it is!” she murmured, wriggling the box out from behind an old Crock-Pot and some extra fabric that looked as if it was from the sixties and better off forgotten. “You’re gonna love me for this, Brianna.”
“Madison, what could possibly be taking so long?”
Madison jumped at the unexpected sound, knocking her head on a beam. “Ow.”
“Are you okay?” her mother asked. Annette stood at the mouth of the crawl space, but Madison couldn’t see her for all the junk between them.
“I’m fine.” She batted away a few cobwebs to rub the sore spot on her forehead. “You can tell Mrs. Howell I found the punch bowl you said she could borrow.”
“I use that punch bowl every Christmas. What’s it doing all the way back there?”
“It wasn’t back here. I’ve been looking for my old Barbies.”
“Don’t waste another minute on that,” her mother said. “We gave them to Goodwill a long time ago.”
“No, we didn’t. They’re right here.”
“They are?”
“Sure.” Madison pulled open the top flap of the box to prove it, and felt her heart suddenly slam against her chest. Her mother was right. There weren’t any Barbies inside. Just a bunch of women’s shoes and underwear, in various sizes. And a short coil of rope.
CHAPTER TWO
S TUNNED , M ADISON BLINKED at the jumble in the box as the pictures the police had shown her years earlier flashed through her mind—grotesque, heart-rending photos of women after the Sandpoint Strangler had finished with them. It made her dizzy and nauseous to even think about those poor women; it made her feel worse to believe her father might have—
No! Surely there was some mistake. The police had searched the crawl space. They would’ve found this stuff.
Steeling herself against overwhelming revulsion, Madison used a towel rod to poke through the box in hopes of finding some evidence that would refute the obvious.
In the bottom corner, she saw something that glittered, and forced herself to reach gingerly inside. It was a metal chain. When she pulled it out into the murky light, she could see it was a necklace with a gold locket on the end. But she was too terrified to open it. Her heart hammered against her ribs and her hands shook as she stared at it until, finally, she gathered the nerve to unhook the tiny clasp.
Inside, she saw an oval picture of Lisa and Joe McDonna. Lisa was victim number two. Madison knew because she’d memorized them all—by face and by name.
Closing her eyes, she put a hand to her stomach, attempting to override her body’s reaction. But she retched anyway, several dry heaves that hurt her throat and her stomach. She’d hung on to her belief in Ellis’s innocence for so long. She’d stood against the police, the media and popular opinion. She’d stayed in the same high school even after the kids had started taunting her and doing vengeful things, like throwing eggs and oranges at the house or writing “murderer” in the lawn with bleach. She’d held her head high and attended the University of Washington, just as she’d always planned. Through it all, she’d refused to consider the possibility of her father’s culpability in the murders, even when the police produced an eyewitness who said she saw Ellis driving away from a neighbor’s house the night that neighbor was murdered. The witness was old and could have been mistaken. There were a lot of blue Fords with white camper shells in Seattle. All the evidence was circumstantial.
But if he was innocent, how could such a personal item belonging to one of the victims have found its way inside the house?
“Ellis saved those Barbies, after all?” Annette said, her words suddenly sounding as though they had an echo. “I could’ve sworn we took them to Goodwill.”
Madison couldn’t breathe well enough to speak. After those hellish years in high school, she’d expected the scandal to die down, especially when the police couldn’t find any DNA evidence. But the suspicion and hatred had gone on long after that, until it had destroyed her marriage. Her husband wanted to be seen as upwardly mobile and a man who had it all. Not the man who’d married the daughter of the Sandpoint Strangler.
“Madison?” her mother said, when she didn’t respond.
She took a few bolstering breaths and managed an answer. “What?”
“Are you going to bring those Barbie dolls out or not? I’m sure Brianna will be thrilled to have them.”
Madison wasn’t about to let her mother see what the box really contained. Annette had been through enough already.
Wiping away the sweat beading on her upper lip, Madison struggled to distance herself from the whole tragic mess. She hadn’t hurt those women. If her father had, she’d been as much a victim as anyone.
“It—it looks like there’ve been some rats in the box,” she said. “I d-don’t think we can give them to Brianna.”
“That’s too bad. Well, drag them out here anyway, and I’ll get rid of them once and for all.”
Madison