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drummed that into little Alex's head like a catechism all her life.
    "It'll be up to you, Alexandra, to set the record right,"
    Merle had told her almost daily. "That's the least you can do for your mother." At that point she usually glanced wistfully at one of the many framed photographs of her late daughter scattered throughout the house. Looking at the photographs would invariably make her cry, and nothing her
    granddaughter did could cheer her.
    Until a few weeks ago, however, Alex hadn't known who Merle suspected of killing Celina. Finding out had been the darkest hour of Alex's life.
    Responding to an urgent call from the nursing home doctor, she had sped up the interstate to Waco. The facility was quiet, immaculate, and staffed by caring professionals. Merle's lifetime pension from the telephone company made it affordable.
    For all its amenities, it still had the grey smell of old age; despair and decay permeated its corridors.
    When she had arrived that cold, dismal, rainy afternoon, Alex had been told that her grandmother was in critical condition.
    She entered the hushed private room and moved toward the hospital bed. Merle's body had visibly deteriorated since Alex had visited only the week before. But her eyes were as alive as Fourth of July sparklers. Their glitter, however, was hostile.

    "Don't come in here," Merle rasped on a shallow breath.
    "I don't want to see you. It's because of you!"
    "What, Grandma?" Alex asked in dismay. "What are you talking about?"
    "I don't want you here."
    Embarrassed by the blatant rejection, Alex had glanced around at the attending physician and nurses. They shrugged their incomprehension. "Why don't you want to see me? I've come all the way from Austin."
    "It's your fault she died, you know. If it hadn't been for you ..." Merle moaned with pain and clutched her sheet with sticklike, bloodless fingers.
    "Mother? You're saying I'm responsible for Mother's death?"
    Merle's eyes popped open. "Yes," she hissed viciously.
    "But I was just a baby, an infant," Alex argued, desperately wetting her lips. "How could I--"
    "Ask them."
    "Who, Grandma? Ask who?"
    "The one who murdered her. Angus, Junior, Reede. But it was you . . . you . . . you. ..."
    Alex had to be led from the room by the doctor several minutes after Merle lapsed into a deep coma. The ugly accusation had petrified her; it reverberated in her brain and assaulted her soul.
    If Merle held Alex responsible for Celina's death, so much of Alex's upbringing could be explained. She had always wondered why Grandma Graham was never very affectionate with her. No matter how remarkable Alex's achievements, they were never quite good enough to win her grandmother's praise. She knew she was never considered as gifted, or clever, or charismatic as the smiling girl in the photographs that Merle looked at with such sad longing.
    Alex didn't resent her mother. Indeed, she idolized and adored her with the blind passion of a child who had grown up without parents. She constantly worked toward being as good at everything as Celina had been, not only so she would be a worthy daughter, but in the desperate hope of earning her grandmother's love and approval. So it came as a stunning blow to hear from her dying grandmother's lips that she was responsible for Celina's murder.
    The doctor had tentatively suggested that she might want to have Mrs. Graham taken off the life support systems.
    "There's nothing we can do for her now, Ms. Gaither."
    "Oh, yes, there is," Alex had said with a ferocity that shocked him. "You can keep her alive. I'll be in constant touch."
    Immediately upon her return to Austin, she began to research the murder case of Celina Graham Gaither. She spent many sleepless nights studying transcripts and court documents before approaching her boss, the district attorney of Travis County.

    Greg Harper had shifted the smoking cigarette from one corner of his lips to the other. In the courtroom, Greg was the bane of guilty defendants,