The Final Victim by Wendy Corsi Staub Page B

home once was; her parents lie miles away, in the cemetery at Oakgate.
    Daddy went first: cirrhosis of the liver, courtesy of the same lifelong passion for Southern bourbon, of which his staunch Southern Baptist father didn’t approve.
    Alcohol probably had a hand in his own mother’s death as well.
    At least, Charlotte assumes it contributed to her paternal grandmother Eleanore’s decision to kill herself. The topic of her death has always been as forbidden within the family as liquor was at Oakgate.
    The official story is that Grandaddy’s wife died in her sleep of some undiagnosed illness.
    But local gossip, which invariably reached Charlotte’s ears courtesy of insensitive childhood peers, claimed that one night, Eleanore tucked her two small sons into bed, then fixed herself a lethal cocktail spiked with barbiturates.
    It was her younger son who reportedly found her the next morning, though Charlotte’s father never affirmed that. No, Norris just wandered through life wearing a perpetually haunted expression that grew even more haggard when he was self-medicated with bourbon. The only time Charlotte ever really saw him looking at peace was the day she kissed him good-bye on one unfurrowed brow as he lay tucked into the white satin lining of the finest casket money could buy.
    Mom followed him soon after, giving in to the cancer that had been recently diagnosed, and which she was prepared to battle valiantly as long as she had something to live for.
    Without her husband, Connie June Remington apparently had nothing left to live for. He was her whole world. Raised on the island a stone’s throw from Oakgate, Charlotte’s mother was a spoiled, pampered only child. Her parents were middle-aged when she came along, and had thought they were infertile. Their daughter was the center of their world for the rest of their lives. The indulgent, laid-back Norris took over where they left off, coddling his wife until the day he died.
    Nothing could fill the emptiness in the orphaned, widowed Connie June’s life. Not even a daughter, no matter how Charlotte tried.
    Not that she tried all that hard.
    Her mother was never the doting parent Daddy was. Norris Remington showered his only child with both affection and material goods.
    Now they’re all gone, Charlotte thinks bleakly. Not just her father and her mother and Uncle Xavy, but her grandfather, too.
    Yet none of those losses has had the shattering impact of another loss, the one that weighs most heavily on her heart.
    The one she almost didn’t survive at all.
    You’re supposed to bury your parents and grandparents.
    Not your children.

    Lianna discovered the cobweb- and dust-shrouded hidden stairway entirely by accident one night not long after moving into her temporary quarters at Oakgate.
    Even with a flashlight and cell phone reassuringly in hand it took all her nerve that first night to descend the old wooden staircase into the depths of the house. When she realized where it led—to the basement, with its own exit to the outside world—she immediately recognized its potential.
    Freedom .
    Lianna had been feeling stifled by her overprotective mother long before they settled in at Oakgate. At least in Savannah, there was some reprieve from her mother’s watchful eye. She could hang out occasionally at friends’ houses, the squares, the mall . . .
    But these days, her visits to Savannah require the orchestration of an overseas military invasion.
    Basically, now that she’s stuck out here in the marshes, there is no readily accessible escape.
    At least, there wasn’t. Not until she found the hidden passageway . . . and Kevin Tinkston.
    Even he has no idea exactly how she gets out of the house for their forbidden rendezvous. She isn’t about to jeopardize their relationship by admitting that the only way she can see him is to creep through an old tunnel in the night like a convict making a jailbreak. At