She looked into the plastic case that held his pills for the day. He hadn’t taken half of them. If she asked him why not, he would undoubtedly tell her it was because he once read an article in The New England Journal of Medicine while waiting for his dermatologist to remove a mole, and therefore knew more about the subject of pharmaceuticals than any one of the three medical specialists he saw.

“Maybe you can get a girlfriend,” Anne called out, dumping the pills into her hand. “It’ll be just like the old days.”

“I don’t know why you go on like that,” he groused. “I was a very good husband.”

“Really?” she said, coming back into the dining room. “To whom?”

“You always took your mother’s side.”

“Yes. Damn but that I didn’t inherit that amoral gene of yours. My life would be so much easier.”

“Are you finished?” he asked coolly. “I’m going next door to watch Jeopardy! The Ivers are such a lovely family.”

Anne rolled her eyes. “You hate Judith Iver. Tuesday night you called her a stupid cow.”

“Not to her face.”

“Well, that makes all the difference. Here,” she said, handing him a fistful of pills and a glass of water. “I’m not letting you out the door until you take those.”

“I don’t know why you bother,” he complained. “You’d be happier if I was dead.”

“Yes, but I’m such an obvious suspect.”

“I’m sure your new friends at the FBI would take care of you.”

“It would make a better story if I called in all your markers for donating twenty dollars a year to the sheriff’s annual circus day fund.”

Her father sniffed and struck a pose like a Shakespearean actor on stage. Sir Richard of Bullshit. “How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child!”

“Oh, please,” Anne said, quickly thumbing through the rest of the mail. “I’m completely thankful to my parent. That just doesn’t happen to be you, that’s all.”

“I’m leaving,” he announced, offended. It would give him something to talk about when he sat down with Judith Iver and her nephew. He could lament his daughter’s low treatment of him and elicit half an hour’s worth of sympathy while flogging them at Jeopardy!

Anne hurried to her room to shower and change clothes. The Thomas Center was holding a candlelight vigil for Karly Vickers and in memory of Lisa Warwick, and she felt a need to be there. She refused to recognize the fact that she expected to see Vince there, just as she refused to think too hard about the fact that he had kissed her. She had allowed him to kiss her.