“I wish I could say,” Vera said. She closed the laptop. “Back to your father. Was he by any chance a patient at our office?”

“Um, I don’t know,” Drue said.

“It doesn’t matter,” Vera said. “Dr. Garber has been dead a long time now. We girls all thought he was ancient back then, but he was barely fifty. A heart attack took him, poor man.”

She leaned back against the recliner’s headrest. “The police hounded all of us, for months and months after Colleen disappeared. It affected the dental practice. People were asking questions that we couldn’t answer. There was a lot of innuendo. We lost several patients. It was unbelievably upsetting. Particularly for poor Dr. Garber. The police were convinced he was having an affair with her.”

“Was he?”

Vera laughed. “He was having an affair, all right, but not with Colleen. He had a young boyfriend, a waiter who worked at Ten Beach Drive, that was a nightclub back in the day. It all came out when the police started digging around. When Dr. Garber’s wife found out, she left him and took the girls with her. The poor man was shattered.”

“Mrs. Rennick?”

“Vera.”

“You said you thought at first that Colleen had run away. Is that still your theory?”

“Haven’t you read my blog? I’ve laid it out very succinctly.”

“Forgive me, but I just discovered the blog last night. I only had time to skim.”

“I think it was Allen,” she said finally.

Drue leaned forward. “But I thought he had an alibi. Wasn’t he down in the Keys on a fishing trip?”

“Alibis can be cooked up,” Vera said. “And remember, Allen’s alibi was his own father. A prominent doctor in town. Chief of staff at Bayfront Medical Center, as it was called back then.”

“Why would Allen Hicks kill his wife?”

Vera shrugged. “Lots of reasons. I always suspected there was another woman, a girl who worked in his insurance office. He didn’t waste much time marrying her, either. Got himself a quickie divorce in Mexico just three years later.”

“Why didn’t he just divorce Colleen while she was alive?”

“You don’t know very much about men and murder, do you?”

“I guess I don’t,” Drue admitted.

“Well, I do,” Vera said. “There’s a name for it, you know. Uxoricide. It means the killing of one’s romantic partner. The vast majority of the time a woman is the victim. And the men who kill them are jealous, possessive and controlling. For the man, it’s a power thing.”

“Makes sense,” Drue agreed.

“He beat her, you know.”

“Who?”

“Allen. Her husband. The bastard knocked her around. He was abusive. There’s been a study done. In England. Did you know that sixty-five percent of men who kill their romantic partners have been physically abusive in the past?”

“Did Colleen tell you he was hitting her?”