“It wasn’t my fault,” she insisted. “I was doing what I thought right.”

“What do you mean by that?” he asked. “What did you have against David?”

“I was just doing what I thought was best.”

“Best for whom?” James asked.

She turned back to him, her eyes blazing defiantly. “For Laura.”

“And is the same true with Gloria and Stan? Are you doing what’s best for Gloria?”

Mary closed her eyes tightly and leaned back. Thoughts flew aimlessly through her mind. She tried hard to concentrate but it was so difficult.

James was so wise sometimes, she thought. He was right, of course. This time, her words had not been said in the hopes of protecting her daughter. This time, she had put herself first. And that was wrong. Her daughters must always come first. Always.

Fear crawled around Mary’s shoulders. Calm down, she told herself. After all, what harm could Stan Baskin cause her and her family now?

The answer made her shiver.

A nervous smile danced about Richard Corsel’s face as he stood to greet Laura. His thin hair needed combing. His face needed a shave. He was hardly the neat and proper bank vice president Laura had encountered in the past.

“Mrs. Baskin,” he said, his smile stretching for a moment before returning to its original state, “it’s a pleasure to see you again.”

“Thank you.”

“Please have a seat,” he continued. “How are you feeling on this fine day?”

“Fine.”

“Good, good.” He looked around liked a caged animal searching for an opening. “Can I get you something? Coffee?”

“No, thank you. Mr. Corsel, you said on the phone you have something urgent to tell me.”

His smile collapsed as if from exhaustion. “I do—or at least I might.”

“I don’t understand.”

He shook his head slowly. “Neither do I, Mrs. Baskin. Neither do I.”

“What do you mean?”

Corsel picked a pen and then put it back down. “I mean I looked through your husband’s records again. Something might be wrong.”

“Wrong?”

“Might be wrong,” Richard Corsel corrected. He opened his desk drawer and took out a file. “May I ask you a question, Mrs. Baskin?”

Laura nodded.

Corsel leaned back in his chair. His gaze rested on the ceiling and stayed there. “According to the newspapers, your husband went swimming on June seventeenth and drowned sometime that day between the hours of four and seven o’clock in the afternoon, Australian time. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

He nodded, his eyes still on the ceiling. “There is a fourteen-hour time difference between here and Australia—we’re fourteen hours behind them. That would mean Mr. Baskin died sometime on June seventeenth between one a.m. and four a.m. Boston time.”

“Right.”

Corsel sat forward, but he still could not look at her. “His call to me came on June seventeenth at eight thirty in the morning. That’s nearly midnight in Australia and at least five hours after he drowned.”

Cold fear seeped into Laura.

“Here,” Corsel continued, tossing the file at Laura. “Read it. According to this, Mr. Baskin called me several hours after his drowning.”

“Are you sure about the time? Could you have made a mistake?”

He shook his head. “Not possible. Even though I recognized your husband’s voice and he said the access code number, I insisted on verification due to the magnitude of the transaction.”

“What do you mean, verification?”

He swallowed. “I asked him to give me the phone number of where he was so that I could call him back. A woman with an Aussie accent answered and transferred my call. The number is written there. There is also a copy of the phone bill, which reconfirms the time.”

Laura skimmed through the file until she saw a phone number: 011-61-70-517-999. Then she saw the time of the call. Her heart fell deep into her stomach. How . . . ? The call had been placed at eight forty-seven a.m. on June 17. Thirteen minutes before midnight in Australia. Several hours after David had drowned.

“The zero-one-one is for an international call,” Richard Corsel explained. “Sixty-one is the country code for Australia. Seventy is the city code of Cairns.”

Cairns, Laura thought. That was where she had met with the Peterson Group, the meeting that had taken place while David drowned in nearby waters. . . .

“I don’t understand, Mr. Corsel. How could David have placed a call to you after he drowned?”

Corsel shrugged. “I’m not a detective, Mrs. Baskin. I only know the facts you see in front of you. As much as it pains me to say, I think you were right. Somehow, someone was able to get David’s access code and imitate his voice well enough to fool me. I can’t imagine what else it could be . . . unless, of course, the coroner was wrong about the time of death.”

Laura slumped back. If the coroner had been wrong, where had David been for all those hours? And why would David move around his money hours before taking a midnight swim?

“Can I keep this file, Mr. Corsel?”

“I’d prefer if you just wrote down what you want to know for now. Of course, I’ll keep trying to track down the missing money. Your husband . . . I mean, whoever made that call had this access code and insisted on absolute secrecy, so please, Mrs. Baskin, I never showed this to you. This time I’m worried about something a lot more valuable than my job.”

Laura nodded. She understood what he meant.

WHEN Laura and Serita arrived at Laura’s place, Laura picked up the phone and dialed 011-61-70-517-999. She pictured her call traveling through thousands of miles of wires and satellite transmissions that led from Boston to a small city on the other side of the world in Australia. After a few seconds, a loud static came over the line. Then she heard the ringing of a telephone.

Laura gripped the phone impossibly tight and listened. The receiver on the other end was picked up after the third ring. A piercing feedback traveled halfway across the globe, followed by a young woman’s voice: “Pacific International Hotel. Can I help you?”

15

LAURA hung up the phone without speaking.

“What is it, Laura?” Serita asked. “Whose number is it?”

Laura remembered the hotel so well. The window from the Peterson office had given her a perfect view of the Marlin Jetty’s only high-rise structure. “The Pacific International Hotel.”