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was being crushed inside of her.
    Pink struggled out of her embrace. “I feel sick,” he said. “Let me sit.”
    Lillie clung to his arm and he fell heavily onto the sofa. She sat down beside him. Gray offered her the glass of water, but she turned it away. He stood helplessly by, with panic in his eyes.
    Royce Ansley stood up. “I have to get back down there. There’s a deputy with her now, and the coroner is on his way.” He could see that his words were passing virtually unheard by the stricken couple on the couch. “I’ll let you know when we know anything.”
    Lillie blinked up at him. “Oh, all right,” she said in a numb, distracted voice. She got up from the sofa and started to shuffle toward the door as if to see him out.
    “Never mind,” Royce said quickly. “Please, please, sit down.”
    Lillie looked up at him. “Maybe it isn’t Michele,” she said.
    “I’ll be in touch with you,” Royce repeated gently. “Meanwhile, somebody better call her daddy. Let him know what happened.”
    Lillie nodded. “I’ll call him,” she said in a dull voice. Jordan Hill had a right to know. He was Michele’s natural father, after all. And in fact, he had tried to be a real father to her in the last ten years or so. Calling her. Sending her presents. Having her come to New York to visit him.
    It was an hour later in New York City. Nearly two in the morning. Lillie wondered if she would be awakening him with those words. Michele is dead. For so long she had lived in fear of those same words. She had bedded down in cots beside Michele’s hospital bed, and she had prayed that no one would waken her in the night with those words. And now, when the danger was long since past, when her guard was relaxed, the news had come, striking her, stunning her with the force of a whirlwind.
    She would call Jordan. She would awaken him and say the words, but they were not real. She could not feel the reality of it. Despite all the evidence around her, she thought she might look out the door again and see her daughter coming up the steps, dragging the skirts of a rose-pink ballgown, her child’s face glowing like a bright oval wafer in the moonlight.

Chapter 2
    IT WAS TWO IN THE MORNING but Jordan Hill was not asleep, although he pretended to be. The girl in the bed beside him sat up and shook her head so that her abundant, wavy hair, the color of a brown-edged sugar cookie, resumed the windblown shape it had lost by being matted on the pillow. She reached down to the end of the bed for his shirt, which lay crumpled there, and pulled it on but didn’t bother to button it. After climbing out of the bed, the girl walked gingerly across the bare wooden floor, past the waist-high bookcases that served as a divider between the bed and the combination living room-kitchen in the long, narrow studio apartment. Bending down to reach the half refrigerator below the sink, she suddenly let out a shriek. Jordan propped himself up on one elbow and called out, “What’s the matter?”
    The girl came back to the bed, carrying an open bottle of beer. She took a swig and offered the bottle to him. Jordan smoothed the corner of his mustache and shook his head. “There’s a roach in the sink,” she said indignantly.
    “Well, I hope you didn’t scare him off hollerin’ like that, Amanda.”
    The girl made a face at him and then sat down on the end of the bed. She lifted up one dainty foot and frowned at the grime that had collected on it in her brief trip to the refrigerator. The blue work shirt slipped becomingly off one shoulder as she twisted her shapely calf to examine her foot. She was in her mid-twenties and her body was without a ripple or a blemish. Jordan pulled the sheet up over himself, suddenly conscious of the gray hairs on his chest. “I’m not a great housekeeper,” he admitted.
    Still holding her foot, Amanda scanned the walls of the dimly lit apartment with a critical gaze. The room was neat, but he had never tried to