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clerk handed her one with the keys to the car.
    â€œThe lot is out this door and to your right,” she said. “Your car should be at the far end of the lot, Row 8.”
    Sarah nodded, shouldered her purse to a more comfortable position, grabbed the handle of her suitcase and headed out the door. A short while later she was in the car and making her way out of the airport. As she steered the car into the traffic moving toward the city, she muttered a hasty prayer.
    â€œGod give me strength,” she said, and melded into the long line of cars.
    For a while she was too involved in making sure she took the right exit and got on the correct highway to think about where she was going. But after she cleared the city and was on the northbound highway, her anxiety returned. She’d only been ten when her world had imploded. There were nights when she still dreamed of waking up and finding her mother’s dead body in the bedroom, lying in a congealing pool of blood. She had vague memories of wrapping her mother’s bloody wrists with towels in a futile effort to stop the blood that had already ceased to flow. Then, because their phone service had been disconnected, she had run next door for help. The ensuing days were nothing but a blur. It wasn’t until her aunt Lorett had come from New Orleans that she’d let herself cry, and then she’d been unable to stop.
    The day after her mother’s funeral, Lorett Boudreaux had helped her pack her clothes, given the authorities a copy of Catherine Whitman’s will stating her wishes that Sarah would now live with her and left town without looking back. The townspeople were so glad to be rid of the duty of dealing with Frank Whitman’s spawn that they’d made little to no fuss about a black woman claiming a white woman’s child. That Lorett Boudreaux had papers signed by Catherine Whitman giving her sole custody of her daughter was enough for them. For the authorities in Marmet, it was a case of out of sight, out of mind.
    Sarah had spent the next twenty years trying to do just that—put it out of her mind. She’d done a pretty good job of it, too, until she’d gotten the phone call from the Somerset County sheriff. Now everything she’d grown up believing had been turned upside down. If her father had been dead all those years, then that meant he hadn’t abandoned them. On the contrary, he’d obviously been murdered, which led to the disintegration of another assumption under which she’d been living. There was every possibility that her father had been the scapegoat for the real thief. It hurt her heart to think she’d so easily believed his guilt. It didn’t matter that she’d only been ten years old. She should have known that the gentle, loving man who’d always read her bedtime stories wouldn’t have done the vile things of which he’d been accused. Now it was too late to tell him she was sorry, but it wasn’t too late to clear his name.
    She took a deep breath, telling herself to be calm. Yes, she was coming to reclaim what was left of the man she’d called Father, but she owed him more than a Christian burial. He deserved to rest in peace with his good name restored. It was the least she could do.
    Â 
    Sarah didn’t think she’d remembered all that much about the first ten years of her life, but then she hit the city limits of Marmet. The neat Cape Cod houses and tree-lined streets were eerily familiar. She stared intently at each house she passed and at the people she saw on the streets, wondering if they would recognize her, wondering if they cared that they’d been so wrong about her father, wondering if they carried the guilt of her mother’s death upon their souls. She blamed them. She blamed them all, just as she’d blamed her father. But she’d been wrong about him and was willing to admit it. It remained to be seen if they would be as