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to move to Omaha during Cindy’s senior year of high school; of sharing the same bedroom and, with only two years difference in their ages, sharing late night talks and secrets about boyfriends right up until Cindy graduated and moved away from home to go to college at the University of Nebraska. She recalled all the fun and sorrow their family went through, especially the support Debbie had given Cindy once she and Harry found out, after years of trying, that she would never be able to have children of her own… of drawing together even closer for emotional support just three years ago, following their retired parents’ death in a car accident while vacationing in New Mexico. All of these thoughts and more tumbled through Cindy’s mind as the minister droned on and on, saying what sounded to her like silly, superficial things that didn’t even come close to capturing what a beautiful human being her sister had been.
    Had been … The thought reverberated in her mind like the slow thundering roll of a drum.
    Had been… Debbie doesn’t exist anymore, not on earth and, as far as I’m concerned, not in her minister’s Heaven, either. She’s gone. Gone for good.
    “Hey! You hanging in there?” Harry whispered. He nudged Cindy’s arm with his elbow as he slipped his hand from hers and shook it.
    Cindy bit down on her lower lip to stop it from trembling as she looked over at him and, blinking back a fresh flood of tears, nodded. As soon as they made eye contact, though, another, stronger wave of loneliness rippled through her.
    Why does he even bother to ask? she thought as she shifted her gaze down to the floor. What the hell does he think, that I feel like jumping up and doing a quick tap-dance on my sister’s coffin?
    But it wasn’t just that, and in the dense silence of the funeral, another thought that she had been keeping at bay came forward with a vengeance.
    He doesn’t even care! Not really! Oh, he pretends that he does and that he wants to be supportive, but he doesn’t really care. No, good-ole Harry’s keeping a nice, safe distance from all of this.
    Cindy shivered at the thought and tried to tell herself that this might not actually be the case, but she couldn’t deny the truth. Now that she was being honest with herself in this moment of grief and weakness, she might just as well admit it, that this alienation had been going on since long before Debbie’s accident—
    Murder!
    Like so many other couples married better than ten years, she and Harry had been gradually drifting away from each other. They were getting so involved with their own lives and so stuck in their own patterns that they were losing touch with each other and whatever they used to share. Some day—maybe in the not-too-distant future—they would both realize just how much they had become strangers to each other. Perhaps then they would even split…
    Stop it! Jesus Christ, stop thinking like that! Cindy told herself.
    She shifted her hand onto Harry’s again and clung to it tightly, desperately seeking the strength she knew she didn’t have right now.
    Please… please stop thinking like that!
    But then her gaze shifted from the floor to the coffin at the front of the room. Her sister’s immobile face didn’t look at all real. This couldn’t really be her, she thought. It’s a shell, a wax figure made to look like her. This is all a bad dream, and I’m gonna wake up soon. The real Debbie—the sister I loved more than anyone else in the world, is someplace else.
    And Cindy found herself grateful that, wherever the hell she thought Debbie was, at least she was no longer being brutalized by that son of a bitch Alex. No more “accidents!
    Murder!
    That single word rang in her mind like steel striking steel, sending sparks flying.
    Was she crazy to be thinking like this?
    Was she paranoid about Alex simply because she had never liked him, never trusted him? Was she unfairly focusing all of her misery and grief onto Alex