Chapter 5

We got the gates unlocked at seven-forty, after Nadia Fenn made two calls and a man in a booth at the end of the pier spoke into a radio. The festival crowd drained off the boardwalk like water off a tilted table. Sophie fell asleep against my shoulder in the passenger seat of Nadia's car and didn't wake when we stopped.

I had expected to be taken to the bluff house. I wasn't. Augustin's driver took us to a small hotel three streets up from the pier - the kind of place with a real key and a night clerk who doesn't ask questions - and Nadia paid for a week.

"Nobody knows you're here," she said. "Not Preston. Not the Foundation. I used my own card."

At nine-fifteen the next morning, Rosalind Rourke Ainsley came to the pier.

I recognized her from the framed portrait in the pavilion's donor alcove: silver bob, pearl studs, cream cashmere, a handbag that probably cost more than my car. She arrived in a black sedan with a driver and she came straight to the maintenance workshop, where I was sanding a rail I had no business sanding, because my hands have to do something or I start to shake.

"Ms. Velasco," she said. "May I sit?"

"There's sawdust on everything."

"I don't mind sawdust."

She sat on a stool. She folded her hands. And then she did something I did not expect: she started to cry, briefly, efficiently, one tear, which she blotted with a tissue from her sleeve without smudging her eye makeup.

"I have spent thirty-five years," she said, "trying to protect my brother from a story I did not think he could survive."

Augustin came in behind her. He stood by the door. He didn't say anything.

Rosalind opened her handbag and took out a large brown envelope, softened with age, and from it a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds.

"This came to the house eleven days after Celia disappeared," she said. "I intercepted it. I was the one who opened the mail because Augustin couldn't." She held it out. "I have never shown him."

The letter was typed.

I have your daughter. She is safe and well cared for. I want two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in unmarked bills, delivered where I say, and then you will never see me again. Do not go to the police or she will pay for it.

It was signed in a looping hand: E. Velasco.

I read it twice. Then I looked at Augustin, and his face had gone the way a house goes when they turn off the last light: dark, and quiet, and done.

"Elena was unstable," Rosalind said gently. "I hired her from our office pool. She was kind with children, but she'd had a hard life, and she had a son in college she couldn't pay for. I've blamed myself every day. When the letter came, I made a decision - a wrong one - because my brother had just buried his wife and I thought a demand for money was survivable and a body was not. So I paid part of it. And then she vanished, and there was never another letter, and I have spent thirty-five years giving money to private investigators who found nothing."

She turned to me.

"And now here you are," she said. "With that necklace. And I don't know what to think."

The workshop was quiet. Dust hung in the light from the high window. I understood, standing there, why everyone loved her, and why everyone believed her, because I believed her, standing there. It was such a clean story. A desperate woman, a grieving family, an old regret.

"You should do the test," Rosalind said. "Privately. I'll arrange it through a lab we use - I'll pay, and there won't be a record. If it's negative, we'll never speak of it. If it's positive..." She stopped. "If it's positive, we will do this properly. You'll want a lawyer of your own, and I'll want to make sure Sophie's school isn't disrupted, and - may I say something as an old woman? Overnight, money goes strange. I've seen it. I'd rather have one quiet week than one loud year."

She left the envelope and the letter on the workbench.

I picked the letter up.

She watched me do it.

And while Augustin was walking her back down the pier, I slid the letter into my apron pocket without asking anyone's permission, because there was one thing on that page that didn't sit right, and I couldn't say yet what it was.