Samantha lay panting on the floor for a few minutes, trying to collect her wits. That was what had happened to the women who had owned the clothes in the other room. Pryde had killed them and then kept the bones for his trophies along with the clothes. Was her mother one of the victims? Was her skull in one of the clay pots?
Once she had the wherewithal to look up again, she noticed a bulletin board over the worktable. Tacked to the board were photographs. As with the clothes, the photos dated from different eras. The ones at the top were in black-and-white, the women not smiling into the camera. They wore bulky dresses like the hoop skirt she had found. The farther down Samantha went on the board, the fewer clothes the women wore and the more they smiled.
Samantha stood up to examine the pictures closer. As the clothes had indicated, all of the women had been large, some probably more than three hundred pounds. They all had dark hair and dark eyes and ranged from thirty to perhaps fifty years old. In most of the pictures the woman had at least one child with her, if not more. Any husbands had been edited out of the photographs.
He killed mothers, the voice in her mind spoke again. Most likely because he resented his own mother. Subconsciously he seeks out victims who look like her to try and destroy the memories. But he couldn't do it, at least not for long, so he would need another victim.
She followed the lines of pictures until she came to the last one. She sucked in a deep breath when she saw herself. In the picture she was about the age she was now, wearing a pink T-shirt with a sunset depicted on it and the words, "San Diego, California." Her mother had an arm around her shoulders. She looked almost exactly like Samantha, with the same glossy black hair tied into a ponytail and the same bronze skin. She wore the same outfit Samantha had found in the cellar, which confirmed Samantha's worst fears.
Her father stood on the other side of her, looking a little older than in her dream but otherwise the same. He was a heavyset man with paler skin burned red from the sun, light blue eyes, and blond hair that had begun to thin. In the background were palm trees and whitish sand. Apparently Pryde hadn't taken the time to cut Samantha's father from the photograph before he died in the Fountain of Youth.
She took the tack from the picture so she could hold it in both hands. A scenario played out in her mind. Pryde had seen her mother and gone in for the kill. But Samantha must have heard him and tried to interfere. So he had taken both of them back to Eternity. He kept Mom here while he turned Samantha over to the reverend. He had given her some of the fountain water, perhaps to heal an injury, making her ten years old and erasing her memory. Meanwhile Pryde had killed Samantha's mother and disposed of her.