She dumped the last bit of glass, straightened. “Because your skin is a shade of green I’ve never seen before, and there was an incredibly drunken message on my answering machine this morning.”

“Ah.” I vaguely recollected a pay phone and a beep from some point last night. “What did this message say?”

She took her coffee cup off the table, leaned against the washing machine. “Something like ‘Where are you, it’s three in the morning, something’s really fucked up, we gotta talk.’ The rest I couldn’t understand, but by then you’d started speaking Swahili anyway.”

I put the dustpan, broom, and wastebasket in the pantry, poured myself a cup of coffee. “So,” I said, “where were you at three in the morning?”

“You’re my father now?” She frowned and pinched my waist just above the sheet. “You’re getting love handles.”

I reached for the cream. “I don’t have love handles.”

“And you know why? Because you still drink beer like you’re in a frat.”

I looked at her steadily, poured extra cream into my coffee. “You going to answer my original question?”

“About my whereabouts last night?”

“Yes.”

She sipped her coffee, looked over the mug rim at me. “Nope. I did wake up with a warm, fuzzy feeling, though, and a big smile on my face. Big smile.”

“Big as the one you’re wearing now?”

“Bigger.”

“Hmm,” I said.

She hoisted herself up onto the washing machine. “So, you called me, shit-faced, at three A.M. to do more than check up on my sex life. What’s up?” She lit a cigarette.

I said, “You remember Kara Rider?”

“Yeah.”

“Someone murdered her last night.”

“No.” Her eyes were huge.

“Yes.” With all the extra cream, my coffee tasted like baby’s formula. “Crucified her on Meeting House Hill.”

She closed her eyes for a moment, opened them. She looked at her cigarette like it might tell her something.

“Any idea who did it?” she said.

“No one was parading around Meeting House Hill with a bloody hammer singing, ‘Boy, oh boy, do I like to crucify women,’ if that’s what you mean.” I tossed my coffee in the sink.

Quietly, she said, “You done snapping for the day?”

I poured fresh coffee into the cup. “Don’t know yet. It’s still early.” I turned around and she slipped off the washing machine and stood in front of me.

I saw Kara’s thin body lying in the cold night, swollen and exposed, her eyes blank.

I said, “I ran into her the other morning outside the Emerald. I had a feeling, I dunno, that she was in trouble or something, but I let it go. I blew it off.”

“And what?” she said. “You’re somehow to blame?”

I shrugged.

“No, Patrick,” she said. She ran a warm palm up the side of my neck, forced me to look in her eyes. “Understand?”

Nobody should die like Kara did.

“Understand?” she said again.

“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, I guess.”

“No guessing,” she said. She removed her hand and pulled a white envelope from her purse and handed it to me. “This was taped to the front door downstairs.” She pointed to a small cardboard box on my kitchen table. “And that was leaning against the door.”