And there wasn’t anything to convict her on. She had to remember that. She had never spent time with Rafe without her mother present, and there had been no phone conversations between them other than when he was at her mother’s house. No one had any reason to believe, or any proof, that they had been involved with each other and could have done something as heinous as plot her mother’s murder.

Besides, why would they have needed to kill her mother to be together? It was completely illogical. Rafe was a doctor. He didn’t need her mother’s tiny insurance policy or house.

Sara was tempted to delete the e-mail, just to get rid of it, but she knew she really should keep it. She should pursue who had sent it to her, try to determine if it was a random person or if it was the newspaper trying to coax a response from her. But she wasn’t up for an investigation at the moment. She wanted Florida to stay in Florida. And the only murder she wanted to think about was Anne Donovan’s, leaving her mother’s for Gabriel to deal with for the book, so she moved the e-mail to a folder labeled “Misc.” and closed her browser.

Then she opened up a Word document and started typing. There were questions she wanted to answer about the Donovan case, whether or not they could ever reach a conclusion as to what happened. There were things she just wanted to know, so she typed them to organize her thoughts:

Where did John Thiroux come from?

Where did he go after his acquittal?

Who was keeping Anne Donovan’s child?

And there was the ultimate question, which she found difficult to even type in black-and-white, that tied present to past, Florida to Louisiana. She had never spoken it out loud, never told anyone. They would think she was either insane or making it up, or look at her like she was a complete and utter freak. Because there was no way around the truth, the question to which she had no answer:

Why were my great-great-great-grandmother, great-great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother all murdered? Was it a coincidence? A curse? Why was Anne Donovan’s granddaughter, Mary Conway, not killed? Does someone know about the first two murders and have they decided to perpetuate them with the last two? Could it have been my grandfather?

Am I next?

The last was a small question, but one which held all her fears, encompassed the very drive behind everything she had done in the last year. The very real terror that it would be her turn at any given moment.

“Want to go to lunch?”