Chapter Two

“He’s dead,” Tess Barker reminded herself as she peered out her window at the setting sun. “My father’s body is stretched out on an embalming table and his soul is in hell. I’m thirty years old, healthy, and finally free of the bastard. Why don’t I feel better?”

Strange that despite the death of her father, Tess Barker still dreaded the end of the day. As usual, she hurried from room to room, shoving drapes away from windows to make the most of the dwindling sunlight. The rest of the world welcomed dusk as a signal to wind down and kick back, but Tess mourned sundown. Others looked forward to feet-up time in dimly lit TV rooms followed by blessed hours of sleep cocooned in blackness. Not so, for Tess. She despised the night.

Even though she knew her father had taught her to hate the dark and the way to move on was to learn to love it, she couldn’t. How do you train a well-grooved brain to flip a one-eighty?

She’d tried. Therapists, self-help books, pills. College roommates chided her for reading late and forgetting to turn off her over-the-bed light. Eventually, she lied to friends and lovers about a “light deprivation problem,” so they wouldn’t criticize her penchant for lamps lit all over the house, day and night. Boyfriends figured she had a healthy view of sex because she liked it with bedroom lights ablaze.

No one knew it was Cliff Barker who’d ruined the night for all his children and that was the way she and her brothers wanted it: the secret buried with the creep. But if their stubborn mother and the funeral planner had their way, putting on a memorial that made the dead bastard look like a God, Tess wouldn’t be able to hold back. She’d have to elbow her way to the pulpit and reveal to the ignorant worshipers that she hoped Cliff Barker burned in hell for what he’d done to his children. Then, bowled over by the media tidal wave, her brother would surely try suicide one more time.

No, to save herself and her siblings, she’d have to convince the funeral planner to stop the ceremony…without telling the woman or anyone else how her father had robbed his children of the night.