Spilled Blood Read Free

Hannah had called at six o’clock, waking him up. He hadn’t spoken to her in months, but he could see her face as clearly as if she’d been sleeping beside him. There were still days when he reached for her in bed, hoping to take her hand, hoping to fold her against his body. He still had dreams in which the three of them lived together as a family. Chris. Hannah. Olivia.
    She didn’t give him a chance to dream.
    “Our daughter has been arrested for murder,” she announced.
    Just like that. No small talk. Hannah never wasted time. She had a way of cutting to the chase, whether it was in college when he wanted to sleep with her (she said yes), or three years ago when she wanted a divorce (he said no, but that didn’t change her mind).
    Olivia.
    Chris didn’t ask for details about the crime she had supposedly committed. He didn’t want to know the victim’s name, be told what happened, or hear Hannah reassure him that she was really innocent. For him, that wasn’t even a question. His daughter didn’t do it. Not Olivia. The girl who texted and tweeted him every day— Send me a pic of a Dunn Bros latte, Dad. I miss it.— was not a murderer.
    “I’ll be there this afternoon,” he replied.
    The silence on the phone told him that his answer surprised her. Finally, Hannah said, “She needs a lawyer, Chris.”
    “I’m a lawyer.”
    “You know what I mean. A criminal lawyer.”
    “All lawyers are criminals.”
    It was an old joke between them, but Hannah didn’t laugh. “Chris, this is serious. I’m scared.”
    “I know you are, but this is obviously a misunderstanding. I’ll straighten it out with the police.”
    Her hesitation felt like a punch to the gut. “I’m not so sure that’s all it is,” she said. She was silent again and then added, “It’s ugly. Olivia’s in trouble.”
    Hannah sketched out the facts for him, and he realized that she was right. It was ugly. In the early hours of Saturday morning, a pretty teenage girl had been shot to death, and Olivia had been at the scene, drunk, desperate, pointing a gun at the girl’s head. It hadn’t taken long—it was Tuesday now—for the police to conclude that his daughter was guilty.
    “What did Olivia tell you?” he asked. “What happened between them?”
    “She won’t talk to me. She said I should call you.”
    “Okay, tell her I’ll be there soon.”
    Hannah didn’t protest further. “Fine. You’re right, she needs you. Just remember that you don’t know this girl, Chris. Not anymore.”
    “We talk all the time.”
    “That’s not the same thing. Believe me. You see the girl she wants you to see.”
    As his ex-wife hung up, he’d wondered to himself if that was true.
    A lifetime had passed—three years—since Hannah left him to go back to St. Croix, the small farm town where she’d been raised. He saw his daughter every few months, but to him, she would always be a girl, not a woman. He didn’t know much about the mix-up of emotions a teenage girl faced. She hadn’t said a word to him about what was in her head She talked about meaningless things. Easy things. He should have realized there was much more to her than a girl who missed her father.
    It didn’t change what he had to do. Olivia needed him, and he had to go.
    Now, hours later, he was deep in the western farmlands of Minnesota, with the rain coming down, with Jesus on a billboard asking if he was ready. It could have been Antarctica; it could have been Mars. Every mile here looked like the next. This part of the world was terra incognita to him. He was a creature of the noise, asphalt, and people of downtown Minneapolis. He owned a two-bedroom condominium near Loring Park, which he used mostly to sleep. He didn’t cook, so he ate fish and chips and drank Guinness at The Local and ordered take-out pho from Quang. He spent his days and nights negotiating contracts for industrial parks and strip malls. Steel and concrete—those were things that were real, things