Never Look Away

THIRTY-THREE

Duckworth and I had moved away from the open grave containing the body of Leanne Kowalski. I was shaking.

I said, “I’m gonna be sick.” And I was. Duckworth gave me a few seconds to make sure I wasn’t going to do it again.

“How can it be her?” I asked. “What’s she doing up here?”

“Let’s go back to my car,” Duckworth said. He was sweating. He’d been crouching next to me when I first looked at the body, and getting back up had left him short of breath.

“If Leanne’s here…,” I started.

“Yes?”

I felt I had to ask. “Is there another grave? Is this the only one?”

Duckworth looked at me intently, like he was trying to see inside my head. “Do you think there’s another one?”

“What?” I said.

“Come on.”

We said nothing on the way back to his car. He opened my door for me and helped me into the car like I was an invalid, then got in around the other side. Neither of us spoke for the better part of a minute. Duckworth turned the key ahead far enough to let him put the front windows down. A light breeze blew through the car.

I turned and looked at him. He was staring straight ahead, hands on the wheel, even though the engine was off.

“Did you already know who it was?” I asked him. “Did you know it was Leanne Kowalski?”

Duckworth ignored the question and asked one of his own. “When you came up here Friday with your wife, Mr. Harwood, did you bring Leanne Kowalski with you?”

I rested my head on the headrest and closed my eyes. “What? No,” I said. “Why would we do that?”

“Did she follow you up here? Did you arrange to meet her up here?”

“No and no.”

For a moment I wondered whether Leanne Kowalski could have, somehow, been the woman who sent me the anonymous email, who wanted to meet me at Ted’s. But I couldn’t think of a way for those dots to connect.

“You don’t think it’s odd that Leanne Kowalski’s body turns up within a mile or two of the place where you claim you were meeting this source of yours?”

I turned. “Odd? Do I think it’s fucking odd? You’re damn right I think it’s odd. You want me to list the fucking odd things that have happened to me in the last two days? How about this. My wife goes missing. Some stranger tries to grab my son. I find out Jan has a birth certificate for some kid who got run over by a car when she was five, that my wife may not even be who she says she is. She goes into that store and tells the guy a story about not knowing why I’ve brought her up here, like I’ve tricked her. Why the hell did she do that? Why did she lie to him? Why was there no ticket for her to get into Five Mountains? Why did she lie to me about seeing Dr. Samuels about wanting to kill herself? So when you ask me if I think it’s odd that Leanne Kowalski is lying dead over there, yeah, I find that pretty fucking odd. Just like everything else that’s going on.”

Duckworth nodded slowly. Finally, he said, “And would you think it odd if I told you that a preliminary examination of your car-the one you used to drive up here Friday with your wife-has turned up samples of blood and hair in the trunk, and a crumpled receipt for a roll of duct tape in the glove box?”

So talkative a moment earlier, I now could find no words.

“I got the call just before you came back for your car. It’ll be a while before we get back the DNA tests. Want to save us some trouble, tell us what we’re going to learn?”

It was time to get help.

Driving home from Lake George, I reached Natalie Bondurant, the lawyer my father had been in touch with, on my cell phone. Once we got the preliminaries out of the way, and she was officially going to act on my behalf, I said, “There’s been a development since you spoke to my father. Actually, a few.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“Leanne Kowalski, the woman who worked in the same office as my wife, her body was found not far from where I had driven on Friday with Jan.”

“So the cops already like you for this thing,” she said, “and now they’ve got this.”

“Yeah.”

“Are they going to find a second body, Mr. Harwood? Are they going to find your wife, too?”

“I hope to God not,” I said.

“Because if they do they’ll be able to nail you for it? Or because you’re still hoping to see your wife come home alive?”

She had a directness that was disarming.

“The latter,” I said. “And Detective Duckworth said they’ve found blood and hair in the trunk of my car, plus a receipt for duct tape in the glove compartment.”

“He may be trying to rattle you. Can you explain those things?”

“No,” I said. “I mean, the hair? Sure, we’re in and out of the trunk, I suppose some stray hairs could fall in, but the other things? No. I don’t know why there’d be blood there, and I haven’t bought a roll of duct tape in a long time.”

“Kind of convenient that they’ve found those things, then,” Natalie Bondurant said.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s a lot of circumstantial evidence building up around you.”

She had me take her through things from the beginning. I tried to tell everything as simply as possible, as though I were spelling it all out in a news story. Give her the overall picture first, then start zeroing in on the details. I told her about my trip to Rochester, the revelation that Jan might not be who she’d been claiming to be.

“How do you explain that?” she asked.

“I can’t. I asked Detective Duckworth whether she might be one of those relocated witnesses, but I don’t think he took me seriously, after I’d already told him Jan had been acting depressed the last few weeks, and he couldn’t find anyone else to back up that story.”

Natalie was quiet a moment, then said, “You’re in a load of trouble.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“What the police don’t have is a body,” she said. “They’ve got this Leanne Kowalski’s, but they don’t have your wife’s. That’s good news. Not just because we want your wife to come back alive, but it means the police don’t have a solid case yet. That doesn’t mean they might not be able to build one without a body. Plenty of people have gone to jail for murder where a body was never found.”

“You’re not cheering me up.”

“That’s not my job. My job is to keep your ass out of jail, or if you end up going there, to make it for as short a time as possible.”

If I hadn’t been driving, I would have closed my eyes. We had been talking so long, I was nearly home. It was just after eight.

A thought occurred to me.

“There was something weird about the grave,” I said. “About where they found Leanne’s body.”

“What?”

“That hole that was dug, to put Leanne into. It was right by the side of the road. It wasn’t much of a grave, either. Just enough to put somebody into it and cover it with a bit of dirt. All somebody had to do was go a few more feet into the woods and they could have buried her where she wouldn’t have been seen. Why someone would try to bury her that close to the road, even a road that’s not very well traveled, seems stupid.”

“You’re saying she was meant to be found,” Natalie said.

“It hadn’t occurred to me until now, but yeah. I wonder.”

“Come to my office tomorrow morning at eleven,” she said. “Bring your checkbook.”

“Okay,” I said. I was driving back into my parents’ neighborhood.

“And don’t have any more conversations with the police without me present,” she said.

“Got it,” I said. I made the turn onto my parents’ street. The house was just up ahead.

There was a mini media circus on the street out front.

Two TV news vans. Three cars. People milling about.

Shit.

“And,” Natalie Bondurant said, “no talking to the press.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said, and ended the call.

I was guessing that if there were this many reporters at my parents’ house, my own house was probably staked out as well. One of the news vans was half blocking the driveway, so I had to park at the curb on the opposite side of the street.

I didn’t see any way around this. I wanted to see my parents, and I desperately needed to see my son.

I got out of my father’s car and started striding across the street. A reporter and cameraman jumped out of each of the news vans and called out my name. Young people with notepads and digital recorders got out of the three cars. Samantha Henry emerged from a faded red Honda Civic that I’d thought looked familiar. She wore a pained, apologetic look on her face as she approached, one that seemed to say, Hey, look, I’m sorry, I’m just doing my job.

The reporters swarmed me, shouting out questions.

“Mr. Harwood, any word on your wife?”

“Mr. Harwood, do you know what’s happened to your wife?”

“Why do the police consider you a suspect?”

“Did you kill your wife, Mr. Harwood?”

I resisted my first inclination, which was to push my way through them and run into the house. Natalie’s advice was fresh in my mind, but I’d worked in newspapers long enough to know how guilty brushing past the press, refusing to say anything, would make me look. So I stopped, held up my palms in a bid to show I was willing to take their questions if they’d just hold up.

“I’ll say a few words,” I said as the two cameramen maneuvered for good shots. I needed a moment to compose myself, collect my thoughts. Then I said, “My wife, Jan Harwood, went missing yesterday morning while we were at Five Mountains with our son. I’ve been doing everything I can to find her, and I’m hoping and praying that she’s all right. If you’re watching this, honey, please get in touch and let me know you’re okay. Ethan and I love you, we miss you, and we just want you to get home safely. Whatever’s happened, whatever it might be, we can work it out. We can work through it together. And to anyone else who’s watching, if anyone has seen Jan or knows anything about where she might be or what might have happened to her, I beg you, please get in touch with me or with the police. All I want is for my wife to come home.”

One of the more beautifully coiffed TV reporters pushed a microphone into my face and said, “We have information that you felt compelled to tell the police that you did not kill your wife. Why did you feel you had to say that? Are you officially a suspect?”

“I said it because it’s the truth,” I said, trying to keep my voice even. I glanced at the house, saw my mother watching me through the curtains. “I understand that the police have to consider every possibility in a case like this, including looking at the spouse of a missing person. I get that. That’s just standard procedure.”

“But are you a suspect?” she persisted. “Do the police believe your wife has been murdered?”

“There’s no evidence anything’s happened to my wife,” I said.

“Is that because you’ve done a good job getting rid of the body?” she asked.

I tried very hard to stay calm. “I won’t dignify that with a response.”

The second most beautifully coiffed reporter, from the other TV station, asked, “How do you explain the fact that there’s no evidence your wife was even with you at Five Mountains?”

“I’m sure there were a thousand other people at Five Mountains yesterday who might have a hard time proving they were there,” I said. “She was there with me, and then she disappeared.”

“Have you taken a lie detector test?” asked a rumpled reporter I was pretty sure was from Albany.

“No,” I said.

“Did you refuse to take it?”

“No one’s asked me to take one,” I said.

The more beautiful TV reporter jumped in, “Would you take one?”

“I just told you, no one’s asked me-”

“Would you take one if we set it up?” the less beautifully coiffed TV reporter asked.

“I don’t see any reason why I would sit down with you-”

“So you’re refusing, then? You don’t want to take any questions about your wife’s disappearance while hooked up to a polygraph machine?”

“This is ridiculous,” I said. I was losing control of this. I’d been a fool to think I could walk into this and escape unscathed. You think, because you’re a reporter, you know the tricks. Then you find out you’re no smarter than anyone else.

Samantha, sensing what was happening to me, tried to help by breaking in with a soft question: “David,” she said, “can you tell me how you’re bearing up under this? It must be a terrible strain for you and for your son.”

I nodded. “It’s horrible. Not knowing… it’s terrible. I’ve never been through anything like this before. You have no idea until you’re experiencing it yourself.”

“How does it feel,” she continued, “being the subject of a story instead of the one covering it? All of us here, ganging up on you like this, it must seem kind of weird.”

The TV reporters gave Sam a dirty look when she said “ganging up.”

I almost smiled. “It’s okay, I know how it works. Look, I really have to go.”

The reporters opened a path for me as I moved forward. I took Sam by the elbow and brought her along with me, which brought some grumbles from the rest of the pack. What the hell was I doing? Giving her an exclusive?

“Dave, I feel real bad about this,” she said as we went up the stairs to my parents’ front door. “You know I’m just doing-”

“I get it,” I said. Before I could open the door, Mom had swung it open. She’d aged a couple of years since I’d seen her earlier in the day, and she gave Sam a withering look.

“Hi, Mom,” I said. “You remember Sam.” They’d met several times when we were going together.

Mom didn’t return Sam’s nod. She clearly viewed Sam, in her professional role, as the enemy.

“Where’s Ethan?” I asked.

Mom said, “Your father took him out. They went for something to eat and then he was going to take Ethan down by the tracks to see some real trains. I told him I’d call when things quieted down around here.”

That seemed like a pretty good plan to me. I was glad Ethan had been taken away from all this.

I said to Samantha, “Look, thanks for that question out there. It helped smooth things over a bit.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “I’ve got to do this story but I’m not out to get you.”

“I appreciate that.”

“I mean, I know you would never do anything to Jan.” She studied me. “Right?”

“Jesus, Sam.”

“I really don’t think you would.”

“Thanks for the halfhearted vote of confidence.”

The corners of her mouth turned up. “I have to at least pretend to be objective. But I’m on your side, I swear. But I can’t promise the desk won’t have its way with this story once I turn it in. Which reminds me.” She looked at her watch. It was ten after eight. I knew she had until about nine-thirty to turn in a story and still make the first print edition.

“What did you want to tell me?” she asked. “I mean, if you’re giving me some kind of exclusive, I’ll take it. This is your paper, after all.”

“You need to watch your back,” I said.

“What?”

“I don’t mean you’re in any danger or anything, but you have to be careful. I think Madeline’s monitoring all the email.”

“What?” Sam’s jaw dropped. “The publisher is reading my personal email?”

“If it’s through the paper’s system, yeah, I think so.”

“Holy shit,” she said. “Why? Why do you think that?”

“I received an anonymous email the other day, a woman wanting to talk to me, about the prison proposal, about members of council taking bribes or whatever in exchange for a favorable vote.”

“Okay.”

“It landed in my mailbox, I only had it there for a few minutes before I purged it from the system. But Elmont Sebastian, he knew about it. He knew someone had tried to get in touch with me. I wondered at first whether he got tipped at the other end, from where this woman got in touch with me, but I don’t think so. I think he got the tip from the Standard. And who else but Madeline would have the authority to read everyone’s email?”

“Why would she want to do that?”

“She might not be interested in yours, but she’d have a reason to be interested in mine. The Russell family, they’ve got land they want to sell to Star Spangled Corrections for that prison. It’s not in our own paper’s interest to take a run at them. I think when Madeline saw that email, she let Sebastian know.”

“What about Brian?” she asked. “Maybe Madeline’s got him looking into the emails. She’s in his office all the time.”

I thought about that. “That’s possible. The bottom line is, our publisher can’t be trusted. You just need to know that.”

“I was kind of kidding when I said the desk might have its way with this story, but now I think they really might. Are they going to slant this thing with Jan to make you look even worse? Because you owned that prison story. Once you’re out of the picture, how likely is it someone else is going to take it up?”

“I don’t know.” I didn’t tell her the lengths Elmont Sebastian had already gone to stop me. A job offer. Veiled threats against my son. I hadn’t given up on the theory that he had something to do with what had happened to Jan, but I couldn’t put it together in a way that made sense.

“I gotta go,” Sam said. “I’ve got to file this thing.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with Jan’s disappearance,” I said one last time.

She put a hand softly on my chest. “I know. I believe. I’m not going to sell you out with this story.”

She left.

Mom said, “I don’t like her.”

By the time I pulled into the driveway of my own house, it was nine. There were no media types camped out there. They’d all gotten what they needed at my parents’ place and were going to give me some peace, at least for the rest of this evening.

Ethan had fallen asleep on the way home. I carefully lifted him out of his seat and he rested his head on my shoulder as I took him into the house. The moment I came through the door, I was instantly reminded that the house had been searched by the police earlier in the day. Sofa cushions were tossed about, books removed from shelves, carpets pulled back. It didn’t look as though anything was actually damaged, but there was a lot of straightening up to do.

I laid Ethan gently on the couch and covered him with a throw blanket. Then I went upstairs and made some sense of his room. I put the mattress back in place, toys back in bins, clothes back in drawers.

It looked bad when I started, but only took fifteen minutes to tidy it up. I went back down, picked him up off the couch, and brought him up to his bed. I placed him on his back and undressed him. I’d have thought pulling a shirt up over his head would have awakened him, but he slept through all the jostling. I found his Wolverine pajamas and got them on him, then slipped him under the covers, tucked them in around him, and kissed him lightly on the forehead.

Without opening his eyes, he whispered sleepily, “Good night, Mommy.”

THIRTY-FOUR

Rolling off her, Dwayne said to Jan, “I always like to start a big day like this with a bang.”

She got out of the motel bed, slipped into the bathroom, and closed the door.

Dwayne, on his back and looking at the ceiling, laced his fingers behind his head and smiled. “This is it, baby. A few hours and we’ll be set. You know what I think we should do later today? We should look at boats. I’ll bet there are all kinds of people selling their boats. Just when everyone else is unloading their goodies because of the recession, we’re going to be doing just fine. We’ll be able to pick up some twenty- or thirty-foot cabin cruiser for a song, not that we couldn’t pay full price if we wanted to. But if this money is going to last us the rest of our lives, we don’t want to be really stupid with it, am I right?”

Jan hadn’t heard anything after “baby.” She had turned on the shower after taking a moment to figure out how the taps worked in this one-star joint, which was about five miles from downtown Boston. Plenty close enough, considering her nervousness about being anywhere around here.

Dwayne threw back the covers and stood naked in the room. He grabbed the remote and turned on the television. He was flipping through the channels at high speed.

“They don’t get any of the good stations here,” he said. “Why do they make you pay extra for the adult stuff? Don’t they already charge enough for the room?”

He landed on a cartoon network that was running an animated Batman episode, got bored with that, and kept on surfing. He’d gone past a news channel and was already onto a stand-up comedy show when he said, “The fuck?” He went back a couple of stations and there was Jan. A photo of her.

“Hey!” he shouted. “Get out here!”

She didn’t hear him from under the shower.

Dwayne banged the door open and shouted, “You’re on the fucking TV!”

He tapped the volume up so high the television cabinet began to vibrate. The anchor was saying, “-yet when invited by the station to take a lie detector test, Mr. Harwood flatly refused. The journalist for the Promise Falls Standard says his wife went missing from the Five Mountains amusement park Saturday, yet police sources have said that no one has actually seen Jan Harwood since late Friday afternoon. And there’s a new development this morning. The body of a coworker of the missing woman was found in the Lake George area, not far from where Jan Harwood and her husband were seen before she went missing. Looks like we’re going to have some sunshine this afternoon in the greater Boston-”

Dwayne killed the TV and went back into the bathroom. He reached through the shower curtain and turned off the water. Jan’s hair was in full lather.

“Dwayne! Shit!”

“Didn’t you hear me?”

“What is it?”

“It was on the news. They were chasing your husband, asking him to take a lie detector test, and they found the body.”

Jan squinted at him through soapy eyes. She was instantly feeling cold as the water dripped from her naked body. She said, “Okay.”

“That’s good, right?”

“Let me finish up in here,” Jan said.

“Want me to get in with you?”

She answered by pulling the curtain shut. She went back to fiddling with the taps. The water blasted out cold at first, and she huddled, as though that would somehow protect her. She swore under her breath, adjusted the knob and then nearly scalded herself. She dialed it back and found the right temperature, then stuck her face into the spray to get the shampoo out of her eyes.

But they’d been stinging before this.

She’d found herself-she could hardly believe it when it happened-crying at one point in the night. Dwayne was snoring like a band saw, so there was no risk of waking him.

Not that she was sobbing uncontrollably. She hadn’t been bawling her eyes out or anything undignified like that. But there was this moment when she felt, well, overwhelmed.

A couple of tears got away before she fought them back. You didn’t want to slip out of character.

You didn’t want people thinking you cared.

But as she lay there in bed, she imagined putting her hand on Ethan’s head, feeling the silky strands of his hair on her palm. She imagined the smell of him. The sounds his feet made padding on the floor when he got up in the morning and walked into their bedroom to see if she was awake. The way his fingers picked up Cheerios, how he stuffed them into his mouth, the sounds he made when he chewed. How he sat, cross-legged, in front of the television when he watched Thomas the Tank Engine.

The warmth of his body when he crawled into bed with her.

Think about the money.

She tried to push him out of her thoughts as she lay there in the middle of the night. The way some people might count sheep, she counted diamonds.

But Ethan’s face kept materializing before her eyes.

From the moment she started going out with David, she’d convinced herself it was about the money. This façade, this marriage, this raising a child, it was all part of the job. This was how she was earning her fortune. She just had to do the time, until Dwayne got out, and she’d be out of there. She’d walk away and not look back. And once she’d exchanged the diamonds for cash, she’d be rid of Dwayne, too.

One last costume change.

With any luck, the way she’d left things in Promise Falls, no one would be looking for her. At least not alive. And when they didn’t find her body, the police would figure David had done a very good job of disposing of it. Oh, he’d tell them he had nothing to do with it, that he was an innocent man, but wasn’t that what all guilty men said?

Maybe he’d even, at some point, suspect what it was that had really happened. When and if it finally dawned on him that his wife had set him up, what exactly was he going to do about it from a jail cell? He’d have spent everything he had on lawyers trying to beat the charges. He wasn’t going to have anything left to hire a private detective to track her down.

At least Ethan would be okay. His grandparents would look after him. Don, he was a bit loopy at times, but his heart was in the right place. And while Jan never much cared for the way Arlene looked at her sometimes-it was like she knew Jan was up to something, but she couldn’t figure out what it was-there was no doubt she’d be able to raise that boy. She had a lot of years left in her, and she loved Ethan to death.

Jan struggled to find some comfort in that.

Maybe, once she had her money, once she really knew there was a new life waiting for her, a new life where she could do anything she wanted, she’d be able to forget about the last few years, pretend they never happened, make believe the people she’d known-and the one she had brought into the world-during that time never really existed.

Once she had the money.

The money would change everything.

Money had a way of healing all sorts of wounds, of helping one move on. That’s what she’d always believed.

Dwayne stopped the truck on Beacon Street, just west of Clarendon.

“Here you go,” he said.

Jan looked to her right. They were parked out front of a MassTrust branch sandwiched between a Starbucks and a high-end shoe store.

“This is it?” she said.

“This is it. Your key opens a box right here.”

This had been the way they’d worked it. They’d each picked a safe-deposit box to store their half of the diamonds, kept the location secret, and then swapped keys. That way, they’d need each other when they wanted to cash in.

“Let’s do it,” she said.

They got out of the truck together and walked through the front doors of the bank and went up to a service counter.

Jan said, “We’d like to get into our safe-deposit box.”

“Of course,” said a middle-aged woman. She needed a name, and for Dwayne to sign in a book, and then she led them into a vault where small, rectangular mailboxlike doors lined three walls.

“Here’s yours right here,” the woman said, producing a key and inserting it into a door. Jan took out the key she’d been holding on to for five years, inserted it into the accompanying slot. The door opened and the woman slid out a long black box.

As she tipped it, something inside rattled softly.

“There’s a room right here for your convenience,” she said, opening the door so Dwayne and Jan could enter. She set the box down on a counter and withdrew, closing the door on her way out. The room was about five by five feet, well lit, with a padded office chair in front of the counter.

“This place is even smaller than my cell,” Dwayne said. He hooked his fingers under the front of the box lid and lifted. “Oh boy.”

Inside was a black fabric bag with a drawstring at the end, the kind that might hold a pair of shoes or slippers.

Jan reached and took out the bag, feeling the contents inside first without opening.

“Feels like teeth,” she said nervously.

She loosened the drawstring and tipped the bag over the counter.

The diamonds began spilling out. Much smaller than teeth, but far more glittery. They hit the counter and scattered. Dozens and dozens of them. More than they could count at a glance.

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Dwayne said, like he’d never seen these gems before. He picked them up randomly, rolled them around in his palm, held them up to the fluorescent light as though that would tell him anything about their worth.

Jan was shaking her head slowly in disbelief.

“And this is just half of them, sugar tits,” Dwayne said. “We are so fucking rich.”

“Calm down,” Jan said. “We need to keep it together. We start getting all crazy, we’ll do something stupid.”

“What do you think I’m going to do? Take one of these next door and buy a latte with it?” Dwayne asked.

“I just… I didn’t remember there was this many,” she whispered.

She started collecting them, slipping them back into the bag. “I think one of them fell on the floor,” she said.

Dwayne dropped down to his hands and knees, running his palms across the surface of the short-pile industrial carpet. “Got it,” he said, and then he wrapped his arms around Jan’s legs, pulling her toward him, burying his face in the crotch of her jeans.

“We should do it in here,” he said.

“We can think about celebrating later,” she said. “After we get our money. Then, we’ll fuck our brains out.” Give ’em what they want, she thought.

Dwayne stood up, took the bag from Jan’s hand.

“I’ll put it in my purse,” she said.

“No, it’s okay,” he said, stuffing the bag into the front pocket of his jeans, which created an unsightly, off-center bulge. “I got it.”

Jan gave directions to Dwayne that took them north across the Charles on the Harvard Bridge, then over to Cambridge Street.

“Stop anywhere around here,” she said.

“Where is it?” he asked, pulling over to the curb and putting the truck in park. He’d spotted a Bank of America and figured that was the place, but Jan pointed across the street to a Revere Federal branch.

“Fucking awesome,” he said, feeling in his other front pocket for the safe-deposit box key he’d been hanging on to for so long.

He had his hand on the door when Jan reached over and held his arm. “This time,” she said, “I’ll hold on to them.”

“Yeah, sure, no big deal,” he said, pulling his arm away.

“I mean it,” she said.

They crossed the street on the diagonal, nearly getting hit by an SUV as they stood on the center line waiting for traffic to pass. Terrific, Jan thought. Moments away from getting your fortune and you get hit by a Tahoe.

Once they were safely across, they entered the bank and followed much the same routine. This time, a young East Indian man led them into the vault, then ushered them into a private room so that they could inspect the contents of the box.

“This never gets old,” Dwayne said when Jan opened the bag and spilled its contents onto the table.

Once the diamonds were back in the bag, and the bag safely tucked into Jan’s purse, they walked out of the bank and back to the truck.

All of their loot, recovered.

Jan thought, In a perfect world, there’d be a way to hang on to Dwayne’s half, without hanging on to Dwayne.

She wondered whether he might be thinking something similar.

THIRTY-FIVE

Sam didn’t sell me out. As best as I could tell, the city desk had not had their way with the story. It hadn’t been jazzed up, slanted, or twisted. It was a factual, direct, straightforward account of what had been going on for the last two days. It didn’t ignore the fact that the police had been talking to me at length about Jan’s disappearance, but it did not go so far as to name me as a suspect. Neither Detective Duckworth nor anyone else with the Promise Falls police had said anything as direct as that.

Sam had also managed to get into her story the discovery of a woman’s body in Lake George. An astute reader would put it together, that maybe I’d killed Jan and buried her up there, but the story didn’t spell it out. The police had not identified the body as Leanne Kowalski’s, at least not by Sam’s Sunday night deadline. I was betting, however, that that information might be on the website version of the story by now, but I wasn’t able to check, considering that the police had taken our laptop when they’d searched the house the day before.

I had a lot to do that Monday, and needed to get Ethan up and over to my parents’ house. I woke him shortly after eight, sitting on the edge of the bed and rubbing his shoulder.

“Time to get moving, sport,” I said, pulling back his covers. The inside of the bed was littered with cars and action figures.

“I’m tired,” he said, grabbing one of the toy cars and drawing it toward his face like it was a teddy bear.

“I know. But soon you’ll be starting school. You’ll be getting up early almost every morning.”

“I don’t want to go to school,” he said, turning his head into the pillow.

“That’s what everyone says, at first,” I said. “But then once they start going, they really start to like it.”

“I just want to go to Nana and Poppa’s.”

“Yesterday you didn’t even want to be there,” I reminded him. He buried his face in his pillow, an interesting debating strategy. “You’ll still see lots of them. But you’ll get to see other people, too. And lots of kids your own age.”

He turned his head, coming up for air. “What’s Mommy making for breakfast?”

“I’m making breakfast. What do you want?”

“Cheerios,” he said, then added, “and coffee.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “Although it might be just the thing to wake you up.”

“What does it taste like?”

“Pretty awful, most of the time.”

“Then why do you drink it?”

“Habit,” I said. “You drink it enough times, you stop noticing how bad it is.”

“Get Mommy.”

I left my hand on his shoulder, rubbed it softly. “Mommy’s still not here,” I said.

“She’s been away for…” He closed his eyes for a few seconds. “She’s been away for two sleeps.”

“I know,” I said.

While he gathered together his bed toys, he asked, “Did she go fishing?”

“Fishing?”

“Sometimes people go away fishing.” He looked at Robin, smoothed out his cape. “Poppa goes away fishing sometimes.”

“That’s true. But I don’t think your mom has gone fishing.”

“Why?”

“I don’t think fishing is really her thing,” I said.

“Then where would she go?” He had Robin in one hand, Wolverine in the other. They were facing each other, about to engage in combat, or just shoot the shit. It was hard to know.

“I wish I knew,” I said. “Listen, I need to talk to you about something.”

Ethan looked at me, his face all innocent, like maybe I was going to tell him we were out of Cheerios and he was going to have to eat toast. He still had the action figures in his fists, and I pushed them down to get his full attention.

“Even though you’re going to be at my parents’ house, you still might hear some things, maybe on TV or on the radio, or maybe from someone coming by their place, about your dad that aren’t very nice.”

“What kind of things?”

“That I was mean to your mother.” How did you tell your son that people might think you killed his mother?

“You aren’t mean to her,” he said.

“I know that and you know that, but you know how, sometimes, your friends will tattle on you, even though you didn’t do anything?”

He nodded.

“That’s kind of what might happen to me. People saying I did bad things to your mom. Like the TV news people, for one.”

Ethan thought a moment, then reached out and patted my hand. “Do you want me to talk to them and tell them it’s not true?” he asked.

I had to look away for a moment. I made as though I had something in my eye, both of them.

“No,” I said. “But thank you. You just have a good time with your grandparents.”

“Okay.” Now he was thinking about something else. “That’s like what Mom told me.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What did she tell you?”

“She said that people might say awful things about her, but that she wanted me to remember that she really loves me.”

I remembered that.

“Is everybody going to start saying bad things about me, too?” he asked.

“Never,” I said, leaning in and kissing Ethan’s forehead.

When I walked out the door with Ethan, Craig, my neighbor to the right, was getting into his Jeep Cherokee to head off to work. Since moving in three years ago, I’d never known Craig not to say hello, comment on the weather, ask how we were doing. He was a friendly guy, and when he borrowed your hedge trimmer, he always returned it the minute he was finished.

I saw Craig glance my way, but he said nothing. So I said, “Morning.”

Not even a grunt. Craig got into his car, put on his seatbelt, and turned the ignition without looking my way. He backed out and took off briskly.

While I was getting Ethan buckled into the back seat, I heard a car that had been driving up the street slow down as it reached the end of my driveway.

I looked up. A man in a Corolla had put down his window and shouted as he drove by, “Who you gonna kill today?” Then he laughed, stomped on the gas, and disappeared up the street.

“What did he say?” Ethan asked.

“It’s just like I told ya, sport,” I said, snapping his strap into place.

After I had dropped him off at my parents’, I drove to the newspaper. I had time to pop in before my appointment with Natalie Bondurant.

I went up to the newsroom first. As I walked through, what few people were there stopped whatever they were doing to watch me. No one called out, no one said anything. I was a “dead man walking” as I proceeded to my desk.

There were several phone messages-most from the same media outlets that had already tried to reach me at home. One call, which I was unable to determine whether it was a joke-was from the Dr. Phil show. Did I want to come on and give my side of the story, let America know that I had not killed my wife and disposed of her body?

I erased it.

When I tried to sign in to my computer, I couldn’t get it to work. My password was rejected.

“What the fuck?” I said.

Then, a voice behind me. “Hey.”

It was Brian. When I spun around in the chair, he said to me, “I didn’t expect you to come in today, what with, you know, all you got to deal with at the moment.”

“I’m just popping in,” I said. “You’re right, I have a lot on my plate right now.”

“Got a sec?” he said.

Once we were both inside his office, he closed the door, pointed to a chair. I sat down and he settled in behind his desk.

“I really hate to do this,” he said, “but I-we’re-I mean, they’re putting you on suspension. Actually, more like a leave. A leave of absence.”

“Why’s that, Brian? Did you think I wanted to write a book?” It was a reporter’s usual reason for taking a leave.

I knew what was going on, and understood it, but even in my current circumstances it was hard to pass up an opportunity to make Brian squirm. Particularly when I considered him to be a first-class weasel.

“No, not anything like that,” he said. “It’s just, given your current predicament, being questioned by the police about your wife, it kind of compromises your ability as a journalist at the moment.”

“When did the paper start worrying about its journalistic integrity being compromised? Does this mean we’ve fired our reporters in India and plan to send our own people to cover city hall?”

“Jesus, Dave, do you always have to be a dick?”

“Tell me, Brian. Was it you?”

“Huh?”

“Was it you who got into my emails?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“You know what? Forget it. Because even if it was you, you’d just have been doing Madeline’s bidding.”

“I really don’t know what this is about.”

“So, am I on a paid suspension or unpaid?”

Brian couldn’t look me in the eye. “Things are kind of tight, Dave. It’s not like the paper can afford to pay people for not doing anything.”

“I’ve got three weeks’ vacation,” I said. “Why don’t I take that now? I still get paid, but I’m not writing. If my problems haven’t gone away in three weeks, you can suspend me then without pay.”

Brian thought about that. “Let me bounce that off them.”

“Them” meaning Madeline.

“Thanks,” I said. “Do you want me to ask them myself?”

“What do you mean?”

I stood up and opened the door. “See you later, Brian.”

On the way out of the newsroom, I went past the bank of mailbox cubbyholes, scooped three or four envelopes out of my mailbox-one of them my payroll deposit slip. I wondered whether it would be my last. I stuffed the envelopes into my pocket and kept on walking.

From there, I went to the publisher’s office. Madeline Plimpton’s executive assistant, Shannon, was posted at her desk just outside Madeline’s door.

“Oh, David,” she said. “I’m so sorry…” She struggled. Sorry that my wife was missing? Sorry that the cops liked me for it? Sorry that the publisher wanted to help me through my difficult time by bouncing me from the payroll?

I went straight past her and opened the door to Madeline’s oak-paneled office despite Shannon’s protests.

Madeline sat behind her broad desk, looking down at something, a phone to her ear. She raised her eyes and took me in, not even blinking.

“Something’s come up. I’ll have Shannon reconnect us shortly.” She cradled the receiver and said, “Hello, David.”

“I just dropped by to thank you for your support,” I said.

“Sit down, David.”

“No thanks, I’ll stand,” I said. “I saw Brian, found out I’m on the street for the duration.”

“I’m not without sympathy,” Madeline said, leaning back in her leather chair. “Assuming, of course, that you had no involvement in your wife’s misfortune.”

“If I told you I didn’t, would you even believe me?”

She paused. “Yes,” she said. “I would.”

That threw me.

“I’ve heard the whispers,” Madeline said. “I’ve asked around. I know people in the police department. You’re much more than a person of interest. You’re a suspect. They think something has happened to your wife and they think you did it. So I feel doubly bad for you. I feel badly that something may have happened to Jan. My heart goes out to you. And I feel sick at the witch hunt whirling around you. I think I know you, David. I’ve always thought you were a good man. A bit self-righteous at times, a bit idealistic, not always able to see the big picture, but a man who’s always had his heart in the right place. I don’t know what’s happened to Jan, but I would find it hard to believe you’ve had anything to do with it.”

I sat down. I wondered whether she was being sincere or playing me.

“But it’s not possible for you to work as a reporter at the moment. You can’t be doing stories when you are a story.”

“I asked Brian if I could take all the vacation that’s owed to me.”

She nodded. “That’s a good idea. Of course, do that.”

“I have to ask you something else, and I need an honest answer,” I said.

She waited.

“Did you go into my emails, find one from a source offering to tell me about Star Spangled payoffs to council members, and pass it on to Elmont Sebastian?”

She held my stare for several seconds. “No,” she said. “And, when and if you get back to work, if you get something on him or anyone whose votes he’s allegedly buying, I’ll see that it makes the front page. I don’t like that man. He frightens me, and I don’t want to do business with him.”

I got up and left.

When I walked into Natalie Bondurant’s office and she came around from behind her desk, I was expecting her to shake hands with me. But instead, she reached for a remote and turned on the television that was recessed into the far wall.

“Hang on,” she said. “I just had it cued up here a second ago. Okay, here we go.”

She hit the play button and suddenly there I was, making my way through a small media scrum, denying that there was any need for me to take a lie detector test.

She hit pause, threw the remote onto a chair, and turned on me.

“My God, you really want to go to jail, don’t you?”

THIRTY-SIX

The thing was, Jan didn’t know whether she could pull off the role of a murderer. You needed some real acting chops for that. The motivation for most of her performances had been coping, or blending in. Biding time.

But killing? Not so much.

If an opportunity did present itself where she could take off with Dwayne’s half of the loot from the diamonds, she’d take it. No question. She’d pulled off a vanishing act on David and she could do it with Dwayne, too. But was she prepared to kill him to do it?

To put a bullet in his brain or a knife in his heart?

She’d never actually killed anyone, at least not on purpose.

But she wasn’t stupid. She knew the law would already see her as a murderer. Even though she hadn’t been the one who clamped a hand over Leanne Kowalski’s mouth and nose and kept it there until she stopped flailing about, she didn’t exactly do anything to stop it, either. Jan watched it happen. Jan knew it had to be done. And it was her idea to take Leanne’s body back up to Lake George-a way to tighten the noose on David, who police would know had already been up in that neck of the woods with her-and bury it in that shallow grave in plain view, using a shovel in the back of Dwayne’s brother’s pickup. Any jury would see that they hung for that one together.

And she knew it was only luck-or divine intervention, if you believed in that kind of thing-that Oscar Fine hadn’t died when she cut off his hand to steal the briefcase he had cuffed to his wrist.

That had been-let’s face it-a pretty desperate moment. They thought he’d have a key on him. Or a combination to the briefcase. And the chain that linked the case to his cuff was some high-tensile steel that the tools they’d brought along wouldn’t cut. But at least they could go through flesh and bone.

The bastard hadn’t left them much in the way of options.

So, once he was out cold-and that hadn’t taken long after Dwayne shot the dart into him-she did it. If you’d asked her the day before whether she had it in her to cut off a man’s hand, she’d have said no way. Not a chance. Not in a million years. But then there you are, in a limo parked in a Boston vacant lot, not knowing whether someone’s going to come by at any moment, and suddenly you’re doing things you’d have never thought yourself capable of. Of course, millions in diamonds was a great motivator.

Wasn’t that what it was all about? Knowing your motivation? So she got into the role. She became the kind of woman who could do this, who could cut off a man’s hand. She played the part long enough to get the job done.

Too bad he got that one long look at her face before passing out. Even tarted up with enough lipstick and eye shadow to paint a powder room, she never stopped worrying that he might remember her. Would have been a lot better-truth be told-if the son of a bitch had bled to death. Then she wouldn’t have had to put her life on hold for five years, marry a guy, have a kid, work at a goddamn heating and cooling business, for Christ’s sake, live a lie-

Focus, she told herself.

Let’s just take this a step at a time. We have all the diamonds. Now we just have to convert them to cash. Let’s see how things play out.

They’d driven south out of Boston, and already Jan was feeling slightly more at ease. She knew the odds of running into Oscar Fine in a city as big as Boston were remote, but it didn’t make her feel any less nervous. Now that they were out of downtown, she felt she could breathe a little. They had to find this Banura-of-Braintree dude, find out what the jewels were worth, negotiate a price, get their cash, start their new life together.

Start her new life. One way or another, Dwayne was going to be history.

Not that he didn’t have his merits. He had a fabulously taut, sinewy body, and if he could stop fucking like he was expecting the warden to walk in at any moment, he might have some actual potential in that department. And he’d been the perfect one to help her out when she got wind of the diamond courier. He had the guts-or lack of sense, depending on how you looked at it-to help her set it up, get the dart gun, drive the limo. So maybe she was the only one with the balls to cut the guy’s hand off. You couldn’t have everything.

But she’d needed him to get into the safe-deposit boxes. And she needed him now to connect with Banura.

But after that, well, Dwayne really wasn’t what Jan was looking for in a man. The only man she wanted to see in her future was the one delivering her drink to her cabana.

One thing you had to give David, he was a hell of a lot smarter than Dwayne. There was no denying that. Smart enough to be working at a paper better than the Promise Falls Standard. He’d had that one offer, a couple of years back, to go to Toronto to work for the largest-circulation paper in the country, but Jan was nervous about moving to Canada. Her phony credentials were rock solid, but the idea of crossing a border when she wasn’t who she said she was, that gave her pause. Jan had told David she didn’t think it was a good idea to move so far away from his parents, and he had come around to her way of thinking.

Once she had her money, she’d start this identity thing all over again and invest in some foolproof passports-real high-class stuff-and then get the hell out of the States. Maybe this Banura guy could put her onto someone who did good work. Then, off to Thailand, or the Philippines. Someplace where the money would last forever. Shit, it might be enough money to last right here in the good ol’ US of A, but you’d always be looking over your shoulder, never able to relax.

David, you poor bastard.

The guy thought he was some hotshot reporter, but how hotshot could you be at the Standard? Not exactly a risk taker. Always played it safe. Made sure there were new batteries in the smoke detectors, a fresh filter in the furnace. Paid the bills on time. When a shingle came loose, he got up there on the roof-or got his dad up there with him-and nailed it down. He remembered anniversaries and Valentine’s Day and brought home flowers some days for no reason at all.

The guy was goddamn perfect.

Perfect husband.

Perfect father.

Don’t go there.

Dwayne, driving south on Washington and peering through the windshield at street signs, shifted in his seat and ripped off a fart.

“Where the fuck is Hobart?” he said.

They found the house. A small story-and-a-half with white siding. Dwayne wheeled the truck into the driveway behind a Chrysler minivan.

“See?” Dwayne said. “The guy’s smart, doesn’t attract attention. He could afford a goddamn Porsche but then the neighbors are going to say, hey, where’s he get off driving a car like that? And he could live in a bigger house than this, right? But again, he knows how to keep a low profile.”

“What’s the point getting rich if you have to live the way you’ve always lived?” Jan asked.

Dwayne shook his head, like the question was too deep. “I don’t know. Maybe he’s got another place. In the Bahamas or something.”

Dwayne had his hand on the door. Half the diamonds were still tucked into his jeans, while Jan had her share in her purse.

“He said come in around the back,” Dwayne said, nodding toward the end of the drive, which ran down the side of the house.

“You’re not worried, us walking in here with everything we’ve got?” Jan asked. “What if he decides to take the diamonds off us? What are we supposed to do then?”

“Hey, he’s a businessman,” Dwayne said. “You think he’s going to throw away his reputation, fucking over a client like that?”

Jan wasn’t convinced.

“Okay, if you’re worried…” Dwayne reached under the seat and pulled out a small, short-barreled revolver.

“Jesus,” Jan said. “How long you had that?”

“Pretty much since I got out,” he said. “Got it from my brother when he let me have the truck.”

One more thing that could have sunk us if we’d gotten pulled over, Jan thought. But knowing they had a weapon did offer some comfort.

He reached into the small storage area behind the seats and grabbed a jean jacket. Awkwardly, he slipped it on while still behind the wheel, then tucked the gun into the right pocket. “Don’t want to walk in waving the thing. But you’re right, it’s good to have it along. Okay, let’s go get rich.”

They got out of the truck and walked up the drive past the minivan. Dwayne turned at the back of the house, found a ground-level wood door with a peephole, and pressed a tiny round white button to the left of it. They didn’t hear the buzz inside through the thick door, but seconds later there was the sound of a substantial deadbolt being turned back.

A tall, wiry man with very dark brown skin opened the door. His T-shirt was several sizes too large, and a rope belt cinched around his waist kept his baggy cargo pants up. He smiled, exposing two rows of yellowed teeth. “You are Dwayne,” he said.

Great, Jan thought. Real names.

“Banura,” Dwayne said, shaking hands. He went to introduce Jan. “This is… Kate?”

She smiled nervously. She couldn’t be Jan. And she couldn’t be Connie. So Kate it was. “Hi.”

Banura extended a hand to her and drew them both into the house. Inside the door was a narrow flight of stairs heading down. There was no access, at least from the back door, to any other part of the house. Once inside, they watched as Banura returned to position a massive bar that spanned the width of the door. He led them down the stairs, hitting a couple of light switches on the way.

The stairway wall was lined with cheaply framed photos-some in color and some, mercifully, in black and white. Most of them were of young black men, some just children, barefoot and dressed in tattered clothes, photographed against bleak African landscapes of ruin and poverty. They were wielding rifles, raising hands together in victory, mugging for the camera. In several, the men posed over bloody corpses. One that made Jan look away showed a black child, probably no more than twelve, waving a severed arm as though it were a baseball bat.

Banura took them into a crowded room with a long, brilliantly lit workbench. Spread out on the bench was a black velvet runner, and over it three different magnifiers on metal arms.

“Have a seat,” Banura said in his thick African accent, gesturing to a ratty couch that was half-covered in boxes and two IKEA-type office chairs that probably cost five bucks new.

“Sure,” Dwayne said, dropping onto a narrow spot on the couch.

“You won’t be needing your gun,” Banura said, his back to Dwayne as he sat on the stool at the workbench.

“What’s that?”

“The one in your right pocket,” he said. “I’m not going to take anything from you. And you are not going to take anything from me. That would be totally foolish.”

“Hey, sure, I get that,” Dwayne said, laughing nervously. “I just like to be cautious, you know?”

Banura pulled his magnifiers into position, flicked another switch. They had lights built in to them.

“Let me see what you have,” he said.

Jan, who had chosen not to sit, reached into her purse and withdrew her bag. Dwayne leaned back on the couch to make it easier to reach into his pants and fished out his half. He tossed the bag over to Jan, like having a bag of diamonds was no biggie, and she presented both of them to Banura.

Delicately, he opened both bags and emptied them onto the black velvet. He examined no more than half a dozen of the stones, putting each one under bright light and magnification.

“So, you know this stuff pretty good, huh?” Dwayne said.

“Yes,” Banura said.

“So whaddya think?”

“Just a moment, please.”

“Dwayne, let the man do his job,” Jan said.

Dwayne made a face.

Once he’d finished looking at the half dozen stones, Banura slowly turned on his stool and said to them, “These are very good.”

“Well, yeah,” said Dwayne.

“Where did you get these?” he asked. “I’m just curious.”

“Come on, Banny Boy, we went through this before. I’m not telling you that.”

Banura nodded. “That’s fine, then. Sometimes it is better not to know. What counts is the quality of the merchandise. And this is superb. And you have a lot of it.”

“So, what do you think it’s worth?” Jan asked.

Banura turned his head and studied her. “I am prepared to offer you six.”

Jan blinked. “I’m sorry?”

“Million?” Dwayne said, sitting up at attention.

Banura nodded solemnly. “I think that’s more than generous.”

Jan had never expected to be offered anything remotely close to six million dollars. She thought maybe two or three million, but this, this was unbelievable.

Dwayne stood, struggled not to look excited. “You’ll never guess what my lucky number happens to be.” He slapped his own ass where he’d been tattooed. “Well, you know, I think that’s a figure that my partner and I can work with. But we’ll need to talk about it.”

“We’ll take it,” Jan said.

Banura nodded again, then turned back to his table. He began selecting more of the diamonds at random for study. “The quality is consistent,” he said.

“Fuckin’ A,” Dwayne said. “So, where’s the money?”

Banura frowned without taking his eyes off the jewels. “I don’t keep funds of that nature around here,” he said. “I will have to make some arrangements. You may take your product with you, and later this afternoon we can make an exchange.”

“Here?” Dwayne said. “We come back here?”

“Yes,” Banura said. “And I should tell you, that for a transaction of this size, I will have an associate present, and you will not be permitted to enter my premises with that gun on you.”

“No problem, no problem,” Dwayne said. “We want to do everything straight up.”

Banura glanced at his watch. It looked, to Jan, like a cheap Timex. “Come back at two,” he said.

Dwayne said, “So it’ll be cash, right? I don’t want a check.”

Banura sighed.

“I’m sorry,” Jan said. “We’re just… a little excited, to be honest.”

“Of course,” Banura said. “You have plans?”

“Yes,” Jan said, without elaborating.

“Oh yeah,” Dwayne said.

Banura gathered the jewels and returned them all to one bag, since they fit easily enough. “That’s okay?” he asked.

“Sure,” Jan said.

He held out the bag and Jan took it before Dwayne could get his hands on it. She dropped it into her purse.

“So, two o’clock, then,” Jan said.

Banura followed them up the stairs, peered through the peephole, then pulled back the bar across the door.

“Goodbye,” he said. “And when you come back, you don’t bring your gun in here. I won’t have it.”

The bar could be heard clinking back in place once they were outside.

“Six mil!” Dwayne said. “Did you hear the man? Six fucking mil!”

He threw his arms around her. “It was all worth it, baby. All fucking worth it.”

Jan smiled, but she wasn’t feeling it.

It was too much money.

When he was back at his workbench, Banura picked up a cell phone, flipped it open, and dialed a number.

He put the phone to his ear. It rang once.

“Yes?”

“It was them,” Banura said.

“When?”

“Two o’clock.”

“Thank you,” Oscar Fine said and ended the call.

THIRTY-SEVEN

Natalie Bondurant said, “Either somebody’s setting you up, or you killed your wife.”

“I didn’t kill my wife,” I said. “I don’t know for sure something’s even happened to her.”

“Something has happened to her,” Bondurant said. “She’s gone. She may very well be alive, but something has happened to her.”

I’d told my new lawyer everything I knew, and everything that had happened to me in the last couple of weeks. That included my chats-and rides-with Elmont Sebastian.

Natalie sat behind her desk and leaned back in her chair. She appeared to be looking up at the ceiling, but her eyes were closed.

“I think it’s a stretch,” she said.

“What?”

“That Sebastian is somehow setting you up to take the fall for this. That he’s done something to her and found a way to make everything point your way.”

“Because it’s a lot of trouble to go to just to silence one critic,” I said.

She shook her head. “Not so much that. It’s not his style. From everything you’ve told me, Elmont Sebastian has a more direct approach. First, a cash inducement. The job offer. When you turned that down, he moved on to simple scare tactics. Mess with me and something’ll happen to you, or worse, to your child.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I think there’s a more obvious answer,” she said.

“That’s staring us in the face?” I said.

Natalie Bondurant opened her eyes and leaned forward, elbows on the table. “Let’s review a few things here. The ticket thing, going into Five Mountains.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“One child ticket, one adult ticket ordered online,” she said.

“Right.”

“You’re the only one who seems to know about your wife’s recent bout of depression. Jan says she went to the doctor but didn’t.”

“Yeah.”

“No one sees Jan from the time you left that store in Lake George. She didn’t go with you to your parents’ house to pick up your son. She tells that shopkeeper some tale about not knowing why you’ve driven her up there.”

“Supposedly.”

Natalie ignored that. “And Duckworth wasn’t lying to you. They’ve found hair and blood in the trunk of your car, plus a recent receipt for duct tape in the glove box, which is a kind of handy item to have around if you’re planning to kidnap someone and get rid of them.”

“I didn’t buy any duct tape,” I said.

“Somebody did,” Natalie said. “And guess what they found in the history folder of your laptop?”

I blinked. “I don’t know. What?”

“Sites that offered tips on how to get rid of a body.”

“How do you know this?”

“I had a chat with Detective Duckworth before you arrived. Full disclosure and all.”

“That’s crazy,” I said. “I never looked up anything like that.”

“I told Duckworth the planets are all in alignment for him on this one. That should be his first clue that you’re being set up.”

“Set up? Is that what he thinks?”

“Hell no. The more obvious the clue, the more the cops like it. There’s also this business of the life insurance policy you recently took out on your wife.”

“What? How do you know about that?”

“I’ll give Duckworth this much. He can be thorough. Tell me about the policy.”

“It was Jan’s idea. She thought it made sense, and I agreed.”

“Jan’s idea,” Natalie repeated, nodding.

“What?” I said.

“You’re not getting this, are you?”

“Getting what? That I’m in a shitload of trouble? Yeah, I get that. And don’t talk to the press. I get that now, too.”

She shook her head. “Just how well do you really know your wife, David?”

“Really well. Very well. You don’t spend more than five years with someone and not know them.”

“Except you’re not even sure what her real name is. Clearly it’s not Jan Richler. Jan Richler died when she was a child.”

“There has to be an explanation.”

“I’ve no doubt there is. But how can you claim to know your wife well if you don’t even know who she is?”

The question hung there for several seconds.

Finally, I said, “Duckworth may be covering for the FBI. She might be a relocated witness. Maybe she testified against someone and no one can say, for the record, that she had to take on a new identity.”

“You told this to Duckworth,” she said.

I nodded. “I don’t think, when I told him, he believed a word of it. I’d already told him about Jan’s depression, but that story was falling apart whenever he talked to anyone else.”

“So he may not even have checked the FBI thing.”

“I don’t know.”

“How do you explain the fact that you’re the only one who witnessed your wife’s change in mood?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I was the only one she felt she could be that honest with.”

“Honest?” Natalie said. “We’re talking about a woman who’s been hiding from you, since the day she met you, who she really is.”

I had nothing for that.

“What if this depression thing was an act?” she asked.

I had nothing for that, either.

“An act just for you.”

Slowly, I said, “Go on.”

“Okay, let’s rewind a bit here. Forget this business about the FBI getting your wife a new name and life. The FBI doesn’t have to troll around looking for people who died as children to create new identities for people. They can make them right out of thin air. They’ve got all the blank forms for every document you could ever need. You want to be Suzy Creamcheese? No problem. We’ll make you up a Suzy Creamcheese ID. So what I’m asking is, has it occurred to you that your wife might have gone about getting a new identity all on her own?”

I took a second. “I’ve thought about it, but I can’t come up with a reason why she’d do such a thing.”

“David, it wouldn’t surprise me that as we sit here the police are drawing up a warrant for your arrest. Finding Leanne Kowalski’s body only a couple of miles from where you were seen with your wife will have shifted them into overdrive. All they’ve wanted is to find a body, and now they’ve got one. Don’t think that just because it isn’t your wife’s, that’s going to slow them down. They probably figure you killed Jan, that Leanne found out or witnessed it, so you killed her, too. They don’t even need to find your wife’s body now. They’ll be able to put together some kind of case with Leanne’s. Maybe you did a better job at hiding Jan’s body, but you screwed things up and panicked and did a shitty job with Leanne’s. If I were them, that’s how I’d be putting this together.”

“I didn’t kill Leanne,” I said.

Natalie waved her hand at me, like she didn’t want to hear it. “You’re in a mess, and there’s only one person I can think of who could have put you there.”

My head suddenly felt very heavy. I let it fall for a moment, then raised it and looked at Natalie.

“Jan,” I said.

“Bingo,” she said. “She was the one who ordered the Five Mountains tickets. She was the one who fed you-and you alone-a story about being depressed. Why? So when something happened to her, that’s the story you’d tell the cops. A story that would look increasingly bogus the more the police looked into it. Who had access to your laptop to leave a trail of tips on how to get rid of a body? Who could easily have put her own hair and blood in the trunk of your car? Who went in and told the Lake George store owner that she had no idea why her husband was taking her for a drive up into the woods? Who persuaded you to take out life insurance, so that if she died you’d be up three hundred grand?”

I said nothing.

“Who’s not who she claims to be?” Natalie asked. “Who took on the identity of some kid who got hit by a car way back when?”

I felt the ground starting to swallow me up.

“Who the hell is your wife, really, and what did you do to piss her off so badly that she’d want to frame you for her murder?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

Natalie Bondurant rolled her eyes. “There isn’t a husband on the planet whose wife hasn’t thought of killing him at one time or another. But this is different. This takes things to a whole new level.”

“But why?” I asked. “I mean, if she didn’t love me anymore, if she wanted out of the marriage, why not just leave? Tell me it’s over and walk away? Why do something as elaborate as what you’re suggesting?”

Natalie mulled that one over. “Because there’s more to this. Because it isn’t enough for her to get away. She doesn’t want anyone to come looking for her. She doesn’t want anyone to know she’s alive. No one’s going to come looking for her if they figure she’s dead.”

“But I’d come looking for her,” I said. “She’d have to know I’d do everything I could to find her.”

“Kind of hard to do from a jail cell,” Natalie said. “And if the cops think they’ve closed this thing, so what if they haven’t actually got a body? They’ve got you, their work is done. And your Jan’s off living a new life somewhere.”

I sat, numb, in Natalie’s leather chair.

“I can’t believe it,” I said. “She couldn’t have set it all up.” I struggled to get my head around it. “What about that Lake George trip? How could she have known I was going to go there Friday to meet that source?”

Natalie shrugged. “Who knows? And who the hell ran off with Ethan at Five Mountains? Who caused that distraction? How does Leanne Kowalski fit in? No idea. But right now, based on what you’ve told me, the only thing that makes sense is that your wife is behind this. She wanted to get away, and she wanted you to be her cover story. Her patsy. Her fall guy. And she’s done a pretty fantastic job of it, if you don’t mind my saying so.”

“Why would she do this to me?” I whispered. But there was a bigger question. “Why would she do this to Ethan?”

Natalie crossed her arms and thought about that a moment.

“Maybe,” she said, “because she’s not a very nice person.”

THIRTY-EIGHT

“Something’s wrong,” Jan said.

They were sitting in a Braintree McDonald’s on Pearl Street. Dwayne had ordered two double-sized Big Macs, a chocolate shake, and a large order of fries. Jan had bought only a coffee, and even that she wasn’t touching.

His mouth full, Dwayne said, “What’s wrong?”

“It’s too much.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s too much money.”

Jan could see fries and bun and special sauce when Dwayne said, “If you don’t want your half, I’ll take it off your hands.”

“Why would he offer us so much right away?” she asked.

“Maybe,” Dwayne said, continuing to talk with his mouth full, “he knew the stuff was worth a hell of a lot more and he’s actually cheating us.”

A woman about Jan’s age, with a small boy in tow, sat down two tables over. The boy, maybe four or five years old, perched himself on the chair and swung his legs a good foot above the floor. Jan watched as his mother put a Happy Meal in front of him and unwrapped his cheeseburger. The boy put a single fry into his mouth like he was a sword swallower, leaning back, pointing the fry in slowly.

Jan was just turning to look at Dwayne again when she heard the woman say, “Don’t be silly, Ethan.”

Jan whipped her head to the side. Did she hear that right?

The mother said, “Can you open your milk, Nathan, or do you want me to do it?”

“I can do it,” he said.

“You just worry too much,” Dwayne said. “We’ve been waiting years for this moment and now you’re getting all antsy.”

“I never expected that kind of money,” Jan said quietly. “Come on. The stuff is hot. You’re never going to get retail value for it, you’re not even going to get wholesale. Best you can expect is maybe ten percent, okay, maybe twenty.”

“That’s probably what he was offering us,” Dwayne said. “What we got could be worth way, way more than we can even imagine.”

“He didn’t even look at all the diamonds,” she said. “He only looked at a few.”

“He did a random sampling, and he was impressed,” Dwayne said authoritatively, putting his mouth over the end of the straw and sucking hard. “Fuck, these are hard to get up.”

The mother glanced over at Dwayne.

“Watch your language,” Jan said. She looked over and smiled apologetically. The mother was not pleased. Nathan did not appear to have noticed. He was holding his cheeseburger firmly with both hands as he took his first bite.

“Chill out,” Dwayne said. “You think the kid’s never heard that word before?”

“He might not have,” Jan whispered. “If she’s a good mother, watches who he hangs out with, makes sure he doesn’t watch anything bad on TV.”

She thought about how upset David had gotten when his mother allowed Ethan to watch Family Guy. A smile crossed her lips ever so briefly.

“What?” Dwayne asked.

“Nothing,” she said and refocused. “I just don’t like it.”

“Okay,” Dwayne said, actually allowing his mouth to empty before continuing. “What exactly is the downside? So maybe he’s offering us more than you were expecting. What are you worried about? That he’s going to come after us later and ask for some of his money back?”

“No, I don’t think he’s going ask for some of his money back,” she said. “Did you see the photos on his wall?”

Dwayne shook his head. “I didn’t notice.”

Jan thought, There’s a lot you don’t notice.

Dwayne glanced at his watch. “Couple of hours, we go pick up our money. I was thinking, to kill time, we go find some place that sells boats.”

“I want to find a jewelry store,” Jan said.

“What? If you want a diamond, I’m sure you could keep one of the ones we’ve got. There’s so fucking many, Banny Boy won’t even notice if he’s one short.”

The woman shot Dwayne another look. He returned it, and said, in an exaggerated fashion, “Sorry.”

“I don’t want to buy something,” Jan said. “I want a second opinion.”

The woman was gathering up her son’s lunch onto the tray and moving them to another table on the other side of the restaurant.

Dwayne, shaking his head, said to Jan, “You know, if you don’t allow your kids to be exposed to certain things, they’re not going to grow up ready to face the world.”

“This is a dumb idea,” Dwayne said as they sat in the truck out front of Ross Jewelers, a storefront operation with black iron bars over the windows and door.

“I want someone else to have a look at them,” Jan said. “If this guy in here looks at a few and says they’re worth such and such, then I’ll know what we’re being offered isn’t out of whack.”

“And if we find out they’re worth even more, when we go back we’ll just have to renegotiate,” Dwayne said. “We’ll tell him the price has gone up.”

Jan still had the bag of diamonds in her purse.

“Don’t you go thinking about sneaking out a back door,” Dwayne said. “Half those diamonds are mine.”

“Why would I run off with them now when someone has promised to give us six mil for them?”

“Did I tell you that was my lucky number?”

Only for about the hundredth time.

Jan got out of the truck, opened the outer door of the jewelry store, and stepped into a small alcove. There was a second door that was locked. Through the iron bars and glass, Jan could see into the store, but not get in. There was a woman in her fifties or sixties, well dressed with a hairdo that appeared to have been pumped up with air, behind the counter. She pressed a button and suddenly her voice filled the alcove.

“May I help you?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Jan. “I need a quick appraisal.”

There was a loud buzz, Jan’s cue to pull on the door handle. Once inside, she approached the counter.

“What were you looking to have appraised?” the woman asked politely.

Jan set her open purse on the counter and discreetly picked half a dozen diamonds from the bag inside. She held them in her hand for the woman to examine.

“I was wondering if you could give me a kind of ballpark idea what these might be worth. Do you have someone who can do that?”

“I do that,” the woman said. “Is this for insurance purposes? Because the way it usually works is, you leave these with me, I’ll give you a receipt for them, and when you come back in a week I can give you a certificate of appraisal-”

“I don’t need anything like that. I just need you to give them a quick look and tell me what you think.”

“I see,” the woman said. “All right, then. Let’s see what you have.”

On the glass counter was a desktop calendar pad, about one and a half by two feet, a grid of narrow black rules and numbers on a white background. The woman reached for jeweler’s eyepiece, adjusted a counter lamp so it was pointing down onto the calendar, then asked Jan to put the diamonds in her hand onto the lit surface.

The woman leaned over, studied the diamonds, picked a couple of them up with a long tweezerlike implement to get a closer look.

“What do you think?” Jan asked.

“Let me just get a look at all of them,” she said. One by one, she studied each of the six stones. She never said a word or made a sound the entire time.

When she was done, she said, “Where did you get these?”

“They’re in the family,” Jan said. “They’ve been passed down to me.”

“I see. It sounded as though you had more of them in your purse there.”

“A couple more,” Jan said. “But they’re all pretty much the same.”

“Yes, they are,” the woman said.

“So what do you think? I mean, just a rough estimate, what would you say they were worth? Individually, that is.”

The woman sighed. “Let me show you something.”

She set one of the diamonds on its flattest side directly on one of the black rules on the calendar. “Look at the stone directly from above.” Jan leaned over and did as she was told. “Can you see the line through the stone?”

Jan nodded. “Yes, I can.”

The woman turned and took something from a slender drawer in a cabinet along the wall. She had in her hand a single diamond. She straddled it on the black line beside Jan’s stone. The two diamonds looked identical.

“Now,” the woman said, “see if you can see the line through this stone.”

Jan leaned over a second time. “I can’t make it out,” she said. “I can’t see the line.”

“That’s because diamonds reflect and refract light unlike any other stone or substance. The light’s being bounced in so many directions in there, you can’t see through it.”

Jan felt a growing sense of unease.

“What are you saying?” Jan asked. “That my diamonds are of an inferior quality?”

“No,” the woman said. “I’m not saying that. What you have here is not a diamond.”

“That’s not true,” Jan said. “It is a diamond. Look at it. It looks exactly like yours.”

“Perhaps to you. But what you have here is cubic zirconium. It’s a man-made substance, and it does look very much like diamond, no question. They even use it for advertisements in the diamond trade magazines.” To prove it, she reached for one sitting atop the cabinet and turned through the pages. Each one was filled with dazzling photos of diamonds. “That’s fake, that’s fake. This one, too. The security costs for photo shoots would be astronomical if they used real diamonds for everything.”

Jan wasn’t hearing any of this. She hadn’t taken in anything after the woman said what she had were not diamonds.

“It’s not possible,” she said under her breath.

“Yes, well, I suppose it must be a bit of a shock if your family’s been leading you to believe these are real diamonds.”

“So this stone,” Jan said, pointing to the real diamond and thinking ahead, “wouldn’t break if I hit it with a hammer, but mine would.”

“Actually, they both would,” the woman said. “Diamonds can chip, too.”

“But my diamonds, my cubic…”

“Cubic zirconium.”

“They must be worth something,” Jan said, unable to hide the desperation in her voice.

“Of course,” the woman said. “Perhaps fifty cents each?”

THIRTY-NINE

Barry Duckworth pulled his car over to the shoulder. Fifty yards ahead, police cars were parked on either side of this two-lane stretch of blacktop northwest of Albany. The road had been built along the side of a heavily wooded hill. The ground sloped down from the left, then, just beyond the shoulder where Duckworth had parked, it dropped off steeply into more forest.

That was where a passing cyclist had noticed something. An SUV.

When the first rescue team had shown up, ropes were used to get down to the vehicle safely. The rescue team members knew it was going to be tricky, moving an injured person back up the hill to the ambulance, but it turned out that wasn’t going to be a problem.

There was no one in the Ford Explorer, and nothing to indicate that an occupant had been injured inside it. No blood, no matted hair on the cracked windshield.

A check of the plates showed that the Explorer belonged to Lyall Kowalski, of Promise Falls. Soon the locals learned that the wife of the man who was the registered owner of the vehicle was missing. And that was when someone put in a call to Barry Duckworth.

The night before, about twelve hours before getting the call about the SUV, Duckworth had paid a visit to the Kowalski home to tell Lyall that his wife, Leanne, had been found in a shallow grave near Lake George.

The man wailed and banged his head against the wall until it was raw and bloody, and then his dog began to howl.

Duckworth didn’t get in touch with the man when he heard about the car being found. He decided to take a drive down, see it for himself, and learn what he could before informing him of the development.

Standing at the top of the hill, he could see the path the SUV had taken. Grass had been flattened, dirt dug up. The Explorer had nicked a couple of trees on the way down, judging by the missing bark. A towering pine had brought the car’s trip to an end when it plowed into it head-on.

The first thing Barry thought was, Huh?

What was the Explorer doing here? If you looked at a map, Promise Falls was here in the middle, Lake George was up here to the north, and Albany was down here to the south. How did Leanne’s car end up at the bottom of this hill, but her body up in Lake George?

“Someone ditches the car here hoping it won’t be found,” he said to himself, “but leaves Leanne’s body so somebody’s sure to find it.”

The local police, who’d been down to the car several times before Duckworth arrived, said they’d found a gas station receipt on the floor for early Saturday afternoon. An Exxon just off the interstate north of the city. Duckworth took note of the location, then made sure everyone at the scene understood that the Explorer was linked to a homicide, and that it needed to be sent to a lab as soon as they figured a way to get it back up that hill.

On his way to the Exxon, Duckworth’s cell rang, interrupting thoughts about what sort of snack foods they might sell at the gas station. He was thinking maybe a Twinkie. He hadn’t had a Twinkie in weeks.

“Yeah?”

“Hey, Barry. How’s it hanging?”

“Natalie. How you doin’, my dear?” His encounters with Natalie Bondurant were often antagonistic, but he liked her.

“I’m doing just fine, Barry. Yourself?”

“Couldn’t be better. Your client decided to make a full confession yet?”

“Sorry, Barry, not just yet. I have a question for you.”

“Shoot.”

“When your clowns did a search of the Harwood house, did they dust for prints?”

Barry scratched his ear with the cell. “No,” he said. “They looked for any signs of violence, but not fingerprints.”

“Why not?”

“Natalie, it’s not officially a crime scene. We were looking for other things. Like what we found on the laptop.”

“Anyone could have done those Internet searches, Barry.”

He ignored that. Instead, he asked, “Why do you care about fingerprints?”

“I want a set of the wife’s,” she said. “If you’re not planning to get a set, then I’m going to have someone go into the house and pull a set.”

“It’s not exactly going to be a surprise to find the wife’s fingerprints all over that house, Natalie,” Barry said cautiously.

“I want to see if they’re in any database. I want to know who she really is.”

“So you’re buying your guy’s story. Is this the one where his wife is in the witness protection program, or is he now thinking she got replaced by a pod person?”

“You never checked the FBI angle, did you?”

“In fact, I did,” Barry said. “If she’s a witness, they’re not copping to it.”

“What about this fake name she was going by? You looked into that?”

He hadn’t, but rather than admit it, he said, “Even if she did turn out to be somebody else, it doesn’t mean her husband didn’t do her in.”

“You’re going in the wrong direction on this one, Barry. Isn’t your sizable gut telling you that yet?”

“Always a pleasure, Natalie,” Barry said and ended the call.

That last comment of hers had taken all the fun out of thinking about a Twinkie. The hell of it was, there was something going on down there, in that sizable gut of his.

FORTY

I didn’t even remember driving home from Natalie Bondurant’s office. By the time I walked out of her building, I was so shaken by her interpretation of recent events I was in a walking coma. I was traumatized, shell-shocked, dumbstruck.

Jan had set me up.

At least that was how it looked. Maybe, I kept telling myself, there was some other explanation. Something that didn’t force me to reassess my life for the last five years. Something that didn’t transform Jan from a loving wife and mother to a heartless manipulator.

But the part of me that had been trained to deal with the facts as they presented themselves-a part of me I’d been successfully suppressing lately-found it hard to reject Natalie’s theory out of hand.

If one bought into the premise that I had something to do with Jan’s disappearance, as Detective Duckworth no doubt did, the circumstantial evidence was substantial. My story that Jan had been depressed and might well have killed herself didn’t hold up to scrutiny. The more that story fell apart, the more it looked as though I’d made it up.

And suddenly I was a prime suspect.

Jan had set me up.

Those five words kept playing on a loop in my head the entire way home. Somehow, without being aware I was doing it, I’d taken the keys from my pocket, started my father’s car, driven it from one side of Promise Falls to the other, pulled into my driveway, unlocked my front door, and stepped into my home.

Our home.

I tossed Dad’s keys onto the table by the front door, and as I stood in that house it suddenly felt very different, like someplace I’d come into for the first time. If everything that had happened here for the last five years was built on a lie-on Jan’s false identity-then was this a real home? Or was this place a façade, a set, a stage where some fiction had been playing out day after day?

“Just who the fuck are you, Jan?” I said to the empty house.

I mounted the stairs and went into our bedroom, which I’d so carefully tidied after the house had been turned upside down by the police. I stood at the foot of the bed, taking in the whole room; the closet, the dresser, the end tables.

I started with the closet. I reached in and hauled out everything of Jan’s. I tore blouses and dresses and pants off their hangers and threw them on the bed. Then I attacked the shelves, tossing sweaters and shoes into the room. I don’t know what I was looking for. I don’t know what I expected to find. But I felt compelled to take everything of Jan’s and toss them, disrupt them, expose them to the light.

When I was done with the closet, I yanked out all the drawers on Jan’s half of the dresser. I flipped them over, dumped their contents onto the bed, much of the stuff falling onto the floor. Underwear, socks, hosiery. I tossed the empty drawers into a pile, then tore into the items on the bed in a frenzy.

I was venting rage as much as I was looking for anything. Why the hell had she done this? Why had she left? What was she running from? What was she running to? Why was disappearing so important to her that she was willing to sacrifice me to do it? Who was the man who’d run off with Ethan at Five Mountains? Was that why she’d left? For another man?

And the question I kept coming back to: Who the hell was she?

Abruptly, I walked out of the bedroom-leaving it in a much worse state than the police had-and traveled down two flights to the basement. I grabbed a large screwdriver and a hammer, then came back up to the second floor, taking the steps two at a time.

I opened the linen closet, hauled everything out that was on the floor, got down on my knees, and started ripping out the baseboards. I set the end of the screwdriver where the wood met the wall and drove it in with the hammer.

There was nothing delicate about the way I was going about this.

Once I had the wood partly pried from the wall, I forced the claw of the hammer in there and yanked. The wood snapped and broke off. I did it all the way around the closet, cracking wood, throwing it into the hallway behind me.

When I was finished with that closet-having found nothing-I started in on the one in Ethan’s room. I tossed out any toys and small shoes in the way and ripped out all the molding around the closet base. When I struck out there, I tackled our own bedroom and again came up empty.

I did a walkabout of the upstairs, took in all the damage I’d created so far.

I was just getting started.

Dropping down to my hands and knees again, I started tapping on the wood floors throughout the house, looking for any planks that appeared loose or disturbed. I threw back the carpet runners in the upstairs hallways and started there. A couple of the boards looked as though they might have been tampered with, so I drove the screwdriver down between them and pried up. The flooring cracked and snapped as the nails were ripped out.

I got my nose right into the hole I’d created, then rooted around with my hand. I came up with nothing.

When I was done prying up a few other boards on the top floor, I moved down to the main floor. I dragged rugs out of the way, continued to tap on boards, pried them up here and there. Then I removed the baseboards from the inside of the front hall closet. In the kitchen, I emptied every drawer, flipped it over. Pulled out the fridge and looked behind it, dumped out the flour and sugar containers, took out every saved plastic grocery store bag from a storage unit in the pantry. Opened the lids on rarely used baking dishes. Got on a chair and looked on top of all the kitchen cabinets.

Nothing.

Then I had an idea and rounded up every framed family photo in the house. Pictures of Ethan. Jan. Jan and me together, pictures of the three of us. A photo of my parents on their thirtieth anniversary.

I took apart all the frames, removed the pictures, looked to see whether anything had been slipped in between the photo and the cardboard backing.

I turned up nothing.

In the living room, I tossed cushions, unzipped and removed covers, flipped chairs over, tipped the sofa on its back and tore the filmy fabric that covered the underside, stuck my hand in and cut my palm on a staple.

When I’d looked into every possible hiding spot on the main floor, I moved down to the basement.

That meant opening up countless boxes of things. Old books, family mementos-exclusively from my side-small appliances we no longer used, sleeping bags for camping trips, stuff from my days in college.

As in the rest of the house, the search was feverish, reckless. Items scattered everywhere in haste.

I was desperate to find something, anything, that might tell me who Jan really was or where she might have gone.

And I didn’t find a single goddamn thing.

Maybe that birth certificate that had been hidden behind the baseboard in the upstairs linen closet had been it. The only thing Jan had hidden in this house. Or if there had been other things, she’d been smart enough to take them with her, too, when she disappeared.

The birth certificate, and the envelope.

There’d been a key in that envelope, too. A strange-looking key, not a typical door key. A different kind of key.

Then it hit me what it probably was. A safe-deposit box key.

Before Jan had met and taken up with me, she’d put something away for safekeeping. And the time had come for her to go and get it.

And leave Ethan and me behind.

Slowly, I walked through our home and surveyed the damage I’d wrought. The house looked like a bomb had hit it.

There weren’t many places to sit down save for the stairs. I set my ass down on one of the lower steps, put my face into my hands, and began to cry.

If Jan really was dead, my life was shattered.

If Jan was alive, and had betrayed me, it wasn’t much better.

If Natalie Bondurant’s take on everything was right, it meant Jan was alive, and to save my own neck, I needed to find her.

But it didn’t mean I wanted her back.

As I wiped the tears from my cheeks, trying to focus through my watery eyes, I looked for something in all of this that was good. Something that would give me some hope, some reason to carry on.

Ethan.

I had to keep going for Ethan.

I had to get through this, find out what was going on, and stay out of jail, for Ethan.

I couldn’t let him lose his father. And I wasn’t about to lose my son.

FORTY-ONE

When Jan came out of the jewelry store and got into the pickup truck, she didn’t say anything. But Dwayne sensed something was wrong. Jan’s face was set like stone and her hand seemed to shake when she reached for the handle to pull the door shut.

“What’s going on?” Dwayne asked. “What’d they say?”

Jan said, “Just go.”

“Go where?”

“Just go. Anywhere. Just go.”

Dwayne turned the ignition, threw the truck into drive, and pulled out in front of a Lincoln that had to hit the brakes.

“What the hell’s wrong?” Dwayne said as he drove. “You look like you just saw a ghost. Or you’re constipated.” When Jan didn’t laugh, Dwayne said, “Come on, I’m trying to make a joke. What’d they say in that store?”

Jan turned and looked at him. “It’s all been for nothing.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“All of it. What we did, the waiting, everything. It’s all been for nothing.”

“Jesus, Connie, would you mind telling me what the fuck you’re talking about?”

“They’re worthless,” she said.

“What?”

“They’re fake, Dwayne!” she screamed at him. “They’re all cubic fucking something or other! They’re not diamonds! They’re fucking worthless! Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

Dwayne slammed on the brakes in the middle of the street. Behind him, a horn blared.

“What are you fucking telling me?” he said, foot on the brake.

“Are you deaf, Dwayne? Are you fucking hard of hearing? Let me tell it to you real slow so you’ll understand. They. Are. Worthless.”

Dwayne’s face had gone crimson. His hands were gripping the steering wheel so hard his knuckles were going white.

Another honk of the horn, and then the Lincoln pulled up alongside, hit the brakes, and a man shouted, “Hey, asshole! Where’d you learn to drive?”

Dwayne tore his hand off the wheel, reached under the seat for his gun, whirled around and pointed it out the window.

“Why don’t you give me a lesson?” he shouted.

The driver of the Lincoln floored it. The car squealed off.

Dwayne turned back to face Jan, gun in hand. “Tell me.”

“I showed this woman half a dozen of the diamonds. Picked them at random. She said they were all fake.”

“That is not possible,” Dwayne said through clenched teeth.

“I’m telling you what she said. They’re worthless!”

“You’re wrong,” he said.

“It’s not me who’s saying it,” Jan said. “She got out her fucking eye thing and studied them all.”

Dwayne was shaking his head furiously. “She’s wrong. Fucking bitch is playing some sort of game. Figured if she said they were worth next to nothing, she could make you a lowball bid. That’s what she was doing.”

“No, no,” Jan said, shaking her head. “She didn’t make any offer. She didn’t-”

“Not now,” Dwayne said. “But you can bet she’s just waiting for you to come back in and say, ‘What would you give me for these? A thousand, five hundred?’”

Jan screamed at him, “You’re not getting it! They’re not-”

He lunged across the seat and with his left hand-the gun was still in his right-he grabbed her around the throat and pushed her up against the headrest.

Jan choked. “Dwayne-”

“Now you listen to me. I don’t give a fucking rat’s ass what you were told by some stupid bitch back there. We have a guy who is prepared to give us six million for these diamonds, and I am quite prepared to accept his offer no matter what you say.”

“Dwayne, I can’t brea-”

“Or maybe… let me guess. Did she say the diamonds were actually worth more? But you figure, you’ll come back out and tell little ol’ Dwayne that they’re worth nothing, so I’ll figure, fuck it, let’s forget the whole thing and hit the road, while you go back and negotiate an even better deal and keep all the money for yourself? I had a sneaking suspicion this was always your game.”

Jan gasped for air as Dwayne maintained his grip on her neck. She tried to bat his arms away but they were like steel rods.

“You were able to play your little husband for all these years, so how hard could it be to play me for a few days, am I right? You wait till I get out, get the other key, get all the diamonds, and then figure out a way to get all the money, cut me out of the picture.”

Jan felt herself starting to pass out.

“You think I’m stupid?” Dwayne asked, his face in hers, his hot McDonald’s breath enveloping her. “You think I don’t know what you’re doing?”

Jan’s eyelids started to flutter, her head started to list to one side.

Dwayne took his hand away.

“Fuck this,” he said. “I’m trading these diamonds for our six million, and when I’ve got the money I’ll make a decision about what your share is going to be.”

Jan coughed and struggled to get back her breath. She put her own hand to her neck and held it there as Dwayne put the truck in gear and sped off down the street.

It was the closest she’d ever come to dying. Two thoughts had flashed across her mind before she thought it was all over.

I could do it. I could kill him.

And: Ethan.

Dwayne was driving around in circles, waiting until it was two o’clock and time to return for his money. Jan had sat quietly in the seat next to him, waiting until she thought he’d calmed down.

Finally, she whispered, “You need to listen to me.”

He poked his tongue around inside his cheek, not turning to look at her.

“All I want you to do is listen. Do what you want, but hear me out.” He didn’t tell her to shut up, so she continued. “If something seems too good to be true, it’s probably because it is.”

“Oh, please.”

“I know you think I’m lying about what the lady in the jewelry store said. But let’s just say I’m telling you the truth. If I am, why did Banura look at them and say they were first-rate?”

Dwayne shook his head. “Okay, if you’re not lying, then maybe that woman doesn’t know shit.”

“It is her business,” Jan said. “It’s what she does.”

Dwayne thought about that. “Then maybe Banura doesn’t know shit.”

Now Jan was shaking her head. “It’s his business, too.”

Dwayne made a snorting noise. “Well, if they both know so fucking much, how come one of them is wrong? Clearly, one of them doesn’t know what the fuck they’re talking about.”

“I think they both know what they’re doing,” Jan said. “But one of them’s lying. And it doesn’t make any sense that the woman in the jewelry store is lying.”

“It might. If you’d decided to sell everything to her for a song, she’d make out like a bandit.”

“I don’t think so.”

Dwayne’s eyes narrowed. “What are you saying? You saying Banny Boy is lying to us?”

“Yeah.”

“About how much he’s going to give us? You think we show up, he’s going to have three million for us instead of six?”

“He’s not going to pay anything for stones that are worthless,” Jan said. Even as she said it, she could hardly believe it. All the time invested, the waiting…

Dwayne’s face was darkening again. The anger was returning. Jan knew what was going on. He was so close to the money he could taste it. He didn’t want anyone ruining his dream.

“If they’re worthless, then why didn’t he tell us that when he first saw them?” Dwayne said. “Why put us through all this, make us come back at two?”

“I don’t know,” Jan said.

“I’ll tell you why,” Dwayne said. “Because it’s not safe to keep that kind of cash around. He probably had to go someplace to get it. Or have some courier come by with it. Maybe he’s got a safe-deposit box, too, and he had to go get the cash out of it. That’s what’s going on.”

Suddenly, Dwayne veered the truck over to the curb.

“Give me a diamond,” he said.

“What?”

“Any diamond. Just give me one.”

Jan reached into the bag in her purse, picked out one small stone, and handed it to Dwayne. He closed his palm on it, got out of the truck, and went around to the sidewalk, just beyond Jan’s window. He bent over, placed the stone on the sidewalk, stood upright, then stomped on the stone with the heel of his shoe. When he lifted his foot, the stone was gone.

“Shit,” he said. “Where the fuck did it go?”

Then he examined the bottom of his shoe, and found the stone embedded in the rubber sole. Bracing himself with one hand on the truck, he dug the stone out with his finger and held it up to Jan’s nose.

“There, look,” he said. “It’s perfectly fine.”

Jan knew the test didn’t prove a damn thing, but she knew Dwayne was beyond convincing at this point.

He handed her the stone before going around the truck and getting back in behind the wheel.

He said to her, “When I get my boat, I’m using you for a fucking anchor.”

FORTY-TWO

For Oscar Fine, it was about rehabilitating his image.

Of course, it was about respect. Self-respect, and keeping the respect of others.

No question, it was about revenge.

But more than anything, it was about redemption. He needed to redeem himself. He had to set things right, restore some personal order, and the only way he could do that, no matter how long it took, was to find the woman who took his hand.

It was more than an injury, more than a physical disfigurement. It was a humiliation. Oscar Fine had always been the best. When you wanted something done, he was the man you called. He was a fixer. He took care of things.

He didn’t screw up.

But then he did. Big-time.

The thing was, he knew something might be up. That was the whole point of toting a briefcase full of bogus jewels. They were worried about a leak, that maybe their system for moving jewels into the country, and then to their various markets, had been compromised.

It had been Oscar Fine’s idea. Do a decoy delivery, he said. Let me do the regular run, he said, but bring the real stuff in some other way, a route that hasn’t been done before. If someone makes a move on me, if the jewels are taken, or if the shipment is somehow damaged-Oscar Fine had imagined a scenario where he might have to send someone, briefcase and all, down to the bottom of the Boston Inner Harbor-we’re not out merchandise.

For theatrical effect, he hooked himself to the briefcase with the handcuff. Any other time, he transported goods in a gym bag. A handcuff, it was like carrying a big sign that said “Rob me.”

The gems were inside several cloth bags. One of them had a GPS transmitter stitched into the lining. Say someone got the drop on him. He’d give up the combination so they could open the briefcase, take the bags. Then he’d just see where they went, using the cell phone-sized receiver in his pocket.

His bosses weren’t so sure. “What if they just kill you?”

“They need me for the combination. I plan on being obliging. They got nothing to gain by killing me.”

Oscar Fine knew right away something was up when the limo arrived and the driver did not get out to open his door. Let him do it himself.

Okay, he thought, I can play along. That’s the whole point of this, after all.

So he opened the back door on his own, and there she was. This woman with red hair, sitting on the far side, not bad looking, all lipstick and low-cut top and a skirt up to here and sheer black stockings and hooker heels, and right away he knew this was not right, this was a trap, this was all bullshit, and it almost made him grin, how amateur hour it all was.

She said, “They said you deserved a bonus.”

Yeah, fuck, like that would happen. But he could play along with this. Let them think they’re pulling a fast one. Pretty soon a gun will come out, he gives up the code and the briefcase, lets them drop him off somewhere.

Too bad about the dart.

It came from where the driver was sitting. Caught him below the right nipple, went through his jacket, pricked the skin.

Son of a bitch.

The effect was almost instantaneous. As he began to weave, the woman lurched toward him, grabbed the briefcase, yanked. Since he was attached to it by the wrist, he stumbled forward and into the back of the car.

Not good, he told himself. Not good at all. His arms and legs started going numb. Couldn’t even reach out to break his fall. But the leather upholstery gave him a soft landing.

He started to say “What the fuck” but all that came out was “Wawawa.”

How did he fail to anticipate something like this? While the dart had numbed and dizzied him, made it difficult to speak, it hadn’t totally slowed his thought process. No one’s supposed to get the drop on me, he thought. Suddenly, I’m an amateur again.

He started wondering how this was going to work. They were going to want the briefcase, no doubt about that. And he was more than happy to let them have every piece of cubic zirconium that it held. But if he couldn’t talk, how the hell was he going to tell them the combination? The case had a lock on its side, next to the handle. A series of five numbers that had to be lined up for it to open. There was no key.

He couldn’t see the driver, but the woman, he’d gotten a good look at her.

The two of them, once they couldn’t open the case or release it from the handcuff that attached it to his wrist, started yelling at each other. First, he heard metallic clinking. They’d brought tools. Several of them, on the car floor. His wrist, being grabbed, examined, thrown down, picked up again. A search of his pockets, the inside of his jacket. The woman found his phone, the GPS receiver, pocketed both.

Then she found the gun strapped to his ankle. “Jesus,” she said. She took it as well.

Then they were both shouting at him, asking for the combination. He tried to say something, but the words would not come. He continued to be aware of what was happening around him, even if he couldn’t talk or move.

He thought he felt some tingling in his fingers, like maybe his feeling was coming back. Maybe whatever was in that dart wasn’t all that powerful.

He’s really out of it, the woman said.

Look for a key, said the driver.

I told you, I’ve been through his pockets. There’s no goddamn handcuff key, said the woman.

What about the combination? Maybe he wrote it down somewhere, put it in his wallet or something, said the driver.

The woman: What, you think he’s a moron? He’s going to write down the combination and keep it on him?

So cut the chain, the driver said. We take the case, we figure out how to open it later.

It looks way stronger than I thought, the woman said. It’ll take me an hour to cut through.

The driver: You can’t get the cuff over his hand?

The woman: How many times do I have to tell you? I’m gonna have to cut it off.

I thought you said it would take forever to cut the cuff, the driver said.

The woman: I’m not talking about the cuff.

Oscar Fine tried to will some feeling back into his arms. He had a pretty good idea now what they were going to do.

He was a bit surprised when he realized it was the woman who was going to do it.

He tried to form the word “Wait.” If they could hold off long enough for the tranquilizer to wear off, if only slightly. Not to the point where he’d be any threat to them, but enough that he could articulate the words, the numbers they needed to open the briefcase.

Then maybe they’d decide against the amputation.

“Wu,” he said.

“What?” said the woman.

“Dwer,” he said.

She shook her head and looked down at him. A change seemed to come across her face, like a mask. He would never forget that face, not if he lived through this.

“Sorry,” she said.

And then she began to cut.

The injury was so horrendous, so traumatic, that while it might normally have caused Oscar Fine to pass out, it also had the effect of rousing him from the effects of the mild tranquilizer.

Once the woman and the driver had bolted with the case, he managed to summon enough strength to slip off his necktie and, with his remaining hand, wrap it a couple of inches above the ragged stump. A memory flashed through his brain, something he’d seen on one of the morning news shows, about that kid who’d gone exploring in a canyon, got trapped when a rock fell on his hand. How he went days without being found, and eventually had to cut the hand off with his penknife.

I can be that kid, Oscar Fine thought. Shit, half the work’s been done for me. The woman had done the hard part. All he had to do was stanch the blood flow.

With what little reserves of will he had left, he started twisting the ends of the tie, tightening it on his wrist, attempting to stop the rate at which his blood was flowing out of him.

It wasn’t enough. The blood was still coming.

He was going to die.

If he’d still had his phone, he’d have called for help. But the woman had taken it. He didn’t have the strength to open the door, get to his feet, try to flag someone down.

This was it.

“Would you step out of the car, please?”

Huh?

Banging on the window. “Hello? Police! You can’t park your limo here. Would you step out of the car, please? I’m not going to ask again.”

He wasn’t able to offer the cops much help.

Didn’t see them, he said.

Never mentioned the briefcase.

Said he had no idea why they cut off his hand.

His guess? Mistaken identity. No one would have any reason to do such a thing to me, he said. They must have thought I was someone else.

The cops didn’t buy it for a second.

And Oscar Fine knew it. So fuck ‘em.

The hell of it was, someone hit the other courier, the one with the real diamonds. And that courier didn’t fuck things up. He shot the guy, and before he died, learned he’d been tipped by someone from inside.

The hit on Oscar Fine, it appeared, came out of left field.

His employers said not to worry, we’ll look after you.

They covered his medical expenses, even when he said no. Why should they be on the hook for this, he said, when he was the one who screwed up? But they insisted. His recovery took several months. Even though the paramedics had found the hand right there on the car floor, the doctors had been unsuccessful in reattaching it.

Sure, Oscar Fine felt pain. But mostly, he felt shame.

He’d fucked up a job. He’d been outwitted. He’d allowed others to cover his health costs.

I can still do this, he said. I’m not asking to get out. They said don’t worry about it. When we need you for something, we’ll be in touch, pay the going rate.

He knew they’d never call. You couldn’t trust a guy who couldn’t hang on to all his body parts.

So he said, the next five jobs are free. Just tell me what you need. And his employers thought, what the hell, let’s see if the guy can get back on the horse.

And he did.

In many ways, even minus a hand, he was better at this than he’d ever been before. Less cocky, more cautious.

Less forgiving. Not that he’d ever been a softy. But sometimes, he used to actually listen when someone pleaded for his life. Not that it was going to change anything, but Oscar Fine thought maybe it made them feel better. Gave them, if only for a few seconds, a glimmer of hope.

Now he just did the job.

And there was never a moment, not in the last six years, when he wasn’t looking for her. Watching faces, scanning crowds, searching the Net. He only had one real lead. A name: Constance Tattinger. He’d gotten it from that crazy bitch Alanna, the one who’d gone snooping in his gym bag when he’d left her in the car for only a few minutes. She was the only one he could think of-other than those who employed him-who had any inkling of what he did.

He needed to know who she might have talked to. And before she died, Alanna came up with that one name.

The only Constance Tattinger he was able to find any record of was born in Rochester, but her parents moved when she was a little girl after some incident in which a playmate got run over by a car backing out of a driveway. From there they moved to Tennessee, then Oregon, then Texas. The girl had left home when she was sixteen or seventeen, and her parents, speaking to Oscar Fine in the kitchen of their El Paso home, had told him that they’d never heard from her again.

He was pretty sure they were telling him the truth, considering the mother and father were bound to kitchen chairs at the time, and Oscar Fine was holding a knife to the woman’s neck. It was too bad they didn’t have any useful information for him.

He slit both their throats.

Oscar Fine figured she’d been going by other names since his encounter with her. That made it difficult, but he’d never given up. He was pretty sure she and her accomplice had never tried to unload the fake diamonds. Oscar Fine and the rest of the organization he worked for had put the word out to everyone they knew to be on the lookout for them. That many diamonds-real or not-had a way of attracting attention.

And years had gone by without anyone trying to turn them into cash.

Maybe they knew they were fake, Oscar Fine thought. But even if they figured that out, he guessed they’d still try to unload them to someone who didn’t know any better.

Something must have gone wrong. A change in plan. He could imagine any number of scenarios. But he never gave up hope that-someday-they’d try.

When he saw the face of Jan Harwood-all scrubbed up and wholesome-on television, he just knew.

It was her.

Constance Tattinger.

And knowing the kind of person she was, what she was capable of, he was betting she was fit as a fiddle. This was a girl who knew how to look out for herself. Oscar Fine was betting she was going to be needing some cash.

That was when Oscar Fine started making some calls.

“I really appreciate this,” Oscar Fine said to Banura, sitting in his basement workshop.

“No problem, my friend,” Banura said. “Fucker called me Banny Boy.”

“That’s just rude,” Oscar Fine said.

“No shit.”

“You’re sure this is the stuff I’ve been looking for?”

“No question.”

“And they’re expecting how much?”

“Six.”

Oscar Fine smiled. “I’ll bet he got a hard-on when he heard that.” Banura nodded. “Oh yeah. The girl, though, she looked a bit, I don’t know.”

“Dubious?”

“Yeah, dubious. I was thinking, maybe I oversold it.”

“Not to worry.” Oscar Fine looked at his watch. “Almost two.”

Banura grinned. “Showtime.”

FORTY-THREE

The phone in the kitchen rang. I’d been sitting on the stairs for some time, feeling sorry for myself, not knowing what to do next now that I’d torn the house to pieces and found nothing.

I got up and, stepping carefully around the boards I’d pried up here and there, went into the kitchen.

“Hello,” I said. I glanced down at the phone screen, but the caller’s name and number were blocked.

“You should rot in hell,” a woman said.

“Who’s this?”

“We don’t like having wife killers in the neighborhood, so you better watch your back.”

“Thanks for your support. I’ll bet you thought when you made this call your number wouldn’t show. Now you’ll have to watch your back, too.”

“What?” Then, a hurried hang-up.

Give her something to think about.

I’d barely hung up the phone when it rang again. Perhaps she’d figured out I was bluffing. But this time, there was a number showing, if not an actual name, so I picked up.

“Mr. Harwood?”

“Speaking,” I said.

“This is Annette Kitchner. I’m a producer with Good Morning Albany. We’d very much like to have you on our program. You wouldn’t have to come to the studio, we’d be more than happy to come to you to talk about your current situation, and give you a chance to tell your side.”

“What side would that be?” I asked.

“It would be an opportunity for you to refute allegations that you had a role in your wife’s disappearance.”

“Unless you know something I don’t,” I said, “I haven’t been charged with anything.”

In the back of my mind, I heard Natalie Bondurant saying, Hang up, you idiot.

So I hung up.

I took another slow walk through the house, stepping over the ripped-off planks, the dislodged baseboards, the tossed cushions, and wondered what the hell had gotten into me. I’d lost my mind for the better part of an hour.

I heard someone trying the front door, which I had locked behind me when I’d come home. I made my way to it.

“David?” It was my father, shouting through the door.

I turned back the deadbolt and opened the door. His eyes went wide when he saw the damage.

“Jesus, David, what the hell happened here?” he said, stepping in. “Have you called the police?”

“It’s okay, Dad,” I said.

“Okay? You gotta call the police-”

“I did it, Dad. It was me.”

He looked at me, his mouth open. “What the hell’s gotten into you?”

I led him back through the debris into the kitchen. “You want a beer or something?” I asked him.

“There’s thousands of dollars in damage here,” he said, looking at sugar and flour dumped out on the counter, cereal boxes emptied. “And your insurance isn’t going to cover if you did it yourself. Are you nuts?”

I opened the fridge. It was still pulled out from the wall, but I hadn’t unplugged it. “I got a can of Coors in here. You want that?”

Dad shook his head, looked at me, and extended his hand. “Yeah, sure.” He took the can, popped the top, and took a swig. “Beer kind of upsets my system a bit more than it used to, if you get my drift, but maybe half a can.”

I found one more can tucked in behind a carton of orange juice and opened it. After I took a long drink, I looked at my father and said, “So, I’ve been thinking of doing a few things around the house. You up to helping me with that?”

Dad was still too stunned to appreciate the joke. Maybe that was because it really wasn’t much of one.

“Why did you do this?” he asked.

“I thought Jan might have hidden something else in the house. She hid that birth certificate and a key in an envelope behind a baseboard upstairs. I thought maybe she’d done that someplace else.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” Dad said. “What exactly did you think you were going to find?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea.”

The phone rang again. I glanced at it, didn’t recognize the number calling. After two rings, Dad said, “You going to get that?” When I didn’t say something immediately, he added, “What if it’s your wife?”

I picked up. I wasn’t expecting it to be Jan. I was guessing more abuse.

“Hello.”

A voice I recognized. “Mr. Sebastian would like to speak with you.” It was Welland.

I sighed. “Sure.”

“Not on the phone. Out front.”

I replaced the receiver, ignored Dad’s quizzical look, and went out the front door and down the steps to the limo I was now becoming far more familiar with than I wanted to be. Instead of following me outside, Dad went upstairs, no doubt curious about just how much damage he was going to feel obliged to help me fix.

As I approached the curb, Welland, looking thuggish as ever, his eyes hidden behind a pair of Serengetis, came around the front of the car to greet me. The limo windows were so heavily tinted I couldn’t even see Elmont Sebastian’s silhouette inside.

Welland reached for the rear door handle to open it for me.

“I’m not getting inside and I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “If he wants to talk to me, he can put his window down.”

Welland, evidently prepared to accept that, rapped the window lightly with his knuckle, and a second later it powered down. Sebastian leaned forward slightly in his seat so he could see me.

“Good day, David.”

“What do you want?”

“The same thing I wanted the last time we spoke. I want to know who was going to meet with you. I was hoping you’d made some progress in this regard.”

“I told you. I don’t know.”

“You need to find out,” Sebastian said calmly. “That woman, whoever she is, is a threat to my organization. It makes it difficult to move forward with things knowing that someone is prepared to pass on proprietary information.”

“My plate is full,” I said. “But I do have an idea for you.”

Sebastian’s eyebrows went up a notch.

“You could go fuck yourself.”

Sebastian nodded solemnly, said no more, and put the window back up. Once it had sealed him off from the rest of the world, Welland looked at me.

“He’s not going to ask you again,” he said.

“Good,” I said.

“No,” Welland said. “Not good. It means that Mr. Sebastian is prepared to escalate.”

He got back behind the wheel of the limo and took off quietly down the street. I watched the car go until it made the turn at the end, then slowly walked back to the house.

As I went in I could hear Dad mucking about upstairs.

“Dad!” I called.

“Yeah?”

“What are you doing?”

“Starting to figure out how we’re going to get this all fixed up. Goddamn, you really went to town.”

I found him in the upstairs hallway, on his hands and knees, straddling an open stretch in the floor where I’d ripped up a board.

“You can’t let Ethan come back here to this,” Dad said. “There’s a hundred places he could catch his foot and get hurt real bad. There’s nails sticking up all over the place. Damn it, David, I know you’re going through a lot right now, but there’s some really nice hardwood here you’ve gone and ruined.”

I didn’t care about that, but I did feel badly that I had made the house dangerous for my son.

“It was a stupid thing to do,” I conceded.

Dad was collecting boards and putting them to one side. “I should be able to figure out, through trial and error, which boards go where. But some places, you’re going to have to spring for some new wood. And it’s going to take a few days. I can go home and get my tools.”

“You don’t have to do that right now,” I said.

Dad turned and yelled, “What the hell else am I supposed to do? Tell me that! What the hell else!”

I leaned up against a wall, feeling defeated.

“Honest to God, what a fucking stupid thing to do,” he said, padding farther up the hall, watching for nails as he approached the linen closet.

“That was where I started,” I said. “That was where I found the envelope, in there.”

“But you didn’t find anything else,” he grumbled.

He reached for a piece of white baseboard I’d pried away from inside the linen closet, turned it over to look for nails, and said, “Hello.”

“What?” I said.

“What’s this?”

I moved closer. It was an envelope, similar to the one I’d found before, taped to the back side of the baseboarding. When I’d ripped the boards off, I’d been looking for what might be left behind them, not what might be taped to the back of them.

Dad peeled the tape away. It was yellowed and brittle. When he had the envelope free, he handed it to me. It was sealed. I ripped open the end, blew into it, and pulled out the single piece of paper that had been placed inside. It was folded in thirds.

I unfolded it.

It was another birth certificate, for a child named Constance Tattinger.

“What is it?” Dad asked.

“A birth certificate,” I said.

“Whose?”

Slowly, I said, “I’m not sure.” I knew I’d heard that name. At least the first name, Constance. Recently, within the last couple of days.

“Well, whose name is on it?” Dad asked.

“Dad,” I said, holding up my hand to tell him to keep quiet. “Please.”

I tried to think.

The name had come up at the Richlers’. Constance was the name of Jan’s playmate. The little girl who had been playing with her in the yard when Horace Richler backed his car too quickly out of the driveway.

The little girl who had pushed Jan Richler into the path of the car.

I looked back at the birth certificate, looking for a date of birth for Constance Tattinger.

April 15, 1975. Just a few months before the date of birth on the Jan Richler birth certificate.

I scanned the rest of the document. Constance Tattinger had been born in Rochester. Her parents’ names were Martin and Thelma.

“Jesus,” I said.

“What?” Dad said.

“It all fits.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If you were the grown-up Constance Tattinger, and you needed a new identity, and you were looking for someone who’d died as a child, you could save yourself a lot of time by picking one you already knew about.”

“Constance who?”

“Not just someone you knew,” I said. “But someone whose death you had a hand in.”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Dad said.

I needed to confirm this. I went to the phone, got the number again for the Richlers in Rochester, and dialed.

“Hello?” Gretchen Richler.

“Mrs. Richler,” I said. “It’s David Harwood.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I have a question.”

“Okay.” Tiredly.

“You mentioned the first name, I think, of the little girl who was playing in your yard when… the accident happened.”

“Constance,” she said. Gretchen made the name sound like ice.

“What was her family’s name?”

“Tattinger,” she said without hesitation.

“Do you know what happened to her family? Didn’t you say they moved away?”

“That’s right. Not long after.”

“Do you know where they moved to?”

“I have no idea,” she said.

“Do you know anyone in the Rochester area who might know?”

“I have no idea. I really don’t.” She paused. “Why are you asking?”

I didn’t want to reveal to Gretchen Richler things I didn’t know for certain. So I fudged. “I’m just looking into every angle I can think of, Mrs. Richler, that’s all.”

“I see.” Another pause. “Have you found your wife, Mr. Harwood?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“You sound hopeful.”

It was my turn to pause. Finally, I said, “Yes.”

“You think she’s alive.”

“I do. But I don’t yet understand all the circumstances behind why she disappeared.”

“I see,” she said.

“Thank you, Mrs. Richler. I appreciate this. I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Please pass on my regards to your husband.”

“Perhaps I’ll be able to do that when he gets home from the hospital,” Gretchen Richler said coldly.

“I’m sorry? Something’s happened to your husband?”

“He tried to kill himself this morning, Mr. Harwood. I think your visit, and your news, were all a bit too much for him.”

FORTY-FOUR

“I’m not going in,” Jan said. “I’m not going down into that basement.”

They were sitting in the pickup, parked in the driveway up close to Banura’s nondescript Braintree house. A couple of houses down, a black Audi was parked at the curb.

“Look,” said Dwayne. “Is it because I lost my cool back there? Is that it?”

Lost your cool? You nearly killed me, Jan thought.

“If that’s what this is about, I’m sorry,” he said, laying it on so thick she could tell he wasn’t. “We’re minutes away from becoming millionaires, you know? You gotta keep your eye on the prize.”

“I’ll keep a watch out here,” she said. “If there’s a problem, I’ll lay on the horn.” Dwayne eyed her suspiciously, prompting Jan to add, “What? You’ve got the goods, you’re going in to get the money. What am I going to do? Drive off?”

That mollified him. “Okay, I guess not.” He appeared thoughtful.

The thing was, she’d been thinking about it. She didn’t give a shit about what might happen to Dwayne, but she needed to know how this was going to play out. If there was still a chance, even one in a million, that she was wrong, that there might be some money in this for her, she was hanging in.

“What if Banny Boy decides to give the stones another inspection?” Dwayne asked. “What if they don’t pass the inspection this time?”

“So, what, now you believe me?” Jan said. “You believe what that woman said?”

Dwayne suddenly looked trapped, less sure of himself. “I don’t know.” He shook his head, as if to cast off any doubts. “No, this is good. Everything’s fine. He looked at the diamonds, he liked them, he offered us money for them. That’s good enough for me. If you want to sit out here and be a big pussy, that’s fine.”

“Good,” Jan said. “Because this is exactly where I’m staying.”

Dwayne glanced at his watch. It was five minutes to two. “This shouldn’t take long, unless he wants me to count the money. How long do you think it would take to count six million?”

“A long time.”

“I don’t want him cheating me.”

“If he’s got a bag of money for you, take it. We’ll go somewhere and count it, and if he shortchanged us, we’ll come back and pay him a visit.” Not that she believed that for a second. If they got away from this house with anything reasonable, she wasn’t coming back. She didn’t ever want to see those photos on the wall again. The picture of that kid, probably Banura, waving a severed arm about. Made her think maybe she had more in common with him than she wanted to admit.

“Yeah, okay.” Dwayne grabbed the bag of diamonds, opened the truck door, the key chiming in the ignition, and started getting out.

“Wait,” Jan said. “Take the gun.”

Dwayne looked at her scornfully. “You heard what the man said. He said not to bring any weapons into his house. He was pretty clear about that.”

Jan leaned across the front seat and reached under it. She pulled out the gun. “Seriously, you should take it.” It wasn’t Dwayne she was worried about. But if things went south in that basement, it was best that Dwayne took care of them before someone came charging out looking for her. And she’d rarely handled guns. At least Dwayne knew how to point and shoot.

Dwayne said, “You need to lighten up.” He put both feet on the ground, slammed the door shut, and said through the open window, “Think about where we’re going to go to celebrate. I am going to get fucking wasted.”

As Dwayne walked down the left side of the house, Jan shifted over behind the wheel, and kept the gun on the seat next to her.

• • •

“So let me ask you this,” Banura said to Oscar Fine. “I know you don’t give a flying fuck about the diamonds, since they’re worth shit, so I’m guessing, if you don’t mind my saying, that this has something to do with that.”

Banura pointed to the end of Oscar Fine’s left arm.

“Yes,” he said. “That’s right.”

“So these two, these are the people who did this to you.”

“One of them,” he said. “The woman. You described her perfectly.”

Banura nodded. “That must have hurt like a son of a bitch.”

Oscar Fine nodded. He didn’t like to talk about it all that much.

“I seen a lot of that kind of thing, where I come from. It’s a little more common there than it is here.”

“I can imagine. I’ve seen your photos.”

Banura nodded. “I was eleven.”

“To do something like that, at eleven, it must stay with you,” Oscar Fine said.

Banura appeared thoughtful. “Yes.” It was difficult to discuss such things with a man who had had his hand chopped off.

There was a loud rapping on the door above them. Oscar Fine took a position around the corner from the bottom of the stairs while Banura went up to answer it. Oscar Fine took his gun from inside his jacket and held it firmly in his right hand.

Oscar Fine listened as Banura moved the bar out of position and opened the door.

“Hey,” Banura said.

“How’s it going,” said Dwayne.

“Raise your arms, please.” Dwayne did as he was told, allowing Banura to pat him down.

“You can trust me,” Dwayne said. “You said not to carry, I don’t carry.”

“Where is your friend?” Banura asked.

“She’s just waiting for me in the truck,” he said. “I didn’t come too soon or nothin’, did I? You got the money?”

“Everything is all set to go,” Banura said, closing the door and putting the bar back in position. “You brought the same number of diamonds back, I hope?”

“Fuck yeah.” Dwayne laughed. “That’d be a pretty dickish thing to do, get a generous offer from you and then come back with half the goods.”

Banura chuckled along with him as they came down the stairs. As Dwayne entered the room, he glanced right, saw Oscar Fine standing there, left arm tucked into his pocket, right arm extended, pointing the gun directly at his head.

“Hey, whoa, the fuck is this?” Dwayne said. To Banura, he said, “Okay, you said you might have a whatchamacallit, an associate, here, that’s cool, but you got no call to threaten me.”

“Do you remember me?” Oscar Fine asked.

“Huh? You his banker or bodyguard or what? I’m not looking for any trouble. I’m just here to pick up what’s owed me.”

Banura stood at the bottom of the stairs, blocking Dwayne’s way should he decide to bolt.

“I asked, do you remember me?” Oscar Fine said.

“I got no idea who the fuck you are,” Dwayne said.

The man with the gun took his left arm out of his pocket. Dwayne looked down, maybe expecting to see another weapon, then noticed the missing hand.

He paled instantly. A moment later, the crotch of his jeans darkened.

“Aw, shit, don’t piss on my floor, man,” said Banura, although he had to know that a puddle of urine on his basement floor was going to be the least of his worries in a few minutes.

“I take that to mean that you do remember me,” Oscar Fine said, pointing the gun below Dwayne’s waist.

“Yes,” Dwayne said.

“Tell me your name.”

“Dwayne. Dwayne Osterhaus.”

“Well, Dwayne Osterhaus, it’s very nice to meet up with you at last. Although we didn’t have a real face-to-face, I believe you were the driver.”

“You shoulda had a combination or something,” Dwayne said. “Then, you know, things would have been different. Wouldn’t have had to, you know, with the hand.”

“It was difficult to communicate a combination to you once you’d shot me with the dart,” he said.

“I’m really sorry, man, honest to God,” Dwayne said. “And I know you kind of passed out and everything, but you understand, I wasn’t the one who actually did it, you know that, right?”

“I remember who did it,” Oscar Fine said. “Where is she?”

Dwayne hesitated.

Oscar Fine said, “Please, Dwayne, you must see where this is going. It’s in your interest to be cooperative. Here, let me show you something.” He held up his left arm. The shirt cuff was tucked around the stump, and Oscar Fine slipped it up his arm with the index finger looped through the trigger of his gun.

“No, that’s okay,” Dwayne said.

“Not at all, my pleasure,” Oscar Fine said. He pulled away the fabric and displayed the ragged, but healed, end of his arm.

“Jesus,” Dwayne said.

“He can’t help you,” Oscar Fine said. Satisfied that Dwayne had had a good look, he tucked his shirtsleeve back around the wound. He asked, “Are you left- or right-handed?”

The spot on Dwayne’s pants broadened. Oscar Fine repeated the question.

Dwayne swallowed. “Right.”

“Then I shall take your left. No sense making this any more difficult than it needs to be. And I trust Banura here has something that will allow me to make a cleaner cut than the one I was left with.”

Sweat droplets were forming on Dwayne’s forehead. “You don’t need to do anything like that. If you let me go, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s in the truck.”

“Why didn’t she come in with you?”

“She’s nervous,” Dwayne said.

“And why would that be?”

“She thinks Mr. Banura here was offering us too much money. She got suspicious. So she took some of the diamonds to someone else to look at, and they said they’re worthless.”

Oscar Fine nodded. “But yet you’re here.”

Dwayne appeared on the verge of tears. “I took Mr. Banura here at his word.”

“So it’s ‘Mister’ now,” Banura said. “No more ‘Banny Boy.’”

“Hey,” Dwayne said, smiling nervously. “No disrespect.”

“So she thought something was wrong,” Oscar Fine said. “Does she suspect I’m here?”

“She never said that. She’s just spooked, is all.” Dwayne brightened, wiped the tears from his eyes. “I got an idea. You don’t take my hand off, you let me walk away from this, and I’ll go out to the truck, and I’ll tell her there’s a problem, that some of the money, it’s in some weird currency, like euros or Canadian, and she needs to help me count it, and I’ll get her in here, and then you can let me go. Because, swear to God, I never wanted her to cut your hand off. I was all, hey, let’s go someplace, get some stronger tools. What we brought wasn’t good enough, to cut through the chain? You know what I’m saying? I’d drive the limo somewhere where we could take some time, do it right, so you wouldn’t get hurt. But she got all kind of caught up in the moment and went crazy, but you need to know, I was totally opposed to that shit.”

Oscar Fine nodded, as though considering the proposal.

“So you bring her to me, and then I let you go.”

Dwayne nodded furiously, offered up a nervous smile. “Yeah, that’s right. That’s the deal. I wanna help you out here.”

“I have some questions,” Oscar Fine said.

“Oh yeah, sure, no problem.”

In fact, Oscar Fine had quite a few. About where the two of them had been the last six years. About who Constance Tattinger had become. Where she’d been living, and with whom. Dwayne tried to be as obliging as possible. He told Oscar Fine everything he knew.

“You’ve been very helpful,” Oscar Fine said.

“Yeah, well, you know, it’s the least I can do, considering.” Dwayne attempted another smile. “So, whaddya say, I bring her in here, and you let me go?”

“I don’t think so,” Oscar Fine said, and shot Dwayne Osterhaus in the center of his face. “There’s no reason I can’t go out and talk to her myself.”

FORTY-FIVE

Oscar Fine offered his apologies to Banura. “I have made a mess, and I accept full responsibility for that.”

Banura was looking at the blood and brain matter on the wall behind where Dwayne had been standing. The bullet had gone through his head and out the back.

“I seen worse,” Banura said.

Oscar Fine wrote a number on a piece of paper on Banura’s work-table. “Call that number, tell them Mr. Fine told you they’d handle things. They’ll come and take care of all this. Cleanup as well as removal.”

“Appreciate it,” Banura said.

“But you might as well wait a few minutes until I have the other one,” he said, and Banura nodded.

“Do you have any other way out of here?” Oscar Fine asked. “Someone could be watching this door.”

“No,” he said. “This is all walled off from the rest of the house, only access is from the back door. You can’t even get to the furnace from here. There’s another set of stairs down in the regular part of the house. But there are cameras.”

“Show me.”

Banura led Oscar Fine over to the worktable, where in addition to his jeweler’s tools there was a keyboard and an ultra-thin flat-screen monitor. Banura tapped a couple of keys, and suddenly the screen was divided into equal quadrants, each one offering a different view of Banura’s property.

“There’s a wide-angle camera on each side of the house,” he said.

Oscar Fine leaned in, looking at the upper right corner, which was a view of the street out front of the house, with the driveway off to the far right. He could see the pickup, but given the angle and the way the light was reflecting off the windshield, it was difficult to make out who, if anyone, was inside. There was no one on the passenger side, and too much glare to determine whether anyone was behind the wheel.

“Hmmm,” he said.

The camera mounted at the back door showed no one in the yard, which appeared to be empty by design. No storage shed to hide behind, no trees with broad trunks. Just a flat yard of dead grass bordered by a six-foot plank fence.

Banura pointed to the lower left quadrant.

“You see that?”

Oscar Fine had missed it. “What?”

“There was-look.”

In the upper right image, the pickup truck was starting to back up.

The moment after Dwayne disappeared around the corner of the house, Jan thought, I’m outta here.

She was working out possible scenarios in her head for what was going on:

Banura was a moron and didn’t know the first thing about diamonds. Unlikely.

The woman in the jewelry store was a moron and didn’t know the first thing about diamonds. Ditto.

Banura knew they were fake, didn’t like being conned, and was going to teach them a lesson when they returned. Possible, but why wait until 2 p.m.? Why not teach them a lesson earlier?

Banura needed time to set something up. That seemed likely. But Jan didn’t think it had anything to do with getting the money together.

Could he have been in touch with Oscar Fine? After all these years, could that man still be putting the word out, reminding those in the business to be on the lookout for a large quantity of fake diamonds? And a particular woman who matched her description?

Get out of here, she told herself.

She had her hand on the key, got ready to turn it. All she had to do was start the engine, put the truck in reverse, get on the interstate, put as much distance as possible between herself and the greater Boston area.

And go where?

All these years, she’d had a plan. Get out of Promise Falls, head to Paradise. But she needed the cash from those diamonds to buy her ticket.

Worthless.

She waited all that time to get what she wanted, never stopping to think for a moment she might already have something.

That phony life was a real life.

A real house.

A real husband.

A real son.

All traded away for this. A long shot. A chance to have enough money to live the rest of her life on her own terms, playing only herself. All so she could head to that mythical beach. She’d never even figured out where it was. Tahiti? Thailand? Jamaica?

Did it matter?

And when she got there, she could dream of telling her mother and, especially, her father, Fuck you. I’m here, living the life, and you’re not.

The beach seemed far away now.

She was sitting in a pickup truck outside Boston, waiting for some clueless ex-con to show up with six million dollars, wondering whether her entire world was about to go to shit.

She took her fingers off the keys and reached into her purse. Tucked into a side pocket was a photo, creased and tattered. She took it out, held it carefully, the photo as light and fragile as a fallen autumn leaf. She looked into the face of her young son.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. She set the photo on the seat next to her.

She sat there another moment, her hand on the keys, ready to bail. But there was part of her that still wondered: What if.

What if, by some fluke, Dwayne had called it right?

Everything told her he had it wrong. But what if he walked out with the money and she wasn’t there?

She needed a sense of how things were going.

Jan left the keys in the ignition and got out of the truck, first grabbing the gun she’d been unable to persuade Dwayne to take. She walked down the side of the house, rounded the corner, and went up to the door.

Didn’t knock. Just looked at it. Wanted it to open. Didn’t want it to open.

Very faint noises, muffled by the heavy door, came from inside. The hint of a voice, high-pitched, whiny. The kinds of noise she could imagine Dwayne making.

She caught a few phrases.

“… swear to God, I never… I was all, hey, let’s… get some stronger tools… know what I’m saying? I’d drive the limo…”

Jan didn’t need to hear any more. She’d been sold out. They’d be coming for her next. Any second now that door would be opening.

Should she wait, shoot whoever came out? No, not good, just standing there. It was just as likely she’d be the one to end up taking a bullet. She moved off the door, pressed herself up against the house, and in doing so happened to look up and saw the tiny camera mounted below the eaves.

She’d spent so much time at Five Mountains, scoping out where all the closed-circuit TV cameras were, she thought she might have noticed that one sooner. If there was one there, there was probably one on each side of the house.

They might already know she was out there, waiting by the door.

She had to run.

She bolted, rounded the corner of the house, grabbed the handle on the driver’s door with her left hand, the gun still in her right. She jumped in, dropped the gun onto the seat, and turned the ignition.

The engine didn’t catch the first time.

As she turned the key a second time, she noticed a figure coming out from behind the house. A man in a long jacket, wielding a gun in his right hand. It was pointed in her direction.

The engine caught and she threw the column shifter into reverse and had her foot on the gas even before she’d turned to make sure no one was there. She threw her right arm over the seat, turned around, bounced from the driveway to the street and cranked the wheel.

The windshield shattered.

For a millisecond she looked back in the direction of the shot, saw the man with the gun.

Saw the left arm with no hand at the end.

A blue Chevy coming down the street laid on the horn as the back end of the pickup lurched into its path. The car swerved, a man shouted “Asshole!” and the car kept on moving.

As Jan slammed on the brake and put the truck into drive, Oscar Fine fired again. The shot didn’t hit the truck, but Jan had the sense it went in through the passenger window and out the driver’s door.

Oscar was running into the street now, his face set in grim determination. Jan cranked the wheel hard again and stomped on the accelerator, narrowly missing him with the truck’s right front fender. He pivoted so hard he went down to the pavement, even though he hadn’t been hit.

The gun was still on the seat next to her, but there was no time to use it. And what kind of shot could she get off anyway, driving flat out, Oscar Fine directly behind her?

She raced past the black Audi, guessing that was his car. But he was still a good fifty feet away from it. By the time he reached it, got in, fired it up, she could be a block or two away.

It might be just enough of a head start.

She heard a sharp ping, above and behind her head. Sounded like a bullet had gone into the cab, above the back window.

It just made her drive faster. She glanced into her mirror, saw the man running for the black car. It was the last image she had of him before she hung a hard right and kept on going.

She never noticed that, in all the excitement, the wind had swept up her picture of Ethan and carried it out the window.

Oscar Fine was about to take chase when he saw the piece of paper fluttering through the air.

He was almost glad for an excuse not to get in the car and go after Jan Harwood. Chases invariably ended badly. A crash. Attracting the attention of the police. And with only one hand, it was difficult for Oscar Fine to perform quick steering maneuvers.

If he could find her once, he could find her again. Especially with everything Dwayne had told him. He let the car door close and walked up the street to pick up the piece of paper. It appeared to be nothing more than a simple white square, but after he bent over, picked it up, and flipped it over, he saw that it was a photograph.

A picture of a small, smiling boy. Oscar Fine slid it into his pocket.

That was when it occurred to him that if he was going to have to go out of town, he was going to have to call someone to feed his cat.

FORTY-SIX

Not long after my talk with Gretchen Richler, there was an unexpected call.

I grabbed the phone before the first ring was finished. “Hello?”

“Mr. Harwood?” A woman’s voice. Something about it was familiar.

“Yes?”

“You’re not the person to do this story anymore.”

“What? Who is this?”

“I sent you the information about Mr. Reeves’s hotel bill. So you could write about it. Why didn’t you do a story?”

I took a second to focus. “He paid Elmont Sebastian back,” I said. “My editor felt that killed it.”

“Well, then give that list to someone else, someone who can get the story done. I called the paper and they told me you were off or suspended because your wife is missing. I don’t want anyone who might have killed his wife working on this story, no offense.”

“List? What are you talking about? A list?”

She sighed at the other end of the line. “The one I mailed to you.”

I patted my jacket side pocket, felt the envelopes I’d stuffed in there when I’d passed my mailbox on the way out of the Standard. I dug them out. One of them was from payroll, another was a useless news release from a soap company, and the third was a plain white envelope addressed to me, in block printing, with no return address. I tore it open, took out the single sheet of paper and unfolded it.

“Mr. Harwood?”

“Hang on,” I said, scanning the sheet. It was a handwritten list of names of people on Promise Falls council, with dollar amounts written next to them. They ranged from zero up to $25,000.

“Jesus,” I said. “Is this for real? Is this what Elmont Sebastian’s been paying these people?”

“You’re just looking at this now?” the woman said. “That’s what I mean. That’s why someone else should be looking into this. That son of a bitch Elmont has screwed me over one time too many, and I want to see him nailed. You want to do a story, ask women at Star Spangled Corrections how they like getting felt up every day by the male employees and no one at the top giving a damn.”

So she did work for Elmont. And the hell of it was, considering my current situation, she was right. Someone else should be doing this story.

I asked, “Why didn’t you show up at Lake George?”

“What?” she said. “What are you talking about?”

“The email you sent me. To meet you up there.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. “I’m not meeting you or anyone else face-to-face. You think I’m stupid?”

She hung up.

I sat there a moment, slid the paper back into the envelope and stuffed it back into my pocket. Any other time, this would have made my day, but getting a great story wasn’t exactly a priority at the moment.

But one thing my anonymous caller had said stuck with me. She had not emailed me to meet her in Lake George. Someone else had lured me up there. It was all part of the setup. It fit in perfectly with Natalie Bondurant’s theory.

Jan.

I spent pretty much all of the rest of that day trying to find out everything I could about Constance Tattinger. I didn’t have a lot to work with. There must have been a Tattinger family living in Rochester in the 1970s and 1980s, but after that, according to Gretchen Richler, they had moved away.

I explained to Dad that I had some work to do, and he said he did as well. He was going to get started on repairing all the damage I’d done in the house.

He phoned my mother and explained, quietly, what had happened, and that he was going to stay there for the rest of the day, if that was okay with her. It would mean she’d have to look after Ethan without any assistance.

Mom said that was fine. She asked to speak to me.

“Tell me how you are,” she said.

“I’m losing my mind, but otherwise, okay,” I said.

“Your father says you’ve ripped your house apart.”

“Yeah. And I felt pretty stupid about it, until Dad found something I missed. I think I have a lead on Jan.”

“You know where she is?”

“No, but I think I know who she is. I could really use a computer. I need to search for people named Tattinger.”

“Your father says he’s coming home for more tools. I’ll send him back with my laptop.”

I thanked her for that, and said, “Something bad happened, something I feel responsible for.”

Mom waited.

“Horace Richler-he tried to kill himself. I stirred things up. And finding out that someone was out there-my wife-using his daughter’s name, it was too much for him.”

“You’re doing what you have to do,” Mom said. “It’s not your fault, what happened to that man’s daughter. Whatever it is that Jan may or may not have done, that’s not your fault, either. You need to find out the truth, and that may be difficult for some people.”

“I know. But they’re good people, the Richlers.”

“Do what you have to do,” Mom said.

I told Dad to make sure he came back with Mom’s laptop. He was already making a list of things he needed and added “laptop” to the bottom.

“Be back in a jiff,” he said.

I called Samantha Henry at the Standard. “Can you do me a favor?” I asked her.

“Shoot,” she said.

“I need you to check with the cops, whoever else you can, see what you can get on the name Constance Tattinger.”

“Spell it.”

I did.

“And who’s this Constance Tattinger?”

“I’d rather not say,” I said.

“Oh, okay,” she said. “So you’re on suspension, the cops think you may have killed your wife, and we’re actually writing stories about you, one of our own employees, and you want me to start trying to dig up info for you without telling me why.”

“Yeah, that’s about right,” I said.

“Okay,” said Sam. “Can you give me any more than a name? D.O.B.?”

“April 15, 1975.”

“Got it. Anything else?”

“Not really. Born in Rochester. I think her parents left there when she was just a kid.”

“I’ll call you if I get anything.”

“Thanks, Sam. I owe you.”

“No shit,” she said. “If we had any journalistic ethics around here, I might be troubled by this.”

“One more thing,” I said. “The story about Sebastian and Reeves I’ve been working on?”

“Yeah?”

“It’s yours. I’ve got something that’ll finally break this story wide open. A list of payouts to various councilors.”

“What?”

“I can’t sit on this. I don’t know when I’m coming back. This story needs to be told ASAP. You should do it. I’ll hang on to this list, give it to you next time I see you, see if you can find a way to confirm the numbers.”

“Where’d you get this list?”

“I can fill you in later, okay? I’ve got to go.”

“Sure,” Sam said. “I really appreciate this. I’ll nail this thing for you.”

“Right on,” I said and hung up.

Dad was back within the hour. He dragged in his toolbox, a table saw, some scraps of baseboarding he must have been keeping in his garage since God invented trees, and went upstairs. It wasn’t long before I heard him banging around.

I took Mom’s laptop, got it up and running, and started with the online phone directories. There weren’t all that many people with that name in the U.S.-about three dozen-and only five listings for an “M. Tattinger.” They were in Buffalo, Boise, Catalina, Pittsburgh, and Tampa.

I started dialing.

People answered at the Buffalo and Boise numbers. Not necessarily the actual people who had the phone listing, but the Buffalo Tattinger was a Mark, and the Boise Tattinger was a Miles.

I was looking for a Martin.

In both cases, I asked if they knew of a Martin Tattinger, who, with a woman named Thelma, had a daughter named Constance.

No, and no.

No one answered at the Catalina and Pittsburgh numbers, and the Tampa listing had been disconnected.

I figured I might be able to raise someone later in the day at the other numbers, once people were home from work. In the meantime, I tried to figure out what school Jan Richler and Constance Tattinger might have attended-they must not have gotten any further than kindergarten or first grade together. I studied a Google map of where the Richlers lived, found the names of nearby elementary schools and scribbled down their numbers.

As I began dialing, I realized it was August. The schools would be empty for a few more weeks. But I also knew, from friends who were teachers, that staff were often there in the month leading up to that first day, preparing.

At the first school, I reached a vice principal, but her school, she explained, didn’t even exist in the 1980s. It had been built in the mid-’90s.

While I waited for someone to pick up at the next school, I tried to replay in my head the conversation I’d had with the Richlers when I was in their house. Gretchen had been talking about how devastated everyone had been by their daughter’s death, including her kindergarten teacher.

She’d mentioned a name. Stevenson? Something like that.

An older woman picked up. “Diane Johnson, secretary’s office.”

I told her, first, that I was relieved to find someone at the school, then launched into my story about looking for information about a Constance Tattinger who had attended the school-briefly-back in 1980.

“Who’s calling?” she asked.

I was reluctant to say, considering that even CNN had carried an item on Jan’s disappearance, and my face and name had been plastered across the tube. But my name and number were very likely displayed on Diane Johnson’s phone.

“David Harwood,” I said. “I didn’t go to school in the Rochester area, but I’m trying to track down Constance, or her parents, because of a family emergency.” I put a special emphasis on the last two words, hoping they sounded grave enough that Diane Johnson would help me, and not ask a lot of questions.

She said, “Well, that was the year before I started here, so I can’t honestly say I remember the name.”

“I think she only attended kindergarten there,” I said. “Her parents took her out of school and moved away. She was friends with a girl named Jan Richler.”

“Oh now, hang on,” said Diane Johnson. “That name I know. We have a plaque dedicated to her memory in the hall right outside the office. She was the child who got run over by a car.”

“That’s right.”

“It was her father driving. I think he was backing out of the driveway.”

“Yes, you’ve got it.”

“What a terrible thing. Even though I wasn’t here yet, I remember a bit about that. There was talk that she got pushed into the car’s path.”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s the girl I’m calling about. Constance Tattinger.”

“Oh my, that was so long ago.”

“As you can guess, it can be hard to find someone when you lose track of someone that far back.”

“I don’t really know how I can help you.”

“Would you have any school records? That might have any information about Constance? Where she might have moved to?”

A bell rang in the background for several seconds. When it finished, Diane Johnson said, “They’re just trying them out today.” Then, “We don’t have records that old here. They might be with the central office, but I’m not sure they’d release them to you.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Do you remember her teacher’s name?”

I struggled. “I want to say Stevenson.”

“Oh. Could it have been Stephens? With a P-H?”

“That’s possible.”

“Tina Stephens was the kindergarten teacher here when I arrived. She was here for a couple of years and then transferred to another school.”

“Do you have the name of that school?”

“I don’t remember offhand, but there’s a good chance she’s taught in half a dozen places since then. Teachers move around a lot.”

“Maybe if I called your central office.”

“I can tell you this. She got married. Let me think… she met the nicest man. He worked for Kodak, I think. But then, who hasn’t at some time or other?”

“Do you remember his name?”

“Hang on a minute, there’s someone else in the office here who might know.” I heard her put down the receiver. I clung to the phone, kept it pressed to my year, while Dad hammered and sawed upstairs.

Diane Johnson got back on and said, “Pirelli.” She spelled it for me. “Like the tires? I never heard of tires called that. The only kind of tires I’ve ever heard of are Goodyear, but that’s what they said it’s like. Frank Pirelli.”

I wrote it down. “Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been very helpful.”

I quickly found a listing for an “F. Pirelli” in Rochester and dialed. The phone rang three times before it went to message: “Hi. You’ve reached the voicemail of Frank and Tina Pirelli. We can’t come to the phone right now, but please leave a message.”

I didn’t leave one. I was starting to feel like I was spinning my wheels.

The day dragged on.

At one point, Dad said he needed something to eat, so he went out and bought us a couple of submarine sandwiches stuffed with meatballs and provolone. We took a break and ate them sitting at the kitchen table.

I said, “Thanks.”

“No big deal,” Dad said. “Just a couple of sandwiches.”

“I’m not talking about the sandwiches.”

Dad looked embarrassed and opened the fridge to see whether there was any more beer.

Late afternoon, not long after I’d tried the Catalina listing a second time with no luck, the phone rang. Mom said, “Ethan wants to talk to you.” Some receiver fumbling, then, “Dad?”

“Hey, sport, how’s it going?”

“I wanna come home.”

“Soon,” I said.

“Nana says I have to stay here all day.”

“That’s right.”

“I’ve been here for days and days.”

“Ethan, it’s only been a couple.”

“When’s Mommy coming home?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Are you being a good boy for Nana?”

A hesitation. “Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“She yelled at me about jumping on the stairs.”

“Is that all?”

“Yes. Now I’m playing with the bat.”

“Bat?”

“The okay bat.”

I smiled. “Are you playing croquet with Nana?”

“No. She says it makes her back hurt to hit the ball.”

“So how do you play by yourself?”

“I hit the wood ball through the wires. I can make it go really far.”

“Okay,” I said. “Is Nana making anything for dinner?”

“I think so. I smell something. Nana! What’s for dinner?” I heard Mom talking. Then Ethan said, “Pot roast.” He whispered, “It’s got carrots in it.”

“Try to eat just one carrot. It’s good for you. Do it for Nana.”

“Okay.”

“What time’s Nana serving dinner?”

Ethan shouted out another question. “Seven,” he said.

“Okay, I’ll see you then, okay?”

“Okay.”

“I love you,” I said.

“I love you, too,” he said.

“Okay. Bye, sport.”

“Bye, Dad.”

And he hung up.

• • •

I tried the Rochester Pirelli number again.

“Hello?” A woman.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m trying to find Tina Pirelli.”

“Speaking.”

I tried to hide the excitement in my voice. “Would this be the Tina Pirelli who once taught kindergarten in Rochester?”

“That’s right.” A suspicious tone in her voice. “Who’s calling?”

“My name is David Harwood. I’m trying to find someone who I think was a student of yours, very briefly, back then.”

“David who?”

“Harwood. I’m calling from Promise Falls.”

“How did you get my number?”

I told her, briefly, about the steps I’d taken to find her.

“And who are you trying to find?” she asked.

“Constance Tattinger.”

There was silence at the other end of the line for a moment. “I remember her,” Tina Pirelli said quietly. “Why are you trying to find her?”

I’d thought about whether to make up a story, but decided it was better to play it straight. “She grew up to become my wife,” I said. “And she’s missing.”

I could hear Tina draw in her breath. “And you think I’d know where she is? I haven’t seen her in probably thirty years, when she was just a little girl.”

“I understand,” I said. “But when her parents moved away from Rochester, did they say where they were moving to?” Having had no luck so far tracking down a Martin Tattinger in the United States, I wondered whether they could have moved to Canada or overseas.

“Considering the circumstances,” Tina Pirelli said, “they didn’t really have much to say to anyone. They just moved away.”

“The circumstances being… the accident?”

“So your wife has told you about that,” she said.

“Yes,” I lied.

“Poor Constance, everyone blamed her. Even though she was just a child. Her parents pulled her out of school, and eventually moved away. I don’t have any idea where. I’m sorry. You say she’s missing?”

“She just disappeared,” I said.

“That must be terrible for you,” she said.

“It is.”

“I only had Constance for a couple of weeks. The accident was in September. But she was a good girl. Quiet. And I saw her only once after the accident.”

“How was she then?” I asked.

Tina Pirelli took so long to answer, I thought the connection had been broken. “It was like,” she said, “she’d stopped feeling.”

I called the Pittsburgh listing for M. Tattinger.

“Hello?” A man. Sounded like he could be in his sixties or older.

“Is this Martin Tattinger?” I asked.

When the man didn’t respond right away, I asked again.

“No,” the man said. “This is Mick Tattinger.”

“Is there a Martin Tattinger there?”

“No, there isn’t. I think you must have the wrong number.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “But maybe you can help me. My name is David Harwood. I’m calling from Promise Falls, north of Albany. I’m trying to find a Martin Tattinger, who’s married to Thelma. They have a daughter Constance, and last I heard, they were living in Rochester, but that was some time ago. You wouldn’t by any chance be a relative, know anything about how I might find Martin?”

“The Martin Tattinger you’re looking for is my brother,” he said flatly.

“Oh,” I said, suddenly encouraged.

“He and Thelma, they moved around a lot, ending up in El Paso.”

I’d seen no Tattinger listing for El Paso. “Do you have a number for him there?” I asked.

“Why you trying to get in touch with him?” Mick Tattinger asked.

“It’s about their daughter, Constance,” I said, not disclosing, this time, my relationship to her. “There’s reason to believe she might be in trouble, and we’re trying to contact her parents.”

“That’s going to be hard,” Mick said.

“Why’s that?”

“They’re dead.”

“Oh,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t realize they’d passed on.”

Mick snorted. “Yeah, passed on. That’s a nice way to put it.”

“I’m sorry?”

“They were murdered.”

“What?”

“Throats slit. Both of them. While they were tied to the kitchen chairs.”

“When was this?”

“Four, five years ago? It’s not like I circle the date on my calendar, if you know what I mean.”

“Did they catch who did it?” I asked.

“No,” Mick Tattinger said. “What’s this about Connie?”

“Constance-Connie is missing,” I said.

“Yeah, well, there’s nothing exactly new about that. She’s been missing for years. Martin and Thelma, when they died, they hadn’t heard from her for ages, had no idea what happened to her. She took off when she was sixteen or seventeen. Not that I could blame her. You telling me she’s turned up?”

“It looks that way,” I said.

“Son of a bitch,” he said. “Where the hell is she? She probably doesn’t even know her parents are dead.”

“I think you might be right,” I said.

“She might get some satisfaction from knowing,” Mick Tattinger said. “Martin was my brother and all, but he was an ornery son of a bitch. We hadn’t been close for years. Him and Thelma wouldn’t ever have won any Parent of the Year awards. His bitchin’ and her drinkin’ and mopin’ about, they were a pair. But still, that doesn’t mean they deserved what they got. Martin was fixing cars, running a garage in El Paso. Far as I know, he was keeping his nose clean. So why does someone come and kill them? Nothing was stolen.”

“I don’t know,” I said quietly.

“But Connie’s alive? That’s a kick in the head. I figured she was probably dead, too.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I don’t know. She was so screwed up, you know? It all goes back to something that happened when she was little, but no sense getting into that.”

“The girl that got run over in the driveway.”

“Oh, so you already know about that? Martin was a prick even before that, but after the accident, things really turned sour. He was working for a dealership that was owned by the dead girl’s uncle. He took it out on Martin, fired him. Martin blamed Connie, which to a degree I suppose you could understand, but she was just a kid, right? But he never did let up on her. Found another job at a dealership in another town, ended up taking the fall when someone broke in and stole a bunch of tools. Wasn’t Martin that did it, but management thought it was and fired him. Now he’d been fired from two jobs and things got worse. He finally found some other work, but it didn’t matter what happened, he always put the blame on Connie, like she was their own bad luck charm.” Mick paused, trying to recall something. “What was it he used to call her? He had a name for her.”

“Hindy,” I offered.

“Yeah, that was it. For ‘Hindenburg.’”

“How’d she handle it?” I asked.

“The few times I saw them all together, it was kind of strange.”

“What do you mean?”

“It was like… it was like she was in another place.”

“Excuse me?”

“Like she wasn’t there. It was like she was imagining she was someplace else, or someone else. I think it was her way of surviving.”

I was listening, nodding my head.

“Who’d you say you were?” he asked, and I told him my name again. “If and when you find Connie, you tell her to get in touch. Would you do that?”

“Sure,” I said.

“What are you? Some kind of private investigator?”

“A reporter,” I said. “I’m a reporter.”

Dad came down to the kitchen.

“It must be dinnertime,” he said, looking at the clock. It was 6:40 p.m. “When did your mother say we were supposed to go over?”

I said, “Huh?”

“What’s wrong with you? You look like you’ve seen a ghost or something.”

“Something like that,” I said.

The phone rang. I glanced down at the display. Mom. Or possibly Ethan, who had learned some time ago how to use the speed dial on his grandparents’ phone.

I picked up. “Yeah.”

“I can’t find him,” Mom said, her voice shaking. “I can’t find Ethan.”