us.”
“Because he was obsessed with us. And when he realized what lay at the heart of his obsession, he wanted us dead.”
“Part of him did.”
“You’re saying there was a conflict?”
Annie reached into her purse again. “Look at this.”
She removed the key ring taken from Oliver’s apartment, the keys charred and melted now.
“The firefighters found it when they were sifting the rubble. Michael gave it to me tonight.” She handed the key ring to Erin. “And I remembered something.”
Erin ran her fingertips along the serrated edges of the two padlock keys, one of which had saved their lives. “The other miracle?” she asked quietly.
“Might be.”
Erin waited. When Annie spoke again, her voice was a whisper.
“I used those keys to open the door of the ranch house. They were still in my hand when you shouted from the cellar. I ran to my car. And somewhere along the way… I lost them. Dropped them on the gravel. Dropped them and never picked them up.”
A beat of silence in the room.
“Later, in the fire, when I grabbed for the keys, it was just reflex. They shouldn’t have been in my pocket. But they were.” Annie looked across the table, green eyes sparkling faintly. “You see what I’m saying?”
Erin sat very still. Only her hand moved, fingering the ring of keys like the beads of a rosary. “Yes. I see.”
“He put them there. He put the keys back in my pocket. He gave us a chance, just like in 1973. Not much of a chance, but enough. Both times-just enough.”
“I guess he did.”
“But what I don’t understand is why. He was a killer. He murdered Maureen and Albert, Lincoln Connor and the real Harold Gund, and those three women up north. So why not us? What was special about us?”
Erin gazed into the shadowed corners of the room. Slowly she smiled, a thin, sad smile of wisdom and pain.
“We were his daughters, Annie.”
Nothing more to say after that. They sat together, lost in private thoughts; and sometime in that long silence, Annie reached out slowly and took her sister’s hand.
