Chapter 4

The floor over the ice was colder than the carpets, and I felt it through my boots as I came up the podium steps.

Two hundred faces turned. Wine and pine and cold drafts through the service doors, the blizzard hissing on the glass behind the stage like a kettle someone forgot. I had stood on more stages than I could count. This was the first time my hands were wet.

"Friends," I said. The microphone cracked. "You'll forgive me. Tonight I intended to name my successor, and I intend to stand by that. But I will not do it in the next ten minutes."

The room made a sound like a held breath let out.

"I have something else to say. Before the evening is over, I will be speaking to the Duluth police, and also to my attorney, and also to my board." I looked down the row of faces to where my directors sat in the front, and I watched the Hovland woman put her glass on the table and not pick it back up. "There is a company matter. There is also a family matter. For those of you who knew my daughter Astrid, I ask you not to leave until you've heard me out. That is all. Eat. Drink. The band's been paid."

I stepped back. The band took the hint and swung into something loud.

Julian, beside me, was smiling for the room and speaking through his teeth.

"You've just put a hole in the bottom of this company."

"Somebody did," I said. "I'm trying to find out who."

"Let me be plain." His hand closed on my elbow, which no one had done since I was a boy. "The security on this floor answers to me. Rusk's whole team. You can delay a speech. You cannot delay the fact that I control access to every door in this building, and that child is a liability I intend to remove."

"Say that again."

And he did, worse: he looked past me across the rink, and I followed his eyes, and Dale Rusk - six-four, wool coat, corporate security badge, the man Julian had hired without ever asking me - had already come in from the west stairs with two others.

They were not walking toward us. They were walking toward the corridor that led to my office.

Tessa saw them the same instant I did. She was already moving, radio up, and I heard her voice low and quick.

"Dispatch, Moreau, Valesworth Ice Palace, I need a unit now, priority. I have a nine-year-old female in protective custody and three adult males moving on her. I'm going to need medical too."

"You can't do that," Julian said. "This is a private-"

"Get off my floor," I said.

Julian blinked. In twenty years no one on any property of mine had spoken to him like that, and for one honest second the polish came off him and I saw a forty-seven-year-old man, tired, afraid, exactly as he must have looked the night my daughter's car went into the trees on County Road 12.

Then it came back on, all of it, smooth as poured concrete.

"You're seventy-six," he said quietly. "You had a stent put in four years ago. You have no idea what you're starting."

"I know exactly what I'm starting," I said. "I'm starting with my granddaughter."

There. I said it out loud on my own property with the band playing, and I felt something in my chest that had been shut for nine years come loose all at once.

Julian turned and walked fast toward the west door, and he did not look like a man going to make a phone call. He looked like a man going to a rendezvous he had planned a long time ago.

I went down the podium steps three at a time, which at my age is a way to die, and Tessa and I crossed the rink floor together through the crowd, and the guests parted, and I heard someone say my name, and I did not stop.