EIGHT

“I lied,” I said.

“To who?” Nina asked. “Bobby?”

“I lied to him without even thinking about it, not a moment’s hesitation. I just did it. He knew I was lying, too. That’s why he was so angry.”

“Why should he be different from the rest of us?”

After taking a cab home, I changed clothes. Both my shirt and sports coat were lost causes, stained with so much blood I just balled them up and tossed them in the trash. Some of the cuts started bleeding again when I washed up, and it took me a few minutes to get them back under control. Even so, my face made me look like I had been mugged by a pack of angry cats. Nina noticed it the moment I knocked on her front door. Most people would have asked what happened. She said, “What now?” I told her. She was not amused. Now she was pacing in front of the chair in her living room where I was sitting. I asked her to stop. She ignored me.

“I withheld evidence that I knew to be pertinent to his investigation,” I said. “I never did that before.”

“About Jason?”

“Yes.”

“You were protecting Jason.”

“No. Hell, no.”

“Rickie, then.”

“My father never in his life did a thing that embarrassed me, that made me think less of him—as far as I know. I don’t want to know.”

“And you don’t want Rickie to know. You were protecting Rickie from the truth about her father.”

“Hell, Nina, I don’t even know what the truth is. Maybe your ex-husband is just a dupe. Maybe—ahh. Sometimes I feel like Yul Brynner in The King and I. I’m no longer positive of the things I know for sure. Maybe if someone else had been involved I would have come clean. If it wasn’t just me, if it wasn’t just my car…”

“Isn’t that enough? They nearly killed you. They destroyed your Audi.”

“I figure that’s just the price you pay for doing the things I do.”

“It seems like an awful lot of risk for so little.” Nina took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Sometimes, McKenzie, I just want to slap your face.”

“Please don’t. I’ve already lost too much blood.”

She stopped pacing and looked down at me. Somewhere inside her head a switch was turned. The expression on her face turned from anger to something else.

“Oh, hell,” she said.

“What?”

Nina sat on my lap, her legs hanging over the arm of the chair. She wrapped one arm around my shoulder, her hand resting on the nape of my neck.

“If I kiss you, will you start bleeding again?” she asked.

“I suppose you could give it a try. Think of it as a science experiment.”

Nina leaned in and kissed me on the side of the mouth and then moved her lips to my cheek. She leaned back.

“Nope, no blood,” she said.

“Call that a kiss?”

“Are you suggesting my kisses aren’t what they should be?”

“I’m just saying the results of your experiment would have greater validity if you were more aggressive in your research.”

“Oh, the things I do for science.”

She kissed me again, kissed me to the depths of my soul. I sat there and took it, my eyes closed—it was like receiving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. Suddenly the gloom that had fallen over me since the assassination attempt was lifted. I felt alive again. It seemed hardly possible that this same woman had just spent the better part of a half hour berating me for taking unnecessary risks, for dancing with danger—she actually used those words, “dancing with danger.” I told her she made it sound like one of those silly made-for-TV movies on the Lifetime Channel. That made her even angrier. The kiss, however, suggested that she might be willing to forgive me my many trespasses if only I could resist saying something dumb—“A man has to do what a man has to do” came to mind. I had used that line on her earlier. I was joking at the time; I said that you could tell I was joking because I was smiling. I was never one of those guys, I insisted. Nina rolled her eyes and said, “McKenzie, you’ve always been one of those guys.” I argued that, while I wasn’t completely immune to all that macho bullshit, I usually had a good reason for what I did. The remark only antagonized her, causing her to harangue me even further. So now I just sat there and kept my big mouth shut and let her kiss me.

When she finished, she rested her head against my chest, and I gently stroked her hair.

“How does that Chinese curse go, the one you like to quote?” she asked.

“May you live in interesting times,” I said.

“You’re the most interesting man I know. I think that might be a curse, too.”

“Yeah, but which of us is cursed? Me, or you for knowing me?”

“Both.”

We kissed again. At just about the time the kissing was starting to lead to someplace more interesting, the front door opened and Erica stepped across the threshold, keys in one hand and a backpack in the other. The backpack made a heavy thud on the floor when she dropped it.

“Would you kids like some iced tea?” she asked.

Nina quickly scrambled off of my lap. She tried hard to mask her amusement from her daughter, only her eyes gave her away. I stood next to the chair, pretending the chair wasn’t there and I had never been sitting in it.

“Iced tea?” I repeated.

“A couple weeks ago my mother caught me in a similar position with a boy.” The expression on Erica’s face suggested that she had yet to forgive her. “She asked us if we wanted iced tea and then insisted we come to the kitchen to drink it.”

“I was only being polite to your guest,” Nina said.

“Sure you were.”

Erica and Nina glared at each other until they both felt a smile coming on, and then each turned away so the other wouldn’t see it.

“I am so leaving home to go to college,” Erica said.

“Good. I’ll turn your bedroom into a sewing room,” Nina said.

“I can see it now. You in a rocking chair with a comforter around your legs, crocheting while you watch I Love the 80s retrospectives on VH1, a cat sitting on your lap. We’ll call him Snookums. ‘Would Snookums like some iced tea?’ McKenzie, what happened to your face?”

“I was cut a little bit,” I said. “Nothing too bad. You won’t even notice tomorrow.”

Nina wouldn’t let it go at that, though. Her expression changed from amusement to anger.

“Someone tried to shoot him,” she said.

“Oh, no,” Erica said.

“They missed McKenzie, but they wrecked his car.”

“Oh, no. The Audi? They wrecked the Audi. They almost, they almost—it’s all my fault, isn’t it? It’s my fault.”

“It’s not your fault,” I said. “It had nothing to do with you.”

“If I hadn’t asked you—”

“If you hadn’t asked him to get involved in your father’s problems,” Nina said.

“I’m not sure it had anything to do with your father,” I said.

“If I hadn’t,” Erica said.

“If you hadn’t,” Nina said.

“Stop it, now,” I said.

“I am so sorry, McKenzie,” Erica said.

“Erica, there’s no need for that,” I said.

“I am so sorry.”

“You should be,” Nina said.

“I’m sorry.”

“Nina, stop it,” I said.

She turned toward me. The look in her eyes made me take a step backward.

“I need to think,” Erica said.

She picked up her backpack and slowly carried it up the stairs. She was high enough on the stairs that I could only see her lower legs when she stopped.

“I’m sorry, McKenzie,” she said.

“There’s nothing to be sorry about,” I said. I was looking directly into her mother’s eyes when I spoke. “This is me, remember? This sort of thing happens all the time.”

Erica disappeared upstairs. Nina stepped closer to me.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked. Her voice was low and sharp.

“Don’t you blame her for what happened,” I said.

“She’s my daughter.”

“I don’t care. If you want to blame Jason, I’ll be the first to pile on, but don’t you blame her.”

“If she hadn’t asked for your help, none of this would have happened.”

“If she wasn’t your daughter, I would have said no.”

“So it’s my fault?”

“Why are you so angry?”

“I always get angry when people shoot at you.”

“I’d think you’d be used to it by now.”

“Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit, McKenzie. Don’t you make a joke out of this.”

“Nina, aren’t you the girl I was making out with five minutes ago? What happened?”

“I was angry when I was kissing you.”

I raised my hand as if I were attempting to stop traffic.

“Wait,” I said. “Give me a minute to think that through.”

“Shut up, McKenzie.”

Erica called to us from the top of the stairs. “McKenzie,” she said. She waited a few beats before descending the staircase. I figured she paused because she thought Nina and I might be making out again and she didn’t want to embarrass us a second time. I liked this girl.

“McKenzie,” she said. She was carrying a laptop. “Did I ever show you my fencing photos?”

“No,” I said.

“Now’s not the time,” Nina said.

“I thought McKenzie should see them,” Nina said. “Would you like to see them, McKenzie?”

Should—she said should, my inner voice told me.

“Yes,” I said.

She set the machine on a coffee table. I sat on the sofa next to her. Erica had already opened a file and was now riffling through the electronic images. I watched them appear and disappear on the large screen, not at all sure what I was looking for. Nina stood in front of the coffee table, her arms crossed over her chest. She seemed as confused as I was.

“These were taken at the St. Paul Academy Invitational last year,” Erica said.

She paused at a shot of a large gymnasium floor filled with white-clad swordsmen dueling across gray strips measuring about fifteen meters long and one and a half meters wide. An electrical cord ran from the hilt of each sword to a plug attached to the fencer’s white jacket. From there the cords extended to a reel attached to the floor that gave out and took in slack depending on the movement of the swordsman, then from the reel to an electronic box on the scorer’s table that kept track of the competitor’s touches.

“Mother,” Nina said, “may we have some iced tea?”

Nina hesitated for a moment.

“Sure,” she said.

When her mother disappeared into the kitchen, Erica brought up the next shot. It showed both her and another young woman sitting on folding chairs and mugging for the camera. They were wearing white knickers and white jackets that closed around the throat. Erica’s companion looked like she was about fourteen. She had bright brown eyes and hair the color of roses and wheat that was tied in a ponytail with a red ribbon. Erica was pretending to pull the ponytail. It was the girl’s hair that set the alarm bells ringing.

After a few moments, Erica went to the next photo.

“Go back,” I said.

She did.

I studied the young woman some more.

“Who is this?” I asked.

“Her name is Vicki Walsh,” Erica said. “She went to Johnson.”

“Johnson Senior High School? She looks too young.”

“She’s a year older than I am. This was taken last January.”

“How do you know her?”

“From fencing. There’s only about a dozen girls in the entire state who are any good at épée; that’s the sword I use. We see each other at all the tournaments, and most of us are friendly. We’re not friendly on the strip, no way. Before and after, though—it’s like we’re members of the same exclusive club, you know?”

“Tell me about the girl.”

“The others and I teased Vicki because she looked so young, and she would tease us back, saying how sad it was that we were already past our prime, that we already looked like old women. She was smart. You talk to someone and you know right away if they’ve ever read a book before. I guess she wasn’t all that good in school, though; didn’t have the grades like I do. Vicki said something about missing a lot of time when she was fifteen and that she never really caught up—I guess she was sick or something. She never said. On the other hand, Vicki said that she had been accepted by Cornell University. You don’t get into Cornell with just good looks. She had a lot of personality, always smiling. Even when she lost, when I beat her for the trophy at SPA, she smiled. I liked her a lot.”

Erica turned in her seat so she could look me straight in the eye.

“So did my father,” she said.

From the sound of her voice, I guessed it took a lot for her to tell me that. It took a lot more for me to keep from wrapping my arm around her shoulder and hugging her to my chest, but Erica wasn’t looking for comfort.

“Your father knew Vicki Walsh?” I asked.

“He came to the tournaments. He would joke around with my friends, with the other girls.”

“He joked around with Vicki?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“It’s because of Vicki that my father is in trouble, isn’t it?”

“What makes you say so?”

“The last time I saw Vicki was at the University of Minnesota in late June. We were working out with the college guys. They let us do that. Fencing is a big club, like I said. Anyway, she seemed kind of tense during practice; what’s the word—preoccupied. That wasn’t like her. I thought she was in trouble.”

“Pregnant?”

“Why do people do that? If a girl seems depressed, the first thing they think is that she’s pregnant?”

“It happens even in the best families.”

“No, not pregnant—but something. Anyway, she asked if I had plans for the Fourth of July. I said a bunch of us were going down to Harriet Island for Taste of Minnesota, listen to some free music and watch the fireworks. I said she should come with us. She said she couldn’t because she was going up to Canada. I said where in Canada, thinking it might be Toronto, which is like my favorite city in the whole world. I know a great French restaurant in Toronto. Only she said she was going to Thunder Bay.”

Erica paused to stare at Vicki’s photo some more.

“That was the last time I saw her,” she said. “I figured Vicki went off to Cornell like she said. We weren’t close friends or anything. She didn’t owe me a good-bye. I wrote on her Facebook wall, but she never got back to me. I thought she was so busy in college that she didn’t do Facebook anymore. That’s okay. Like I said, it’s not like we were close friends. I didn’t think anymore about her until…”

“Until your father mentioned that he was having problems.”

“He said he got into a little trouble up in Thunder Bay during the Fourth of July weekend. A very wise man once told me that he didn’t believe in coincidences.”

“That would be me.”

“That would be you. Is my father in trouble because of Vicki?”

“Yes, I think he is. I just don’t know how much trouble.”

“Enough that people are shooting at you?”

“That might be completely unrelated to this.”

“Are you saying it’s a coincidence?”

“I’m saying … I don’t know what I’m saying.”

“Will you still help my father, McKenzie? Will you please, even after what happened?”

“I’ll try, Erica.”

“I’ve always liked that you call me that. Rickie is a child’s name, and I’m not a child anymore. My mom, my dad, my oldest friends, they’ve known me since I was a child, so I pretty much have to take it from them. Only you’ve never treated me like a child. To you I was always Erica. You don’t know how much that’s meant to me.”

Nina called from the kitchen.

“Are you two done conspiring? Is it okay for me to come back into the room?”

Erica closed the laptop and stood.

“It’s all right, Mom,” she said.

Nina entered the room empty-handed.

“Where’s the iced tea?” I asked.

She was looking at her daughter when she said, “I must have forgotten.”

“I’m sorry, Mom,” Erica said. “Sorry to keep things from you. I made promises I shouldn’t have made.”

“What can you do? He’s your father.”

Erica walked to her mother and hugged her with one arm while keeping the laptop pressed to her side with the other.

“What’s this for?” Nina asked.

“Nothing,” Erica said. “Nothing at all.”

She spun around and headed for the stairs. She called to me as she climbed them.

“You know, McKenzie,” Erica said, “I didn’t get a choice of parents. I don’t know if I would have changed anything if I had.”

When she was out of sight, Nina said, “What did you and Rickie talk about?”

“Honestly, Nina,” I said, “you should stop calling her that.”

*   *   *

I hadn’t planned on punching Jason Truhler; hadn’t considered it once during the sixty minutes it took to drive from Mahtomedi, the suburb northeast of St. Paul where Nina lived, to Eden Prairie, the suburb southwest of Minneapolis where Truhler lived. Yet when he opened the door to his town house, looked at me with a mystified expression on his face, and said, “McKenzie, what the hell do you want at this time of night?” I lost it. Granted, in Minnesota it’s considered extremely discourteous to call or visit after 10:00 P.M. On the other hand, I had nearly taken a bullet for this lying bastard. So I drove my fist into his midsection just above the cloth belt keeping his robe closed.

The force of the blow drove Truhler three steps backward and down onto the carpet, his knees drawn up, his hands clutching his stomach. I entered the town house, closing the door behind me.

“What … what…?” Truhler coughed and gasped for air. For a moment I thought he might vomit. “It’s not … it’s not…”

“It’s not what?” I asked.

I caught movement in front of me. I looked up just as the girl started to scream. She was standing under the arch that led to a darkened corridor, wearing only pearls around her neck and high heels on her feet. She looked like she’d started high school last week.

Truhler rolled to his knees and slowly stood up, using an outstretched hand for support. I noticed for the first time that he was naked beneath his robe.

“Oh, for God’s sake,” I said.

“It’s okay … okay,” Truhler said. He moved toward the girl. “Don’t, don’t … be frightened. It’s just a minor misunderstanding.”

The girl must have believed him, because she soon stopped screaming and started to giggle instead.

“I thought you were just showing off when you said you were involved with dangerous people,” she said.

Dangerous? my inner voice asked. You got that right, honey.

Truhler took a deep breath, regained some of his composure.

“Everything is fine now,” he said. “Go back to bed.”

“What about…?” The girl gestured at me with her chin. At no time did she make an effort to cover herself.

“I know who he is. It’ll be fine.”

“He looks so mean…”

I do not. Do I?

“The scratches on his face.”

Yeah, well …

“It’ll be fine,” Truhler said.

The girl giggled some more. I thought I saw her wink.

“Will he be staying?” she asked.

Truhler seemed annoyed by the question.

“No,” he said. “He’ll be leaving in a minute. Now go back to bed.”

The girl was reluctant to leave, and Truhler had to take her elbow and escort her down the corridor and out of sight. Words were exchanged. The girl giggled again.

I sat on a plush sofa pushed against the wall. There was a glass coffee table in front of it. On the coffee table I found a razor blade, a short straw, and a small mirror. The mirror looked as if it had been licked clean. I pointed at the drug paraphernalia when Truhler returned to the living room.

“You’re a cliché, you know that,” I said. “How old is that girl, anyway?”

“She’s legal,” Truhler said.

“By legal do you mean she’s eighteen?”

“What do you want, McKenzie?”

I had no intention of looking up at Truhler while we spoke.

“Sit down before I knock you down,” I told him.

Truhler found a chair as far away from me as he could get and still be in the same room.

“What happened at the drop?” he asked.

“Besides getting shot at and having my car destroyed?”

I gave him the basics. When I finished, Truhler looked at the ceiling and sighed with the same dramatic flourish as he had in my kitchen.

“I take it you didn’t get my money back,” he said.

“Golly gee, Jason, I’m really sorry ’bout that.”

“So why are you here?” he asked. “You could have told me all this over the phone.”

“Does the name Vicki Walsh mean anything to you?”

“Oh.”

“Oh. Did you think I wouldn’t find out who she was?”

“I didn’t think it mattered who she was.”

“That’s an interesting attitude to take. I’m sure the cops will be very impressed.”

“I didn’t kill her.”

“You took her to Thunder Bay.”

“Yes, but…”

“But what?”

Truhler glanced at the opening to the darkened corridor. He left his chair and moved to another, this one across the coffee table directly in front of me. He folded his hands in his lap, leaned toward me, and whispered. Guilty people do that. They whisper even when there’s no one around to overhear.

“I didn’t kill her, McKenzie. You’ve got to believe me.”

“Why? Because you’ve been so truthful up until now? You made reservations at the Prince Arthur Hotel for two—in May.”

“I took Vicki to Thunder Bay, I admit it, but I didn’t know I was going to take her when I made the reservations. I didn’t know who I was going to take.”

“The blackmailers made their reservations four days after you did. They knew who you were going to take.”

“McKenzie, I didn’t tell you about hooking up with Vicki because I knew you wouldn’t approve.”

“She was your daughter’s friend.”

“See, I knew you’d react that way, a straitlaced guy like you. That’s why I didn’t tell you. Everything else happened exactly the way that I said it did, though. I woke up and she was dead. I know you think I’m lying, but it’s true.”

There’s that tell again, my inner voice reminded me.

“You left her there,” I said.

“What else was I going to do? It’s not like we were a couple or anything.”

“I got a long lecture from the cops today about doing the right thing. You should have heard it. It might have done you some good.”

“C’mon, McKenzie. She was a tramp.”

“She was eighteen years old.”

“Yeah? So? McKenzie, Vicki wasn’t some innocent kid that I seduced. You know how we hooked up? We hooked up on the Internet. I found her on a Web site for prostitutes that a friend told me about. I didn’t even believe it was her when I first saw the picture. At the fencing tournaments, she always had her hair in a ponytail and she wore one of those white tunics, jackets, whatever they call it, no makeup. In the picture on the Web site, her blouse was open so you could see her tits, and her hair was down and her lips were red and—”

“What Web site? What are you talking about?”

“C’mere. Let me show you.”

Truhler led me from his living room into a home office. He had an L-shaped desk; an eMachine had been positioned on the base of the L. The power was on. Truhler called up a search engine and typed in an address. The page that popped up on the monitor displayed a shot of an attractive young woman; I would have placed her age at about sixteen. She had dark eyes and black hair that fell to her bare shoulders. There was something extraordinarily touching about her. Beneath her photo was an empty field labeled MEMBERS and another that read PASSWORD. That was it—no explanation of the site and no directions on how to become a member.

Truhler typed in his name—ColdWeatherFriend—and a password that appeared as bullet points. A moment later a new page filled the screen. This one had the title My Very First Time. Beneath it were photographs of twenty women displayed in a grid, four down, five across. Each of the women was identified by a first name only; all of them seemed impossibly young. They were posed provocatively, with shirts unbuttoned and skirts hiked to there, yet despite that they exhibited a kind of innocence that I found intriguing—a trick of the photographer’s light, I decided. That opinion changed abruptly when Truhler moved the cursor to the woman called Tasha and clicked his mouse.

In attempting to define pornography, Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart famously said, “I know it when I see it.” Tasha’s page left no doubt. There were a half dozen photographs of her, each of them more raw than the one before. A prop was placed in each photo to emphasize the woman’s youth—a doll, a teddy bear, a plaid private school skirt, a canopied bed trimmed in pink. Yet any semblance of innocence was gone baby gone.

According to the copy beneath the photos, Tasha had earned a four-out-of-five-star rating from her clients. There was a navigation key that allowed viewers to read the woman’s vital statistics, another that displayed comments posted by her clients, and still another that allowed clients to post a comment. Beneath that, there was a navigation key that read: ARRANGE TO MEET TASHA.

“Show me Vicki’s page,” I said.

Truhler leaned away from the computer screen.

“It’s gone,” he said. “They took it down a few weeks ago.”

“Not after Thunder Bay?”

“No, but I checked a couple of times since I got back, and there didn’t seem to be any activity. No new guys were posting comments after being with her.”

“Tell me how this works.”

“The Web site? Well, you just can’t sign up, that’s the first thing. You have to be recommended by a friend who’ll vouch for you. Then the company checks you out to make sure you’re not a cop, not a degenerate, and that you have money to pay before they give you a confidential membership name and a password.”

“Apparently their definition of degenerate is different from mine.”

“Are you going to judge me now?”

“They’re kids, Truhler.”

“They’re not kids. They look like kids, but they’re not. They’re all older than eighteen. They’re all adults.”

“To a twelve-year-old eighteen might be an adult. Not to guys our age.”

“The law says—”

I held up a hand to stop him.

“I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “I really don’t. Just tell me who does the checking for this company, who’s in charge.”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean you don’t know?”

“It’s run by a woman. Her name is Roberta. She’s about fifty years old. That’s all I know. The company is very security conscious. Names aren’t exchanged.”

“You’re saying they know who you are, but you don’t know who they are.”

“It’s not important for me to know.”

“Truhler, did it ever occur to you that these are the people who are blackmailing you?”

He shook his head as if the idea were just too outrageous to contemplate.

“They wouldn’t jeopardize their business. They wouldn’t kill their own employees,” he said.

“First of all, their business is making money from shnooks like you. Second, Vicki Walsh isn’t dead.”

“What?” Truhler stood and stepped away from the desk. “What?”

“The stain on the carpet where she was supposedly killed was caused by theatrical blood—the stuff they use in slasher films.”

“What? What?”

“You’ve been played, pal.”

Truhler sat down again.

“I don’t believe it,” he said.

“Are you sure you can’t identify your friends at—what is this Web site called, My Very First Time?”

He shook his head.

“Well, then you’re screwed.”

“Not if we can find Vicki. If we can find Vicki—”

“We?”

“McKenzie, you’ve got to help me.”

“You keep telling me that.”

“Please.”

I didn’t want to help Truhler, a man who abused children; the only people who should be involved with eighteen-year-old girls are eighteen-year-old boys. Erica—I figured it would crush her to learn about her father, only he was a jerk and she was going to find out sooner or later. Probably she knew already; she’s the one who put me onto Vicki Walsh. Vicki; she looked so young, so sweet. A prostitute. A year older than Erica, she had to be nineteen by now, maybe twenty. She had to know what she was doing. My Very First Time, exploiting young women, pimping them to old men. Someone should do something about that. I could pick up a phone, give Bobby a call. An online prostitution ring, surely that constituted a major crime, right? And what about the guys who shot up my car, who nearly shot me? They didn’t need to do that. That was unnecessary. Someone should do something about that, too.

Does it have to be me?

A man’s got to do what a man’s got to do.

“No, not this time,” I said. “I’ve done my bit for God and country.”

“McKenzie, please.”

I left the office and headed for the door. Truhler followed, begging me to reconsider with each step.

“What am I going to do?” he asked.

“My advice, call the cops, call a lawyer. I know people. If you want a few names and phone numbers, I’ll give them to you.”

I opened the front door. Truhler grabbed my forearm. I shook it free.

“Rickie will be disappointed,” Truhler said.

“Maybe so, but Erica will understand.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Jason,” the girl called from the darkened corridor. “How long are you going to beeeeeeee?”

“Erica is more mature than most of the women you know,” I said.

I turned and crossed the threshold into the cool night air. The girl’s giggling followed me out the door.

*   *   *

It was eleven thirty by the time I reached my home in Falcon Heights. By midnight I was sitting in my favorite comfy chair and watching SportsCenter on ESPN, a bottle of Summit Ale at my elbow. At twelve forty-five my phone rang.

“McKenzie, it’s Erica.”

I felt a thrill of fear at the sound of her voice. The last time Erica called me in the middle of the night was never.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

Don’t let it be Nina, don’t let it be Nina, don’t let it be Nina, my inner voice chanted.

“It’s my father,” she said.