“I’m Anne Donovan’s descendent.” She could feel it—he was moving away, trying to disengage himself from her arms— but she hung on. “And the coincidences between her murder and my mother’s scared me. That’s why I came here.”

“Why the hell didn’t you tell me? We have your DNA—we could have done a comp to see if our blood samples were Anne’s or John Thiroux’s or someone else’s entirely.” His hands were on her elbows now, trying to gently push her away. “You let me waste an entire afternoon looking to see if Anne Donovan had a child, when you knew she did. You knew the kid’s name. You knew I was trying to track a descendent.”

“I know and I’m sorry.” She had felt guilty about that. “But the thing is, I didn’t want you to think I was a nutjob. That I had ulterior motives or a bias.” Maybe she hadn’t really had a good reason, but she had been protecting herself. Plain and simple. “Everyone for the past year has been looking at me with pity, Gabriel, waiting for me to crack. They think I’m insane, and maybe I am. But the one secret I managed to keep during this whole ugly investigation and trial is that in every generation of my family, a woman has been murdered. Can you imagine the kind of story the media would make out of that? I’d be a freak show, looked at with pity, fascination, horror. I would have no chance at a normal life.” Just the thought of the headlines, the media camped out on her lawn again, the flash photography going off in her face, filled her with panic. “I swear, some loon would probably even murder me just to be the one who sealed the ‘curse.’ ”

Why wasn’t he saying anything? He was just looking at her, eyes narrowed, frowning, head shaking slightly. “So you’re saying that every generation has had a murder? What kind of murder? Domestic violence, robbery shooting, or random unsolved murder?”

“All of them were random unsolved murders.” A chill went up her spine just saying it out loud. “My mother never seemed to think it was a big deal. She used to joke about it. I personally find it scary as hell. But I’m trying to tell myself it’s a horrible coincidence, that the women in my family who were murdered all lived edgy, dangerous lives. With the exception of my grandmother. As far as I can tell, she was just a suburban housewife.”

Gabriel had at least stopped trying to tug away from her, but now he looked puzzled. He wasn’t actually looking at her, but over her shoulder. “I find that really disturbing,” he said.