Mindy didn't mince words. "No. You're crazy. I'm not going to the cemetery in the middle of the night. I came with you because you said you'd get me out of this town."

"I'm not crazy," I said. Adrenaline pumped through my veins, acting like TNT, blowing my previous drowsiness to shreds. "My mother was murdered," I said. Never in my life had I admitted that out loud to anyone.

Mindy chewed her thumbnail. Her leg bobbed up and down in rapid-fire motion.

"I carried knowledge all my life and I've been powerless to bring her murderer to justice." I took a hard left turn and the car slipped enough to remind me to exercise caution. One horrific accident a day was plenty.

"Who did it?"

"I thought my father did. I've always blamed him. He's a sorry, evil excuse for a man and I've hated him all these years, but now I'm not so sure."

"Do you think it was Dan Tanner?"

What kind of absurd question was that? "No, of course not."

"Then who?"

"I'm starting to think who might not be as important as why." The Audi was zipping down the main street, now. The glow of the church fire had lessened, but still there were no sirens or emergency lights. The fire must simply have died down to some degree.

"I don't understand."

"Me either, girl, but I'm going to figure it out. Do you know what my brother has always wanted more than anything in the world?"

"Your brother?"

"My brother, the award-winning set designer. The unrecognized genius in the family. The older one who always watched over his little sister. Our captor, my brother."

A quick glance at my companion revealed tears in her eyes. "I just wanted to get out of town."

"Me too."

A black iron fence encircled the only cemetery in town. Sharp points along the top stabbed the darkness. A blacktop ribbon slithered through the narrow gate and I followed it into the field of headstones. Long ago, families claimed large swaths of the burial ground for themselves and their descendants, with the result that shiny, new, laser-cut granite monuments sprouted up between crooked, weathered, sandstone and slate grave markers. Here and there, crypts made of brick or stone with iron gates or heavy wooden doors loomed over the lesser graves.

Jake and I came here once as teenagers. On a summer day, we'd grown restless and decided to ride our bikes to nowhere in particular. The smooth blacktop of the cemetery seemed a pleasant and peaceful place to ride. Passing one crypt with a thick chain on the door and a padlock the side of a pocket novel, Jake laughed. "Do you think they're trying to keep living people out, or dead people in?"

"What if they're trying to keep living people in until they're dead?" I shot back.

The teasing smile faded from his face as if I'd struck him.

"What?" I asked. "I'm just teasing."

"I know," he said, but his gaze returned to that lock more than once.

My headlights swept over a marker--R. L.

"Just a little further to row P."

"I hate this," Mindy mumbled.

It's not like I was having the time of my life, but I felt like I'd found the end of a rope, the other end of which held the truth about every bad thing that had ever happened to me. Enlightenment existed just on the other end of that rope. All I had to do was follow it. It was the same feeling I'd had in Dan's house when I felt like a clue lay waiting for me, if only I could be clever enough to see it.

"Have you ever had something bad happen to you, and you cry and rail at the universe and ask why?"

Mindy shrugged. "Yeah. I guess."

"Somewhere in this town, the answer to why is waiting for me. I can't leave without finding it."

"But the whole point of coming with you was to get out of this town."

Had she always been a whiny female? I couldn't remember. Everything that happened outside of my father's house in the past felt ephemeral and unimportant.

"If we find the why, we'll find the way out, and once I get out, I won't stop the car again until your toes are in the Pacific Ocean."

She rolled her shoulders back as if fortifying herself. "Okay. Fair enough. It's a deal."

Dealing hadn't been my intention, but okay. Whatever worked.

The small green marker for row P appeared in the glow of the Audi's headlights. "We're on foot from here," I said. "Does your phone have a flashlight?"

"Yeah."

"Okay. Let's go."

Her hand clamped down on my arm. "What do you think we'll find?"

"I told you. Answers."

The temperature had risen noticeably and the snow over the grass had begun to turn wet and mucky. My feet sank into the earth and I wondered about the bodied in the ground beneath us. Did some shred of consciousness remain in those rotting bones? Did our footsteps disturb their slumber?

We walked slowly and Mindy's light swept from side-to-side over tree roots, rocks, and headstones.

Arlene Porter 1804-1852.

Arlene hadn't been so old. Was she murdered? Poisoned? Stabbed in the chest by a black eyed priest? Did her blood pump hot and thin over her daughter's hands in her last moments of life?

John Jensen 1925-1943. Brave Soldier.

A child, sacrificed to the gods of war by a supposedly Christian nation.

With the fake moon and fake stars and God-only-knows how many real people watching us, Mindy and I crept through the dark past thirteen rows of dead bodies, humans rich and poor, young and old, kind and cruel, all equalized now by death's unfailing hand.

My mother rested among them, but far on the opposite edge. Did her ghost haunt these gentle hills? "If you're here, help me," I prayed, the words only a breath on my lips.

"What was that?" Mindy asked.

I stopped moving. "We're in P14. Look for Vandenbusche."

Like a shining blade slicing through the smothering darkness, the beam of Mindy's flashlight moved through the night and landed on the door of a crypt that had caught my attention, even as a child because it wasn't a small building like the others, but a door framed into the hillside. The bare, fingerlike branches of a black walnut tree half hid the medieval-looking entrance.

"Vandenbusche," Mindy whispered.

The name was engraved on a ribbon of stone above the door. Forcing myself to walk toward it was like moving through tar, but at last I was there beneath the branches. I grasped the heavy iron latch and lifted hard, expecting resistance. It came up so easily I nearly lost my balance and fell backward. Freed, the door swung inward on near-silent hinges. Mindy shined the light from over my shoulder and illuminated the room before us.

Four wide black marble steps led into a room too large to make out with the meager light source. On the black marble floor in front of us, a white all-seeing eye glittered within the confines of a perfect equilateral triangle as if the lines were encrusted with diamonds.

"Check it out." Mindy reached past me and wall sconces around the room flickered to life revealing a room that was maybe twenty feet wide and thirty feet long. On the far end, two throne-like chairs sat in the center of a raised dais, with two smaller ornate chairs on either side of them. Inverted crosses hung over two long, black, stone tables, one on either side of the room. The triangle was in the exact center of it all.

Mindy murmured an impressive curse. "I told you."

I stepped into the room, not at all sure what I was looking for. Loathe for reasons I couldn't explain to get too close to the sparkling centerpiece, I stayed to the left when I got to the bottom of the steps and walked along the wall. Between the low-wattage lamps, lay individual niches, each with a black coffin. Like the headstones, some appeared brand new while others had rotted and fallen apart leaving gaps and openings through which a glimpse of bone and cloth could be seen.

Passing behind one of the stone tables, I could see the crosses were suspended by thin metal cables. A little trench, four inches wide and two inches deep at one end of the table growing to a depth of about three inches at the other end ran on each side of the table. Around the edges, symbols had been carved. I recognized the five-pointed star, the Egyptian ankh, and several others, but some looked like no more than lines and swirls to my untrained eye.

Dan Tanner sent me to that place for a reason. Did he simply want to convince me, as Mindy had tried to do, that my brother was a Satanist? Even after everything, I found that impossible to believe.

How could a person hide something like that?

But there had to be some kind of truth to Mindy's crazy stories. How did it fit? If some kind of crazy cult had been operating literally underground in this village for longer than I'd been alive, what did that have to do with my brother turning the city into his own personal movie set?

Up close to the dais, I could see that while the smaller chairs bore fairly simple carvings of thorny vines, every inch of the larger seats were covered with snarling faces and gruesome scenes of death. Beneath the armrest of the chair on the right a naked female demon feasted on a dismembered arm. Above her head, the name Kellerman had acquired to a glossy well-aged patina. The chair on the right bore a naked male performing a sex act with some disfigured six-legged creature not of this world, and again, the name Kellerman.