Her father glared at her even as he called across the room from his recliner. “Sorry, Judith! We were watching the news of that murder. You should keep your windows closed and locked. Would you like me to come over and check around your property for you?”

He would no more have gone out in the night dragging his oxygen tank along to see to the safety of Judith Iver than he would have flown to the moon. Anne held the receiver out away from her.

“Thank you, Dick! You’re so good to me!” Judith Iver shouted. “But I’ve got my nephew staying with me.”

“All right,” her father called out. “Good night, Judith!

“Her nephew,” he said with disgust as Anne hung up the phone. “That rotten hoodlum. He’ll slit her throat one night while she’s dreaming about him amounting to something, the stupid cow.”

The yin and yang of Dick Navarre: charming, handsome old gentleman on the outside; nasty old bastard on the inside. Professor Navarre and Mr. Hyde. And if Anne had described him that way to his casual acquaintances, they would have thought she was mentally disturbed.

She handed the remote to him as she got up.

“I’m going to bed,” she said as she closed the living room window against the night chill and Mrs. Iver. “Did you take your pills?”

He didn’t look at her. “I took them earlier.”

“Oh, really? Even the ones that say ‘take at bedtime’?”

“The human body doesn’t know what time it is.”

“Right. And, I forget, what medical school did you attend in your free time?”

“I don’t need your sarcasm, young lady. I stay up to date on all the latest medical news.”

Anne rolled her eyes as she left the room and went into the kitchen to get his last round of medication for the day. Pills for his heart, for his blood pressure, for edema, for arthritis, for his kidneys, for his arteries.

I stay up to date on all the latest medical news. What crap.

At seventy-nine, her father spent his days with his golf cronies, arguing about politics. If they had been discussing migrant farm workers, he would have claimed he was up to date on all the latest immigration laws.

Anne had never bought into his bullshit. Not when she was five, not when she was twenty-five. She had always seen him for exactly what he was—an egomaniacal, narcissistic ass—and he had always known it and hated her for it.

They didn’t love each other. They didn’t even like each other. And neither made any pretense otherwise, except in public—and then only grudgingly on Anne’s part. Dick, the consummate actor, would have had everyone in town thinking she was the much-adored apple of his eye.