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there."
    She gestured toward the living room and collected her pocketbook from the table near the door. "I stuck it under the sofa cushion so she couldn't get hold of it. Didn't know if you'd want her to be readin' it or not, Dr. Kay."
    She patted my shoulder on her way out.
    I watched her make her way to her car and slowly back out of the drive. God bless her. I no longer apologized for my family. Bertha had been insulted and bullied either face-to-face or over the phone by my niece, my sister, my mother. Bertha knew. She never sympathized or criticized, and I sometimes suspected she felt sorry for me, and that only made me feel worse. Shutting the front door, I went into the kitchen.
    It was my favorite room, high-ceilinged, the appliances modern but few, for I prefer to do most things, such as making pasta or kneading dough, by hand. There was a maple butcher block in the center of the cooking area, just the right height for someone not a stitch over five foot three in her stocking feet. The breakfast area faced a large picture window overlooking the wooded backyard and the bird feeder. Splashing the monochrome blonds of wooden cabinets and countertops were loose arrangements of yellow and red roses from my passionately well attended garden.
    Lucy was not here. Her supper dishes were upright in the drainboard and I assumed she was in my office again.
    I went to the refrigerator and poured myself a glass of Chablis. Leaning against the counter, I shut my eyes for a moment and sipped. I didn't know what I was going to do about Lucy.
    Last summer was her first visit here since I had left the Dade County Medical Examiner's Office and moved away from the city where I was born and where I had returned after my divorce. Lucy is my only niece. At ten she was already doing high-school level science and math. She was a genius, an impossible little holy terror of enigmatic Latin descent whose father died when she was small. She had no one but my only sister, Dorothy, who was too caught up in writing children's books to worry much about her flesh-and-blood daughter. Lucy adored me beyond any rational explanation, and her attachment to me demanded energy I did not have at the moment. While driving home, I debated changing her flight reservations and sending her back to Miami early. I couldn't bring myself to do it.
    She would be devastated. She would not understand. It would be the final rejection in a lifelong series of rejections, another reminder she was inconvenient and unwanted. She had been looking forward to this visit all year. I'd been looking forward to it, too.
    Taking another sip of wine, I waited for the absolute quiet to begin untangling my snarled nerves and smoothing away my worries.
    My house was in a new subdivision in the West End of the city, where the large homes stood on wooded one-acre lots and the traffic on the streets was mostly station wagons and family cars. The neighbors were so quiet, break-ins and vandalism so rare, I couldn't recall the last time I had seen a police car cruise through. The stillness, the security, was worth any price, a necessity, a must, for me. It was soothing to my soul on early mornings to eat breakfast alone and know the only violence beyond my window would be a squirrel and a blue jay fighting over the feeder.
    I took a deep breath and another sip of wine. I began to dread going to bed, dreading those moments in the dark before sleep, fearing what it would be like when I permitted my mind to be still, and therefore unguarded. I could not stop seeing images of Lori Petersen. A dam had broken and my imagination was rushing in, quickening the images into more terrible ones.
    I saw him with her, inside that bedroom. I could almost see his face, but it had no features, just a glimpse of a face-like flash going by as he was with her. She would try to reason with him at first, after the paralyzing fear of waking up at the feel of cold flat steel to her throat, or at the chilling sound of