“What are you now?”

“Totally humiliated.”

“Right,” Sierra said. “So you’ve got nothing to lose.”

She went into the nearest stall and locked the door.

“I hope things go well with you and North,” Kimberly called.

“We’re working on it.”

Kimberly walked past the row of stalls and moved into the carpeted lounge area. The outer door opened and closed.

Sierra stripped off her gloves and tucked them into her little evening bag. There were some things a woman could not do while wearing leather gloves. She was happy to see that the commode was a self-flushing model. No need to touch the handle.

The outer door opened again. A moment later stiletto heels tapped briskly on the white tiled floor and paused in front of a washbasin. Water splashed in the sink and then stopped. The towel dispenser rumbled.

The heels tapped back through the arched doorway into the lounge area.

Silence. The newcomer did not leave.

Probably freshening up her makeup, Sierra thought.

But a shiver of awareness iced her senses.

The outer door opened again. Another woman had arrived. Sierra relaxed. She was no longer alone with the stranger in the lounge. For some reason that was reassuring.

She used some tissues to open the stall door and crossed to the sink the newcomer had just used. Bracing herself for the inevitable jolt, she turned on the gleaming faucet.

Rage slammed across her senses.

It was a startlingly familiar fury. Frustration and psychic instability shivered through it. She recognized it because she had encountered it on two previous occasions. The first time was when she had touched the crystals in North’s poisoned sunglasses. She had sensed the same white-hot heat on the handle of the basement door in the house on Bainbridge Island.

The person who had murdered Loring and tried to blind North was a woman.

Out of the corner of her eye she saw something sparkle on the narrow steel shelf above the neighboring sink. Kimberly had left her lipstick.

Tentatively Sierra touched the gold lipstick case with her bare fingers. She got a little sizzle but nothing like the energy that had been left by the woman who had used the first sink.

Sierra took a deep breath and turned off the faucet. Another shock jolted her but this time she was prepared. She tried to come up with a strategy. There were two women in the outer lounge. One of them was a killer.

Or were they working together?

Kimberly appeared in the arched doorway that separated the stalls-and-sinks room from the makeup lounge. Behind the lenses of her glasses her eyes were wide with horror.

There was a good reason for the expression. Larissa Whittier was directly behind her, a small pistol pointed at Kimberly’s head.

“Hello, Larissa,” Sierra said.

“Get rid of the locket,” Larissa said. “I don’t know how it works but back in Fogg Lake I overheard Marge and the town librarian discussing it. They said you could use it to make a person faint. Take it off now or Kimberly dies.”