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xi PROLOGUE: OCTOBER 18, 1999 A ringing phone in the middle of the night is aggressive, even violent. It drills into sleep; it jars like a collision. That early Monday morning I was deeply asleep. The phone jerked me awake. The clock read three-something. On the other end of the line I heard the high tenor of a student in my first-year seminar at Kalamazoo College, now four weeks underway. A sensitive, needy kid, he was struggling with the transition from thirteenth-grader to college student. My adrenaline rush came out as anger. “Do you know what time it is?” I snapped, heart thumping hard. A student had been killed, he said, his voice watery and thin. Shot by her ex-boyfriend, who then had shot himself. They had evacuated DeWaters, the dorm where it happened. “Do you know who it was?” I asked, now very awake. I didn’t recognize either of the names he gave. “Are you OK? Where are you?” “We’re in Trowbridge. They brought us over here. The police are here. We’re OK, I guess . . .” We talked a few moments more. I asked who was with him and heard some other names from our seminar. Finally I told him I would be in my office later in the morning if he or any of the others needed me, and I hung up. The pattern was grimly familiar: the jealous man who murders his former girlfriend and then “turns the gun on himself,” as the papers always say. I rolled onto my back in bed. My cat, annoyed at being disturbed, rearranged herself and dropped down beside me again. It was like watching those silent films of an atomic explosion, a flash and then, after a delay, the mushroom cloud, blooming out and out. Lying there watching the windows lighten to gray, I began to feel the weight of all that would come. ...

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