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doing. Growing up, her older brother, Eric, played football and put together model cars while Sabrina begged for her father’s hand-me-down microscopes so she could get a better look at what particles made up a regular clump of dirt. She’d spend hours figuring out how to separate those particles and several more hours experimenting what happened when you added water to each. While Eric discovered girls, Sabrina was breaking down the elements in sulfuric acid and chromium phosphates. The summer of her fifteenth birthday her mother was ecstatic to hear that Sabrina had been spending every afternoon with Billy Snyder, until she learned the two of them had been creating a flashlight that glowed in the dark without the use of batteries.
    Her mother’s harshest recrimination was, “You’re turning out to be just like your father.”
    Her mother had never been able to say it without a smile, and Sabrina knew it was more a compliment than an accusation. That was her mother, melodrama and sarcasm as much creative tools as her paintbrushes and clay. Sabrina knew it was obvious her parents loved each other, though they gently teased and goaded one another. Her mother called Arthur Galloway’s inventions “worthless contraptions” even as she clapped and fought back tears of joy during his demonstrations. However, her father’s contraptions were usually the root of all family arguments and, according to her mother, the cause of all their hardships and heartache. But her father never seemed to mind, only grinning at her mother’s outbursts and placating her with a kiss on the cheek while telling her he “was indeed crazy, crazy in love” with her.
    Sabrina had to admit that she didn’t remember any hardships. She couldn’t remember the family ever—not once—going without. Her father’s teaching job at the university always provided more than enough. It wasn’t until after her mother was gone that Sabrina realized all those arguments, all those hurled accusations were simply her mother’s way of saying that she knew Arthur Galloway could have been a famous inventor if only he hadn’t been saddled with a family and monthly responsibilities. That she understood he had sacrificed something larger than the sum of all of them, and she wanted to make sure he knew, over and over again, that she hadn’t asked for any of it. Almost as if she was also giving him a reason, or perhaps a second chance, to change his mind, the ravings of a woman who could never believe she was worthy of her good fortune. The fact was that Meredith and Arthur Galloway were crazy in love with each other. In the end it wasn’t her mother’s petulance that drove Arthur Galloway crazy or drove a wedge between her children. Instead, it was the absence of that petulance, the absence of her mother that had ripped them all to shreds.
    Something slid and crashed outside, startling Sabrina. She jumped even as she recognized the sound, then winced at a second crash. She raced across her living room to the sliding glass door.
    “Hey, cut it out,” she yelled, shoving open the door.
    Too late. The huge white cat batted a paw, sending a third terra-cotta flowerpot off the deck railing.
    “Come on, Lizzie, give me a break.”
    Sabrina grabbed the broom that had become a common fixture in the corner of her small patio. She waved it in front of the cat before Lizzie could swipe at the next pot in the row. It took Sabrina weeks of yelling to realize the feline terror was stone deaf, so even raising the broom did no good unless it was in the cat’s line of vision.
    On a morning like this the last thing Sabrina needed was to have to deal with Lizzie Borden.

3
    Tallahassee, Florida
    Jason Brill left the concierge’s desk shaking his head. It was ridiculous what this hotel considered a king-sized suite. The so-called manager didn’t even know enough to be embarrassed by it, his bush-garden eyebrows raised in surprise at every one of Jason’s questions like he