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like Marielle, it’s almost uncanny.” Sadness shone in Carmen’s gaze for a moment. Then she smiled and began walking away, throwing a cheerful, “Happy birthday, kiddo,” over her shoulder.
    The club had been busy and the parking lot was still almost full. Teresa glanced at all the cars, thinking that most of them wouldn’t be leaving for another hour, then opened the door of her white Buick Lucerne. As soon as the interior lights came on, she saw papers lying on the driver’s seat. She wondered if Mac had left a note in her car until she saw that the top sheet was a newspaper clipping dating from eight years ago. The headline seemed to scream at her:
    OWNER OF FARR COAL COMPANY AND WIFE MURDERED
    “Oh no,” Teresa murmured, a chill running over her in spite of the warmth of the June night. She picked up the papers and glanced at the article, a few phrases jumping out at her about Hugh’s and Wendy’s deaths by stabbing and the injury of little Celeste, who according to the newspaper was in stable condition in spite of a knife wound to her abdomen. The paper also emphasized that Teresa had sustained only “a superficial wound to the left arm,” a fact that had fueled some people’s belief that Teresa had wielded the knife the night of the murders.
    Feeling slightly dizzy, Teri let the newspaper clipping flutter to the asphalt. Then she read the computer-printed note:
    Dear Teresa
,
    Roscoe Lee Byrnes meets his maker this week. Will you finally feel safe? I don’t think so now that Celeste Warner is talking again. Or have you been too busy celebrating your birthday to hear the latest breaking news? It seems she remembers the night you murdered her mother and tried to kill her too. She’s scared now—not telling everything—but she will soon and then your nightmare will really begin
.

CHAPTER TWO
1
    T ERESA AWAKENED HEAVY EYED and sluggish. She wondered what was wrong. She’d only had two drinks at Club Rendezvous last night and been in bed before midnight. Then the memory of the parking lot flooded back to her. Finding the newspaper clipping and the note. No wonder she hadn’t slept well, Teresa thought.
    She groaned and rolled onto her side. At the bottom of the bed slept her dog, Sierra, a fifty-pound mixed breed with short, gleaming chocolate brown hair, white hind paws, and pointed ears a bit too large for her delicate face. Teri smiled as she looked at the dog deep in sleep, untroubled by old tragedies and frightening new threats.
    Teresa’s gaze slowly drifted away from the peaceful dog to the rest of her bedroom. Sunlight poured through the window facing east, highlighting her pale buttercup walls and shining on the simple engraved pine furniture she’d placed throughout the large bedroom. Some people told her the room looked almost Spartan—she needed more than a dresser, a nightstand, a cedar chest, and an overstuffed chair covered in ivory linen striped with moss green.
    Teresa loved the room, though. The unfussy furnishings did not detract from the fireplace across from her bed with its creamy tiles hand-painted with green ferns and a few small butterflies and hummingbirds. She especially liked the décor so radically different from the garish pink and cerise room in which her father and Wendy had been murdered, a room that still appeared in Teri’s recurring nightmare.
    She’d had it last night—the same nightmare she’d had a hundred times of walking into her father’s darkened room, of slowly approaching Wendy’s side of the bed and stepping on soaking-wet carpet, of turning on the light and seeing her father’s and Wendy’s dead bodies, their many stab wounds oozing blood. Her screams. That’s where the nightmare mercifully ended. For years she’d become accustomed to having the nightmare at least once a week. Then, when she was twenty-two, it had abruptly stopped. She was disheartened by its return.
    Teresa realized the note had prompted the dream. Almost against her will, she