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  Blondell maintained that her two younger children had been asleep, tucked into the loft above the main living area; her older daughter, Amity, was on the pull-out couch downstairs. Blondell had been out back on the screened-in porch, wrapped in a sleeping bag on an old chaise longue, drinking wine and watching the rain pour from the heavens to dimple the dark waters of the lake and listening to it pound noisily on the roof. She’d said it was nearly impossible for her to hear much of anything else, but she didn’t mind. Caught in her own troubles, she’d been lulled by the wind and rain and wine while her kids slept inside the tiny cabin—basically one large room with a loft and a small alcove for a kitchen, along with a closet-sized bath.

  She’d intended to bed down for the night on an old recliner near the fire that she’d lit in the old rock fireplace but had taken a few minutes to herself.

  And that had been her mistake.

  Somehow she’d closed her eyes and nodded off to the steady rhythm of the rain. She didn’t know how long she’d dozed, only remembered that she’d awoken sharply at the sound of a car backfiring in the distance and just before a dog began barking wildly. The rain was still steady, but not as strong. She had a sudden premonition that something was wrong. Very wrong. And then her daughter had started screaming about a snake, a copperhead in the cabin.

  Tossing off the sleeping bag, Blondell rushed in and saw, in the half-light from the fire, a horror that made her blood run cold.

  A stranger was inside!

  The fire had died down to red embers, so the cabin was nearly dark, but she could see a man’s silhouette as he stood over Amity. He had dark hair and a muscular build, but his face was masked.

  As he spun, Blondell saw the pistol clenched in his hand, above which, on his wrist, was some kind of tattoo.

  The rest was a blur, Blondell claimed. She’d screamed and they’d struggled. She’d hit her head and the world went black for an instant, the darkened rooms swimming in her vision. She thought she’d heard a dog barking again. For a fleeting second she felt hope that someone was near, but hope vanished as her vision cleared. Amity was screaming that she’d been bitten by a snake, and the stranger, in the shadows, was leveling his gun at the girl. Blondell had wrestled with him but hadn’t been able to stop the horror as he’d fired point-blank at Amity.

  Blondell swore she’d screamed and fought for the gun as Amity, lying on the couch, moaned in pain and footsteps erupted in the loft upstairs. Frantic, she’d launched herself at the stranger just as he turned to face her, his gun pointed straight at her heart. She’d flinched, still struggling for the gun, managing to grip the barrel and twist it upward, and then she heard Niall cry out.

  “Mommy! No!”

  “Get back!” she’d yelled, struggling to gain control of the gun, but the stranger was stronger and twisted the weapon, pulling the trigger.

  Blam! Pain jolted down her arm, and she lost her grip, stumbling backward and falling to the floor.

  Dazed, reeling in pain, she remembered the rest only in flashes: blast after blast echoing through the cabin; Niall running down the stairs, then jerking violently as first one bullet, then another, struck and his body tumbled down the remaining stairs. Little Blythe chasing after her brother, only to be hit as well, slipping through the railing to fall to the floor of the first floor with a last scream and heart-wrenching thud.

  Blondell had cried, “No! No! No!” as Amity, unconscious, was bleeding out, blood pouring from the wound in her abdomen. Her son and youngest daughter mowed down by the monster as well.

  Barely conscious, she heard the dog again. Closer, she’d thought, but the stranger, rather than finishing her off, had suddenly fled, running out the door and into the rain.

  Blondell’s story was a chilling account, but it was at odds with some of the police evidence. No gun had been found. Amity had died on the way to the hospital as the result of the gunshot wound, though she did have puncture wounds in her leg and venom from the copperhead in her bloodstream. The snake’s bite would probably not have killed her, but the bullet that cut through her abdomen and hit an artery had.

  Blondell’s two other children had been rushed into emergency surgery. Blondell herself had been treated for a bullet wound to the right arm and a slight concussion as well as a contusion to the back of her head. She’d obviously fallen or been struck, and there were scratches on her arms, all of which could have been self-inflicted. Her fingernails had been clipped, their residue, presumably, still in the evidence file at the police station.

  Hospital workers claimed her emotions were “all wrong” for someone who had been through the type of trauma she described, that her interest was more in her own injuries than those of her kids. She’d seemed stunned when told that Amity was dead, but hadn’t shed a tear. Nor had any motherly concern been evident while her other children spent hours in the operating rooms. When advised that Amity had been pregnant, her fetus dying with her, Blondell hadn’t uttered a word.

  Had she been catatonic?

  Had her injuries so confused her and stifled her emotions that her reactions were out of sync?

  Or was she a cold-blooded murderess who’d been sent to prison because it was determined she’d staged the whole horrific scene?

  Nikki didn’t know.

  Had there even been an intruder at the cabin?

  That too was murky, but it was possible.

  The flattened body of a copperhead had been found in the muddy driveway. Even that was odd, for in the middle of winter snakes were commonly in a state of reptile hibernation, sluggish and dull. And then there was the cigarette butt discovered near the porch. Blondell didn’t smoke that brand; in fact, she rarely smoked at all.

  Nikki wondered. DNA had just begun to be used at the time of the trials, but now . . . ?

  She thought of Amity, and her heart twisted in guilt. Could she have saved her? Hadn’t Amity begged her to come to the cabin that night?

  If she had, would Amity be alive today?

  “Please come,” Amity had cajoled into the phone. “I need to talk to someone, and you’re my best friend.”

  “I don’t think I can get away.”

  “But it’s really, really important,” she’d insisted. “About . . . about my boyfriend. You have to find a way to come and please, please, please don’t tell a soul. If you do we’ll both be dead.” She’d seemed about to divulge some great secret, then said, “I just can’t tell you over the phone . . . She might be listening.” By “she,” Nikki had believed, Amity had meant her mom. “Come to the cabin, okay? I’ll meet you at the lake. After midnight. Around one, okay? She’ll be asleep by then.”

  “The cabin?” Nikki had repeated. “What cabin?”

  “The one by the lake.”

  “My grandmother’s cabin?” Nikki had asked, feeling a little jab of guilt for once showing Amity the family’s nearly forgotten cottage on the shores of the lake when they’d been horseback riding. “How does your mother—?”

  “Nikki! Just come! Nothing else matters,” Amity had interrupted. “I’m not kidding. Please! It’s a matter of life or death.”

  Nikki hadn’t believed that plea. Amity had always been overly dramatic. Nonetheless, she’d reluctantly promised to show, to find a way to get to the lake, but she’d never made it. She’d set her alarm and even sneaked to the top of the stairs, but had heard her parents arguing in the den, just off the end of the staircase, so she’d waited in her room and eventually fallen asleep, only to wake hours later with the wintry Savannah sun climbing high into the sky, mist rising above the surrounding fields from the recent rain. Though she hadn’t known it then, Amity O’Henry was already dead.

  It’s a matter of life or death!

  She hadn’t been kidding. Nikki had felt awful. Confused. Angry. Trying to convince herself that Amity’s death was not her fault.

  The news had rocked the community as it had ripped a dark hole of guilt through Nikki’s soul. Could she have saved her friend? Somehow prev
ented the horrid tragedy? Sometimes she felt as if she should have been the brave heroine who somehow averted Amity’s murder; at other times she knew with a bone-chilling certainty that if she’d made her rendezvous with Amity, she too would be dead.

  As for Amity’s whispered warning, “Don’t tell a soul,” Nikki had taken that to heart, never once mentioning their conversation to anyone, not even her uncle, who became Blondell O’Henry’s lawyer. Not even when she learned that Amity had been three months pregnant at the time of her death, knowing her pregnancy had probably been the big secret she’d planned to tell Nikki.

  Lots of conflicting evidence had been brought to the trial, and most of the defense’s case was called “smoke and mirrors” by the prosecution. The whole case had taken on a carnival atmosphere, possibly because of the media circus that had ensued.

  The prosecution had insisted that Blondell, estranged from her ex-husband, Calvin O’Henry, was involved with Roland Camp, a shady individual at best, a man who had no interest in raising another man’s children. Speculation had run high that Camp was breaking it off with Blondell because of her kids and that, after losing her unborn child, she’d snapped. In a fit of desperation she’d tried to kill her own daughters and son, then blamed it all on a mythical stranger.

  Did that make sense? No. But nothing else did either, and Blondell’s disconnect over her injured children hadn’t played well with the jury. Still, if she were truly guilty, she’d taken great pains, gone to horrifying lengths, to rid herself of her children in order to what? Hang on to the boyfriend who had sworn on the stand that he’d moved on already?

  It was a terrible story. Cruel. Insidiously evil. An echo of the Diane Downs case that had taken place in Oregon ten years earlier. A case that Nikki, like many others, believed Blondell had used as a blueprint for her own heinous act.

  The defense stuck with the unknown intruder scenario, the proof of which was a single cigarette butt left at the scene and the squashed body of a copperhead in the driveway. These pieces of evidence, they claimed, meant that someone else had been on the property. As for the gun residue on Blondell’s hands, it could be explained by the struggle for the stranger’s weapon.

  Their take was that Blondell’s own injuries were evidence enough that she wasn’t the killer. The man she’d wrestled with, whom she hadn’t really seen, his face always in darkness, had been in his twenties or early thirties, around six feet tall, with thick, bushy hair. She’d also thought he had a tattoo on the inside of his right wrist, the markings of which were unclear in the darkness; but in one of the gun’s blasts, Blondell had seen something that reminded her of a snake, or serpent, or the tail of some beast. Most of the inking was hidden by the long sleeves of his wet hoodie. She’d been allowed to search through book after book of photographs of known felons and to speak with police artists, but she’d identified no one on file, nor had she been clear enough in the details of the man’s features—partially because they were hidden by a mask—for the artist to come up with a clear picture.

  The defense had insisted that despite going through the motions, the detectives in charge of the case had targeted Blondell from the get-go and had never seriously searched for another suspect, the real killer.

  The prosecution’s case was circumstantial and rested on the tiny shoulders of Niall O’Henry, who, because he was old enough to know what was going on, was put on the stand. It was he who, at eight, had, in whispered horror, sent his mother to prison for what was supposed to be the rest of her life.

  Now that could change.

  According to the information Nikki had gathered, Niall O’Henry, along with his lawyer, was going to make a public statement, his own personal press conference, which was bizarre, but what wasn’t about the Blondell O’Henry case?

  Nikki had put in a call to the attorney’s office, left a message, and was working on finding a phone number or address for Niall O’Henry. “In time,” she told herself and kept digging. Since she’d arrived at the newsroom, the information had started streaming in, and yes, she’d broken down and texted Reed, but he hadn’t responded to her bold question: “Any news on Blondell O’Henry case?”

  No surprise there.

  As for Blondell, it appeared she was keeping her silence. No one had any idea yet what she thought about her son’s turnabout and recanting of his story. Nikki had already sent an e-mail to the warden at Fairfield Women’s Prison near Statesboro, requesting an interview, though she didn’t hold out much hope that it would be granted. Over the term of her incarceration, Blondell O’Henry had been moved from one women’s facility to another and, since her one escape years before, had been kept under maximum security at Metro State Prison in Atlanta until it had closed. Afterward she’d landed in Fairfield, which was a little more than an hour’s drive from Savannah. No matter what, Nikki determined, as she left the offices of the Sentinel, she was going to get a private interview with the state of Georgia’s most notorious femme fatale and murderess, if it killed her. And, oh, yeah, she was going to get it first.

  She was already out the door when her phone chirped, the sound of her preset reminder. She checked the screen after she settled behind the wheel. “Right,” she said when she saw the quick text that told her Mikado was ready to be picked up from the groomer’s.

  Fortunately, Ruby’s Ruff and Ready was on the way to City Hall, where Niall’s lawyer, after he’d filed the necessary papers at the courthouse, planned to hold an impromptu press conference. She wondered, as she backed out of the lot and eased into traffic, how the police department was handling all the unusual events in a case that had been decided nearly twenty years earlier.

  Traffic was snarled in the historic district, but she knew the back roads and side streets over by the parkway. She took side streets to an alley where Ruby Daltry had her little shop. Hurrying, Nikki made her way through a short gate and along a brick walkway to the back porch. Over the screen door, hung a hand-painted sign, RUBY’S RUFF AND READY, in script, with colored paw prints of various sizes surrounding the letters.

  She rang the bell and stepped onto the porch, where several dog crates and beds had been placed. A large, tile sink dominated one corner, and unmoving paddle fans hung from the elevated ceiling.

  “Comin’,” a voice called from inside, and Ruby, a fiftysomething woman with fading red hair pinned into a knot on her head, appeared in one of the three, small, descending windows in the door, walking awkwardly before reaching forward to unlatch the door. A child of about three, her hair in pigtails, was wrapped around one of her grandmother’s legs and seemed fastened there. “I was wonderin’ if you’d show up,” Ruby said, offering a gap-toothed smile.

  “Sorry about yesterday,” Nikki apologized, stepping into a large open room to be greeted by a chorus of barks and yips. Three or four dogs, tucked into crates, peered through the mesh of their doors, and within his carrier, Mikado, ecstatic at the sight of her, was turning in tight, little circles.

  “I’m glad to see you too,” she said to him, leaning down and wiggling her fingers through the mesh. “Hang on for a sec.”

  Mikado yipped excitedly as Nikki straightened.

  “You’re not the only one who left a pup here. I don’t know what people are thinking. Must be the rain . . . or maybe all that business about Blondell O’Henry. You’ve heard about that, haven’t you?” Ruby was always one for juicy gossip.

  “Only that she might be released, that testimony is being recanted.”

  “Unthinkable what that woman did,” Ruby said. “Those poor kids. One dead, the other two growing up knowing their mother tried to kill them.” She sighed heavily. “I just can’t imagine.”

  “Blondell has always claimed that she was innocent, that some intruder came into the cabin.”

  Ruby’s eyes met Nikki’s in an “oh sure” stare. “What else was she going to say? That she did it? I don’t think so. Nope, she’s guilty as sin, and if you ask me it was all because of a man. She was involved with that
. . . oh, what was his name?” She let out her breath in a low whistle.

  “Roland Camp,” Nikki supplied.

  “Right!” Snapping her fingers, Ruby added, “A nasty one, him. Good-looking, I suppose, but a real lowlife. Don’t know what she saw in the likes of him when, in her day, she could have had any man in Georgia, let me tell you. I’m a little older than she is, but I’m telling you all my brothers had their damned tongues hanging out at the thought of Blondell. Sickening the way men acted around her. Boys, men, she dated them all.”

  “You knew her?” This was news. Good news, actually. Another source of information. Even if it was, at the worst, suspect and, at the best, laced with gossip.

  “I knew of her. She went to the school across town, but the boys, they knew all the hot girls in the area, and by that time, I was out of the house and set on marrying Seth. Blondell, she had her eyes set on someone to get her out of a crappy home life, I think, and I swear she was involved with some older guy who was rumored to be the baby-daddy of her first kid.”

  “Calvin O’Henry,” Nikki said, distracted; she clipped Mikado’s leash to his collar and held him back as he strained forward.

  “Uh-uh. He wasn’t the father of her first baby, as I understand it.”

  “Yes, you’re right. Sorry. Amity was adopted,” Nikki corrected herself. “Mikado, slow down!”

  “Who knows who the real father was?” Ruby went on. “The truth is, I didn’t really think much about Amity, you know, until she . . .” Ruby glanced down at the girl still wrapped around her big leg and decided to let that thought go, but Nikki made a mental note that Ruby and her brothers had known Blondell as a young girl. Before she’d married. Before she’d had children. Before she’d become involved with Roland Camp and the horrid tragedy had occurred. Background information.