Sanctuary

stared down at the flame. “My hand’s steady,” she muttered. “It’s perfectly steady. I’m not going to break now. I can get through it. I’m never going to break again.”
    Worried that he had pushed her over some line, he moved toward her. “Jo Ellen.”
    “I’m not crazy.” Her head snapped up. Calmly she touched the flame to the tip of her cigarette. “I’m not going to shatter and fall ever again. The worst is just the next thing you have to find room for and live with.” She blew out smoke, watched it haze, then vanish. “Someone sent me a photograph of my mother. One of your father’s photographs.”
    His blood chilled. “That’s impossible.”
    “I saw it. I had it in my hands. It’s what snapped me, what I couldn’t find room for. Then.”
    “You told me someone was sending you pictures of yourself.”
    “They were. It was with them, in the last package I got in Charlotte. And afterward, when I was able to function a little, I couldn’t find it. Whoever sent it got into my apartment and took it back. I thought I was hallucinating. But it was real. It existed. It happened.”
    “I’m the only one who could have sent it to you. I didn’t.”
    “Where are the pictures? The negatives?”
    “They’re gone.”
    “Gone? How?”
    “Kyle wanted to destroy them, them and the journal. I refused. I wanted time to decide what to do. We argued about it. His stand was that it had been twenty years. What good would it do to bring it all out? It could ruin both of us. He was furious that I would even consider going to the police, or to your family. The next morning he was gone. He’d taken the photographs and the journal with him. I didn’t know where to find him. The next I heard he’d drowned. I have to assume he couldn’t live with it. That he destroyed everything, then himself.”
    “The photographs weren’t destroyed.” Her mind was very clear and cold. “They exist, just like the ones of me exist. I look like my mother. It’s not a large leap to shift an obsession with her to one with me.”
    “Do you think I haven’t thought of that, that it hasn’t terrified me? When we found Susan Peters, and I realized how she’d died, I thought ... I’m the only one left, Jo. I buried my father.”
    “But did you bury your brother?”
    He stared, shook his head slowly. “Kyle’s dead.”
    “How do you know? Because the reports say he got drunk and fell off a boat? And what if he didn’t, Nathan? He had the photographs, the negatives, the journal.”
    “But he did drown. He was drunk, stumbling drunk, depressed, moody, according to the people who were with him on the yacht. They didn’t realize he was missing until well into the next morning. All of his clothes, his gear were still on the boat.”
    When she said nothing, he spun around her and began to pace. “I have to accept what my father did, what he was. Now you want me to believe my brother’s alive, that he’s capable of all this. Of stalking you, pushing you until you collapse. Of following you here and . . .” As the rest slammed into him, he turned back. “Of killing Susan Peters.”
    “My mother was strangled, wasn’t she, Nathan?”
    “Yes. Christ.”
    She had to stay cold, Jo warned herself, and go to the next step. “Susan Peters was raped.”
    Understanding the question she was asking, Nathan closed his eyes. “Yes.”
    “If it wasn’t her husband—”
    “The police haven’t found any evidence to hold the husband. I checked before I came back. Jo Ellen.” It scraped his heart to tell her. “They’re going to be looking more closely into Ginny’s disappearance now.”
    “Ginny?” With understanding came horror. The cold that had shielded her melted away in it. “Oh, no. Ginny.”
    He couldn’t touch her, could offer her nothing. He left her alone, stepped out onto the porch. He put his hands on the rail and leaned out, desperate for air. When the screen door squeaked, he made himself straighten.
    “What was your father’s purpose, Nathan? What were the photographs to accomplish if he would never be able to show them to anyone?”
    “Perfection. Control. Not simply to observe, and preserve, but to be a part of the image. To create it. The perfect woman, the perfect crime, the perfect image. He thought she was beautiful, intelligent, gracious. She was worthy.”
    He watched fireflies light up the dark in quick, flirtatious winks. “I should have told you, all of you, as soon as I came