Deaths come in threes?

Deaths come in Threes?

  At exactly 4 o’clock, it was over.  Nicki Smith was dead.  It took rescuers an hour to reach her lifeless body, lying on the rocks.  Their attempts to return life to her went unrewarded.
  The sudden death shocked a community still reeling from the death of their well-loved mayor, Nicholas Smith.
  Nicki’s death came only months after her father perished in a horrific accident that left the town of Broadmeer in a state of shocked despair.
  After her father’s death, the smart, popular girl that Nicki had been withdrew into a private world of her own leaving only her body to continue her daily life on autopilot.
  Everybody in the small town knew the desperate figure as she prowled around the streets, lonely and sad.  But no one more so than her mother and friends.  Continually pushed away, her friends were no longer interested in her and her mother no longer understood her daughter.  She heard her crying at night, but the gap that had opened between them in the first weeks after his death was now a chasm that would not be bridged, no matter what methods they used.
  Nicki was feeling it just as much, not that anyone seemed to notice.  They didn’t seem to care, not any of them.  All her friends had given up on her.  She hadn’t meant to push them away like that, surely they realised, and surely they knew she was just upset?  They all had been so sympathetic.  “We understand.”  They had said, but they didn’t.  They hadn’t lost their fathers, and when it got hard, they just walked away. 
  Her mother was just as bad, she couldn’t see how much Nicki loved her father, had loved her father.  She had to start thinking of him in the past tense; her father wasn’t in the present and could never be in the future.  Never ever.

  “Daddy, you’ll always look after me, won’t you?”
  “I’ll always look after you, Nicki.”
  “You won’t ever leave me?”
  “Never.  Never ever.”

  “I’m coming, Daddy, I’m coming.  Watch me fly.”
  Then it was over.