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the middle of all that fatal unraveling.
    And I hadn’t returned the call.
    I’d been busy.
    She’d been drowning, and I’d been busy.
    I glanced down at her face again, resisted the urge to turn away from the hope in her eyes.
    “Okay,” I said aloud. “Okay, Karen. I’ll see what I can turn up. I’ll see what I can do.”
    A Chinese woman passing in front of the Jeep caught me talking to myself. She stared at me. I waved. She shook her head and walked away.
    She was still shaking her head as I started the Jeep and pulled out of my parking spot.
    Crazy, she seemed to be thinking. The whole damn planet of us. We’re all so crazy.

5
     
    What we presume about strangers when we first meet them is often correct. The guy sitting beside you at a bar, for example, who wears a blue shirt, has fingernails caked with dirt, and smells of motor oil, you can safely presume is a mechanic. To assume more is trickier, yet it’s something we all do every day. Our mechanic, we’d probably guess, drinks Budweiser. Watches football. Likes movies in which lots of shit blows up. Lives in an apartment that smells like his clothes.
    There’s a good chance these assumptions are on the mark.
    And just as good a chance that they’re not.
    When I met Karen Nichols, I assumed she’d grown up in the suburbs, came from comfortably middle-class parents, spent her formative years sheltered from dissension and mess and people who weren’t white. I further assumed (all in an instant, the span of a handshake) that her father was a doctor or the owner of a modest, successful business, a small chain of golf shops, perhaps. Her mother was a homemaker until the kids went to school, and then she worked part-time at a bookstore or maybe for an attorney.
    The truth was that when Karen Nichols was six years old, her father, a marine lieutenant stationed at Fort Devens, was shot by another lieutenant in thekitchen of Karen’s home. The shooter’s name was Reginald Crowe, Uncle Reggie to Karen, even though he hadn’t been a blood relation. He’d been her father’s best friend and next-door neighbor and he shot her father twice in the chest with a .45 as the two sat having Saturday afternoon beers.
    Karen, who had been next door playing with the Crowe children, heard the shots and came rushing into her home to find Uncle Reggie standing over her father. Uncle Reggie, seeing Karen, promptly put the gun to his own heart and fired.
    There was a picture of the two corpses that some enterprising Trib reporter had found in Fort Devens’s files and published in his paper two days after Karen leapt to her death.
    The headline above the story read: SINS OF SUICIDE-WOMAN’S PAST HAUNT PRESENT, and the story reenergized water-cooler conversation around the city for at least half an hour.
    I never would have guessed Karen, at six, had been such a close witness to horror. The house in the suburbs came a few years later, when her mother was remarried to a cardiologist who lived in Weston. Karen Nichols, from that point, grew up untouched and unchallenged.
    And while I was pretty sure that the only reason Karen’s death received any news play whatsoever stemmed more from the building from which she chose to jump than any curiosity regarding her need to do so, I also think that she became, for a moment, a morbid reminder of the ways in which the world or the fates could mangle your dreams. Because in the six months since I’d seen her last, Karen Nichols’s life had been on a slide steeper than a fall from the Eiger.
    A month after I’d solved her Cody Falk problem, her boyfriend, David Wetterau, had tripped while jaywalking during rush hour on Congress Street. The trip hadn’t been much—a fall to both knees that tore a hole in one pant leg—but while he was down, a Cadillac, swerving to misshim, had clipped his forehead with the corner of its rear fender. Wetterau had been comatose ever since.
    Over the next five months, Karen Nichols slipped ever