He’d also managed to replace some broken face plates on electrical outlets and fix a temperamental light in the foyer. In so doing, he’d ingratiated himself to Freya.

“Handy as well as handsome,” Freya, pushing a vacuum cleaner into a nearby closet, had remarked when Val had stopped in during a break from her research.

Wanting to avoid any further conversation about her soon-to-be ex, Val had ducked into the kitchen, which was filled with the odors of cinnamon, bacon, and apples for the next morning’s bread pudding.

But there’d been no escaping Freya. Wiping her hands on a towel, she’d returned to the kitchen to peer into the oven. “Yeah, I understand why you’re set on ditching him,” Freya had said.

“Don’t start with me.” Val hadn’t been in the mood.

“Ouch! Touchy, aren’t we?”

“Ouch! Nosy, aren’t we?”

Freya had laughed and held up her hands in mock surrender. “Okay. Okay. I get it. Talking about Slade is off-limits. I remember the agreement.”

“Good.” Val had walked into the laundry room, taken the last of the towels from the dryer, and folded them before retreating to her cottage again.

Now Val walked to a corner of the porch that allowed her to look up at the uppermost floor of the house. Lights still burned bright in the room Slade was renting.

She’d told him to get out of town, and he hadn’t listened. In fact, he’d seemed all the more insistent upon staying. She should have been angry that he was still here.

Instead, stupid as it was, she felt safer, more secure.

But then, she decided as the first drops of rain plopped against the porch’s roof, she’d always been an idiot where men were concerned.

The news reports have it wrong.

All wrong.

Of course.

Then again, why would I expect anything more?

With only candlelight illuminating my small, hidden room, I watch an ancient television. It’s disturbing, really, that the reporters are so incompetent.

As bad as the police.

At the thought of the detectives assigned to the case, my stomach turns. Reuben Montoya and his partner Rick Bentz. Suspicious men with narrowed eyes and pointed questions. Men without faith. I turn away from the screen so that I only hear the report of what happened to Sister Camille: the unfortunate victim of some sadistic killer.

That makes me smile to myself, and I send up a quick prayer of thanks to the Father for granting me a superior intelligence.

If they only knew.

Facing the TV, I glare at the reporter’s plastic face.

“Come on,” I whisper between my teeth, desperate to see the images, to hear the reports. I have no patience for the sad tone of the reporter’s words as she aggrandizes the deceased.

Camille the beautiful.

Camille the liar.

Camille the condemned.

Did “Sister Camille” understand about conviction?

No.