So we decided to make it a major holiday outing. Bess used Airbnb to secure us a ten-day rental on a two-bedroom apartment in the East Seventies that perfectly suited our needs. We cabbed in from JFK on Thursday the 18th to find Bess waiting for us at the front door. We all walked to the local Gristedes to fill the refrigerator, then went out for an early dinner at a little Tex-Mex place on Second Avenue.

How different my two girls. Bess takes after me: long-faced, wavy, honey-blonde hair, brown-eyed, a bit on the plump side, but pleasingly so, I like to think. Ellie is lanky with a round face, straight black hair, and can’t stand contacts so is never without her owlish tortoise shell rims. Bess fancies herself a Bohemian, while Ellie the scientist turns her nose up at “artsy-fartsy stuff.”

After dinner Bess left us to return to her dorm and Ellie and I went to bed. The start of what looked to be a perfect family trip. If I’d had any hint of what was coming, I’d have packed us up right then and caught the next non-stop back to St. Louis.

I’ve always gotten along well with my two daughters, but we’ve become especially close since Ray’s sudden death five years ago. He was stopped at a railroad crossing when a texting teenage girl rear-ended him and pushed his car into the path of the oncoming freight train. He died instantly. Over the years he’d made a fairly good living as an insurance salesman and, true to his own sales pitches—and taking advantage of his employee discount—he’d accumulated a number of valuable term policies on himself. His death benefit came to a little over three and a half million dollars.

So financially, he left us very well off, though I’m sure the girls would much prefer to have their father around instead. I take a different view. I’ve never told them that one of the clerks at the coroner’s office—an old rival from the high school cheering squad—made sure I overheard her mention that when they extricated the bodies from the car, Ray’s young secretary, killed along with him, was found with her face buried in his lap.

I wasn’t all that surprised. So as a consequence I’ve managed to find perfect contentment in the money, and spend it lavishly on the girls.

In New York, the first hint of the strangeness that lurked ahead came the very next day as we cabbed down to Washington Square Park to meet Bess for a personalized tour of the Village. We were making our way along Fifth Avenue past the lower reaches of Central Park when Ellie, who’d been immersed in Snapchat with her friends back home, suddenly straightened and looked around, her blue eyes wide behind her round glasses.

“What is that?” she said.

“What’s what, honey?”

“That noise.”

I listened but heard nothing beyond typical traffic sounds.

“I’m sorry. I don’t hear anything special. What’s it sound like?”