You race from the phone to the nearest convenience store to buy a new card. The twenty-dollar kind, and you race back to the phone, still warm from your breath on it, your hand squeezing it.

“What happened?” she says.

So you tell her. “Couldn’t you hear them talking to me?” you say.

“No. Your voice cut off. Just like that.”

“Sorry,” you say. And then you ask her what she meant about knowing where her father was.

“It was weird,” she says. “I was watching the video on the television — it must have been the millionth time — and suddenly I got this odd feeling inside. I mean, at first all I could see was that it was him and he was okay. He wasn’t beat up . . . well, anyway.” She pauses, and you imagine her shaking a bad image out of her head. “So, my eyes sort of wandered — took in the wall behind him.”

“Chipboard.”

“Whatever. Yes. Chipboard. And somehow I felt I knew that wall.”

She sniffs. You wait patiently, but a voice inside you is saying, This is the big news? She recognized chipboard? She should come look at your mother’s kitchen if she wants chipboard. Or your squat; every window is boarded with the stuff.

“It’s pretty common,” she says, as if she’s reading your mind. “I know that. It’s just that it got me thinking, and I looked closer. I actually stopped the recording and zoomed in.”

“And?”

“And I thought I could see this stain. The outline of a stain.”

Okay, you think, she’s nuts. Crazier than you. The stress has got to her.

“I’m probably imagining it,” she says. “That’s what you’re thinking, right? I know. But listen, okay?”

“I’m here,” you say.

“You’re the only person I can tell this to, Blink. As weird as that sounds, it is the absolute truth.”

The absolute truth: something beyond just plain, everyday truth. “I’m listening,” you say, real nice, because she said such magic words to you: You’re the only person . . . So who cares if she’s rowing with only one oar in the water?

“My dad goes to this hunting lodge up north. It’s owned by QVD — that’s the company —”

“I know. Queon.”

“Right. So, anyone in the company can use this lodge. They have their own private lake — the whole thing. Dad goes up there to fish and hunt, when he can. He goes up with buddies or businesspeople or alone sometimes.”

“And that’s where he is? At a hunting lodge?”

“Just let me say this?” she says, like it’s a question but snappish, too. Then, “Sorry,” like she needs you to hear her out. You hope the story isn’t more than twenty dollars’ long.

“When I was a kid, I wanted so much to go up there. Some of the guys in the company would take their sons up there, and I couldn’t understand why Dad never took me. So then he gave in, this one time. I was ten or eleven, I guess. It was going to be just the two of us, a little weekend fishing trip.

“We get there, and it’s not very, you know, glamorous. I’m not sure what I was expecting. The lodge looks kind of grand from the outside, but it’s pretty run-down. It’s, like, cavernous, with log beams and rafters and all, but it’s really, really basic, with no plumbing or anything. An outhouse. I mean, really basic.”

You listen, enthralled, not so much by the content of what she’s saying but because it feels so much like a conversation. Like you might be sitting down at Balzac’s with a coffee, chatting to this beautiful girl. This was what you bought into, isn’t it, Blink? All that money, sure, but the chance of something more.

“Right off I start bitching,” she says. “And at first Dad just laughs because he had told me exactly what it was like and I was the one who wanted to come and . . . well, you know. So, anyway, there we are.”

“And it’s really bad?”

“The weather is not great, either. It’s cold and rainy. Suddenly this totally big-deal weekend with my dad is beginning to look like a bust. So I turn into this A1 brat. Pretty well right from the start. Dad plays it cool, trying to make it fun, but I’m just so ‘Let’s go home, I hate this,’ until he finally gets mad. He’s a sweetheart most of the time. I mean, he is so tolerant and fair and all that, but he loses it. It’s not even noon on Saturday, and he just snaps — tells me to pack up.”

She laughs but not much. “We had some lunch before we headed off. Lipton’s chicken noodle soup. I remember that really well. I wouldn’t eat it. Dad got severely pissed off. ‘There’s nothing else,’ he says, ‘And there’s no place to stop on the way home, so if you want to go hungry, that’s your business.’ You know the kind of thing parents say to bratty kids.”

“Right.” Sure.

“And I just throw my bowl at him. Just like that. I pick it up and hurl it. Smash!”

“Wow. Really?”

“I know. Such a bitch.”

“So . . .” you say, leaving lots of space for her to jump in. “So?”

“So that’s why I remember that wall. The one behind him in the ransom video.”

“You can see a chicken noodle soup stain on the chipboard?”

“Well, no. Not so much. Okay, not at all. But it rang a bell. And his hands are in front of him, right? Like they’re resting on a table? Do you see what I mean?”

You’re not sure. Is this wishful thinking or what?

“I have to find out,” she says urgently, her voice dropping in case anyone else might hear her other than you. You can imagine her leaning forward, clutching her cell phone tightly, her blue eyes trained on you, pleading. “I have to know, Blink.”

“I don’t get it,” you say.

She kind of growls and then apologizes, and you think maybe you are really stupid, because this probably makes perfect sense, just not to you.

“It’s what you said, Blink. Don’t you get it? What you implied.” She’s whispering now. “If my daddy’s in on it; if he, you know, arranged this thing; well, I can’t — cannot — tell the cops.”

“But why would he?”

She makes an impatient sound. “There might be a reason. Something . . . a possibility. But there’s no way I can talk about it on the phone. Can you get here?”

“Where?”

“Kingston.”

You don’t want to tell her that you have no idea where Kingston is. You remember the license in her father’s wallet, and it was an Ontario license, so — okay — Kingston is in Ontario and, hell, Ontario is only about as big as Europe. But you have money. Some. And you want to go. That’s the thing. You want to. But it’s still totally —

“Blink?”

“Uh, I guess so.”

“Oh, great. Thank you. Thank you so much!” You can hear her sigh of relief, and it sounds real. “Oh, and Blink? You can drive, right?”