Tilly fought nausea and dizziness. She couldn’t breathe. She scrambled back up the ladder, collapsed on the ground, and wretched.

Momma, she cried, her head tilted toward the sky when she let out a tortured cry. Oh, Momma.

* * *

The police came to Tilly and Johnny’s former home in the country. She could hardly speak. It was as if she had regressed to when she was a child after her father was killed. She met the police at the end of the dirt road. They drove her back up to her home, then to the back part of their property, up the hill, down the hill, and behind a rim of trees toward the stream. She showed them the door in the ground, to the right of the rock, the door into hell, her whole body trembling, swaying. The police helped her, gently told her everything would be okay. But they hadn’t seen what she had seen. How could they know? Nothing would be okay.

She pointed to the ladder. One of the policemen climbed down. She heard him gagging. Then he swore and yelled back up, “We got a crime scene.”

* * *

The press had a field day after the discovery of five women’s bodies in a secret dirt cave underground near Johnny and Tilly Kandinsky’s childhood home in Idaho.

Evidence was collected at the Idaho house and at the home in which they’d previously lived in Portland. Two more women were buried underneath the crawl space of that home. It did not take long to pin the murders of the women on Peter Kandinsky.

“Will my brother, Johnny, and his girlfriend, Betsy, be released from jail?” Tilly asked in front of news reporters and cameramen, her voice wobbling, her body shaking. “You see, this is who my father was. He was a serial killer. Betsy killed him to protect Johnny. If she hadn’t killed my father, my father would have killed Johnny, maybe Betsy, and more women after that if he wasn’t caught. Betsy ended up protecting all of the women whom my father would have killed in the future.”

And, finally, “I remember that night. I’ll tell you what happened.” And she told herself to be brave one more time, to fight for Johnny and Betsy, and she told the press what happened, including that she saw her father turning toward the gun cabinet. “He was going to shoot Johnny. I know that for sure.”

The prosecutor’s office fought against a new trial for Johnny and Betsy. They didn’t want to be seen as having been derelict in their duties, incompetent! They didn’t want to admit they had been wrong, that the barely eighteen-year-old Betsy and Johnny had not deserved time in jail. Their reputations had to be protected! Their egos had to remain uncriticized! One of them was running for governor, and he could not have a bad high-profile case like this on his hands.