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He nodded tiredly. It hit her that he must have been up all night. “I didn’t want to. Finding the speeding ticket with his name, it didn’t mean the guy writing to us was him, did it?”

No, of course it didn’t.

“And anyway, why would he?” Chip said. “If he’d gone to all that trouble to be … well, dead to the world, I guess you’d call it. That was going to be our working title. But Carolyn said we had to come,” he finished resignedly.

He stopped, seeming to hear how foolish the whole thing must sound. She turned into the driveway, pulled to a stop.

“You’d have to know Carolyn,” he said finally. “If there was even a chance that it was true, it would make her next book another big success. And she wanted to check out the area, the background, too.”

At this, the energy returned to his voice. “The place, the people. Mostly people—survivors, what they feel about it all.”

He turned earnestly to her. “Carolyn always says it’s not the crime that makes a book a big hit. It’s the emotions.”

Which both of you planned to exploit
. Grief, guilt, revenge—the old saying “If it bleeds, it leads” was as true for books as it was for news coverage, Jake supposed.

Although maybe that wasn’t fair. She’d never read a Carolyn Rathbone book. She decided to change the subject.

“Sam’s dad passed away a few years ago,” she said, turning off the car. “I don’t know if you’d heard.”

He stared out the car’s side window at the big old houses lining this part of Key Street, where ship captains and lumber barons had built their homes in the early 1800s. The architecture ranged from vast, elderly Queen Annes to narrow Carpenter Gothics with pointy roofs and elaborate gingerbread.

The plain four-square Federals, like Jake’s house, were the oldest,
built right after the War of 1812 when the British had decamped from their loyalty-oath-demanding occupation and people decided it might be safe to come back.

“No. Dr. Tiptree died? I’m sorry, I didn’t know,” Chip said. “And … how’s Sam?”

“He’s okay. He’s had a few bad times, in and out of alcohol rehab, mostly.”

Ordinarily, she’d have hesitated about saying this. But Chip already knew Sam’s life was no rose bed in the substance-abuse department.

Back when Chip started coming around, Sam’s pals had been introducing Sam to the fun of aerosol-propellant huffing. Things had only gone downhill from there.

“The troubles didn’t end when we moved here. For a while it was pretty grim. But it’s better now,” she added.

Fluffs of insulation lay on the lawn where they’d landed a few hours and a lifetime ago. She laid both hands in her lap.

“Why did you do it, Chip? Why were you such a good friend to Sam? I’ve always wanted to ask you.”

His lips pursed. “I don’t know. I just liked him, I guess. I’d always wanted a kid brother, and …” His voice trailed off, perhaps at some painful memory. “And you know, at the time I wasn’t exactly Mr. Popularity myself,” he added wistfully.

“Right. Well, I guess a lot of us weren’t at that age.” They sat in silence a moment. Then it hit her again why he was here.

“How’d you get yourself into this?” she asked.

He gazed at the huge white house with its wide lawn and big garden areas, the pointed firs widely spaced along the rear lot-line. It wasn’t a mansion, but from the outside it could be mistaken for one.

“If I had it to do over again, believe me, I wouldn’t. I told Carolyn it could be dangerous, but …”

They got out and walked toward the house. He kept looking up at it puzzledly. “But like I said before, she talked me into it, as usual. And I let her.”

Also as usual
, his tone said. For all their crime-writing experience-but none as victims, apparently—the two of them had been as innocent as Hansel and Gretel, Jake realized.

Which was how they’d walked into a trap, and yet another reason why she meant to keep close tabs on Chip. Who knew what further foolish things he might do otherwise, and how they might make Sam’s situation worse?

Seeming to be thinking the same, he made a face. “This is all my fault,” he said ruefully.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself.” Then, alerted by something in his voice: “Chip, do you have feelings for this girl? I mean, more than—”

But to that he shook his head emphatically. “No, of course not. That is, we’ve worked together awhile, I think we know each other pretty well. But like I told you, Carolyn’s … difficult.” He craned his neck back, gazing up at the high front gable again. “A stone bitch, actually. Wow, this place is big.”

Straightening, he peered around at the quiet street with its other huge old houses set far apart, all the stately gray-trunked maples lined up in front of them.

A few white flakes drifted down. The peace and quiet here was as loud and unnerving as any Manhattan taxi horn, until you got used to it.

Maybe more so. “So, you just came up here and started living like this?” he asked wonderingly.

An iPod stuck out of his shirt pocket. Everything in Eastport was very different from the city he was used to, she realized. The space, the pace … She hadn’t heard a car horn in months.

And when she had heard one, it had been getting leaned on by a tourist. An iPod wasn’t a common sight around here, either—too expensive … .
Remembering all this, she made a mental note to take it easy on Chip Hahn, as much as she could.

“Why?” he asked. “Why’d you do it?”

He waved at the massive antique structure with its peeling paint and sagging shutters, its acres of clapboard and trim. She couldn’t see the crumbling red brickwork of the three chimneys from this angle, but the porch steps needed painting again, too.

“Believe it or not, I thought it would bring order to my life,” she replied. And in many ways, it had. But at the moment she couldn’t remember any of them.
Sam
, she thought.

“Come on,” she told Chip, starting up the steps. “We’d best get you situated. You should have something to eat and drink and maybe get cleaned up a little if you want to, and then we’ll go get your car.”

He’d given up the idea of a rental cabin when he couldn’t find Carolyn anywhere, he’d said, and parked at the Motel East instead, without checking in. His things were in the car, too.

It struck her as odd that a fellow like Chip, who’d seemed so capable and confident just now at the police station, had apparently been getting pushed around pretty thoroughly by his writing partner.

But that also was a topic for later. “And we’ll talk about what else to do about Carolyn and Sam,” she added. Thinking,
Sure, right after I jump off a tall building and learn to fly
.

Because what the hell am I supposed to do when—
On the porch she turned. He was nowhere in sight. “Chip?”

Inside, the phone began ringing. “Chip, damn it …”

The front door was unlocked. The kitchen shone spotlessly, smelling of soap and scouring powder. It meant her housekeeper-slash-stepmother, Bella Diamond, had been here recently.

But Bella wasn’t here now. A mixing bowl and spoon stood on the kitchen counter. The dogs looked up sleepily from their beds.

“Hello?” she called out. “Is anyone home?”

The phone kept ringing. She dashed to answer, but as she did, it stopped.

The machine’s red light winked at her, though, signaling that a call had come in earlier. She pressed the “play” button—

“I’m going to kill you!”
a high, disguised voice promised cheerfully, followed by a giggle.

Click
.

A
MILLION DOLLARS
.

Chip Hahn felt ashamed even to be thinking about it as he shoved his way through the shrubbery at the back of the Tiptree house. A million in cash …

Wincing as the thorns on some kind of red-berried bushes scratched at his hands, he cringed inwardly even harder at the kind of greedy jerk he knew he was being.

It was even worse than last night, when he’d actually been thinking
about doing something bad to Carolyn. Only this time, he wasn’t stopping at thinking about doing a bad deed. This time …

In his mind he recited again the coordinates Roger Dodd had written down, where he said he’d floated the money:
44.91 N, 67.02 W …
For once, Chip thought grimly, his good memory had come in handy.

And with any luck, maybe Roger Dodd’s brother, Randy, hadn’t gotten to the cash yet.
Hurry …

He pulled his trusty iPod from his shirt pocket and thumbed his playlist on without looking at it, Blondie’s classic “Heart of Glass” with its pulsing bass and crystalline vocals urging him forward. The big white house behind him loomed over the expansive yard like an observation tower.

Next, he cut through a dormant rose garden put neatly to bed for the season, row upon row of low, perfectly spaced bushes covered with burlap and tied with twine.

He darted between the bushes, careful not to disturb the loose mulch heaped around them. The house they belonged to was a low, white cape with two stone lions on the front steps, a wide center chimney, and a massive copper beech in the front lawn.

A curtain twitched in an upstairs window of the cape. A burl as big as his head seemed to stare ominously at him from the beech tree’s rough bark. Chip hustled across the frozen lawn to the sidewalk beyond, looked up and down it.

One way led into a warren of small streets, frost-browned yards with boats on rusty trailers, and dirt driveways containing older-model cars and trucks. The other way, downhill toward the water, lay a stretch of larger homes featuring Andersen windows, prepainted siding, and red-brick front walks.

He recognized them, or at least he understood instinctively the impulse they represented:

Keep your things nice
.

The banal phrase encompassed what he’d been taught from the time he was a very small child. Your house, your car, the parts that
other people could see of your body … It was a class thing, he knew, this obsession with personal maintenance.

It said you deserved your wealth, that you had been born or had become the sort of person who was inclined to preserve and defend capital, and Chip knew that drill only too well. After all, he’d been rich himself once, and at a level that made the well-kept dwellings he was rushing past look like the most abject poverty.

But deciding to be a writer instead of going to Yale Law and joining the family’s generations-old firm as an associate, wading in hip-deep, as his father had so delicately put it—Hahn & Associates was a global concern that hid its bloodlust for courtroom victory, along with its dodgier clients (of whom there were many), beneath a stodgy exterior—had taken care of that. In the Old Bastard’s opinion, not wanting to be a lawyer in his firm was like wishing you had horns and a forked tail. Or actually having them …

Hurrying downhill toward the water that glittered at the foot of the street, Chip recalled the night he’d broken the news. The Old Bastard had glared at him, all wattled and lizard-eyed, from the far end of the dining room table.

Between them, there had been about an acre of white linen covered with china, crystal, and silver. The meal had been roast beef, bloodily dripping. There was no one else in the room. A bell sat by the old man’s right hand.

“Screw you,” the Old Bastard had said, and, ignoring the bell, had thumped the table to demand more cabernet.

Chip had been only eighteen then, and had believed the Old Bastard might change his mind. He hadn’t, though, which mostly accounted for Chip’s financial situation right now. People who refused to do what he wished, the Old Bastard thought, deserved what they got.

Which of course had been nothing. At the corner in front of the long, low Motel East overlooking the bay, Chip made a beeline for the Volvo in the lot, grabbed his topcoat from the back seat, and pulled it
on. Glancing around guiltily, though he wasn’t sure why, he headed downtown, trying not to think about where Carolyn might be right now and what might be happening to her.

Serves her right
, a mean little part of his brain said. But she didn’t deserve this—whatever
this
was—and Chip couldn’t go on pretending he felt that way for long.