“Hello?” I groggily mumbled, silently asking why they’d interrupted my sleep.

“Poppy, it’s Derek. I’m sorry to wake you, but something’s happened.”

Hearing his deep voice instead of my father’s or Alex’s surprised me. Pulling the phone from my ear, I looked at the time. 4:17. Why was Derek calling me at four o’clock in the morning?

“What do you mean something’s happened?” I asked as my brain tried to recover from sleep mode.

“I need you to get down to the apartment building across the street from The Eagle. Hurry, okay?”

“What? What are you talking about?” I asked, slowly coming out of my fog, but it was no use. He was gone already.

I hopped out of bed and quickly dressed as my mind kicked into full panic mode and questions exploded one after another. Why was the police chief of Sunset Ridge calling me about something happening in the early hours of the morning? He had officers who handled the overnight shifts and hadn’t worked one since becoming chief nearly a year ago. What awful event had roused him from bed before his usual nine AM arrival at the station?

Then a horrible thought tore through my brain and made tears fill my eyes. Derek would only call me if something had happened to my father. Nothing else would make him involve me in one of his cases.

As I raced down the stairs to head out to my car, I called my father but it went directly to voicemail. That wasn’t normal. My father’s phone was always left on. He was one of those people who never let his phone run out of a charge. Over and over, I called and every time my heart sank a little lower when his comforting voice intoned that same voicemail message he’d had for as long as I could remember.

I backed out of my driveway like a bat out of hell and tore down the road toward the apartment building on Main Street where Derek waited to break the news that I’d lost my father. I wiped the tears rolling down my cheeks, warming the ice cold steering wheel with them. What had happened to him? Why would he have been at that building instead of at his place over the bar? My father hadn’t told me about anyone new in his life recently. Had he met someone at McGuire’s and gone back to her house?

A million ideas flashed through my mind. He’d been told by his doctor right before the holidays that he needed to lower his blood pressure, but his love of salt had continued unabated through Thanksgiving and Christmas. Had he had a heart attack and been found dead?

The last words I said to him echoed in my head as I parked my car a block away because of the police barrier. He’d called right before nine to remind me to turn on my humidifier since the heat had been running in my house and it tended to make it almost unbearably dry. I’d brushed him off because I was thinking of something Alex had mentioned about going to Baltimore for dinner one night this week and told him I’d be sure to get the humidifier running, the idea leaving me as soon as the words left my mouth. I’d then said goodbye and that I loved him, but it had been more rote than anything real and full of feeling.

How could I have been so thoughtless? My last words to him and they’d been nothing more than a daughter’s dismissiveness to the only real family she had left.

I wiped the tears from my cheeks and steeled myself for what Derek had to tell me. Craig stood in the middle of the street redirecting curious onlookers away from the apartment building about a block away and smiled at me when I approached him, but it wasn’t his usual happy smile. His face told me this wasn’t just some crime scene like usual.

And then he spoke and I knew it was bad.