Now, of course, Meredith knew. Everyone knew.


Things at the jail had ended badly. Freddy didn’t say a single word. He stood up and offered his wrists to the guard like a well-trained monkey-and the guard, without so much as a glance at Meredith, shackled him back up.

“Wait!” Meredith said. She jumped up abruptly, knocking her chair over, and she slapped her palms against the Plexiglas. “Freddy, wait! Don’t leave. Don’t you dare leave!” She felt a force on her arms, the guards grabbed her, and she struggled to break free. She shouted, “They’re going to throw us in jail, Fred! Your family! You have to fix this! You have to tell them we’re innocent!” The guard had her bent over in a half nelson. She screamed. “Freddy! Goddamn it, Fred, tell them!”

The guard led Freddy away. It was no use; there was no getting him back. He was going to let them drown. Meredith’s body went limp in the guard’s grip; she clapped her mouth shut. She had never, ever raised her voice in public. She thought, He’s drugged. Or they’d given him a lobotomy or shock treatment. He’d been sitting right there, but he hadn’t been himself. He would never willfully let his wife and son go to the gallows.

Would he?

As Meredith was led back down the depressing hallways from whence she’d come, she had to admit: she didn’t know.


“So you still haven’t spoken to him?” Connie said. “You haven’t gotten any answers?”

“No answers,” Meredith said. “My attorneys told me that Freddy has stopped speaking altogether. They’re diagnosing it as a type of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

“Give me a break,” Connie said. “Freddy?”

It seemed unlikely. Freddy was tough. He had come from nothing. His father had left the family when Fred was in diapers, then Fred lost his only brother, but he had shored himself up. He didn’t believe in things like PTSD. He was a pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps kind of guy. He was a nothing’s-gonna-happen-until-you-make-it-happen kind of guy. He had been so hard on the boys, Meredith remembered; they’d had to earn Fred’s respect. There were no excuses for bad grades or bad behavior or a missed fly ball. There were no excuses if they forgot a “please” or a “thank you,” or if they neglected to hold the door for their mother. You kids have it so much easier than I had it. You don’t even know. You don’t know a thing.

Burt and Dev had confirmed with prison officials that Freddy Delinn had completely shut down. He was spending time in psych, but they couldn’t make him talk. He spoke to no one.

“Sometimes prisoners use this as a form of control over their captors,” Burt said. “He’s like that Indian in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”

So he was being willfully mute, Meredith thought. Which should not be confused with PTSD. He was pulling a Chief Bromden. Had Freddy even read Cuckoo’s Nest?

“I don’t know what to do,” Meredith said to Connie. “Freddy is the only one who can save me, and he won’t do it.”

“Forget Freddy,” Connie said. “You’re going to have to save yourself.”


That night, Meredith didn’t sleep. Goddamn you, Freddy, she thought (zillionth and second). But she was sick with worry about him. By now, he would be getting adjusted to the horrors of his new, incredibly permanent home. What did it look like? What did it smell like? What did they feed him? Where did he go to the bathroom? Where did he shower?

And how were the boys? Meredith had seen some of the houses that Carver renovated-he favored glorious old Victorians in sad, sagging disrepair. He yanked out carpet and sanded down the long-hidden wood floors beneath. He drove around to architectural salvage places looking for glass doorknobs and stained glass windows. In Meredith’s imagination, the boys were living in such a house; it smelled like polyurethane; every surface was coated with sawdust. Carver hung doors while Leo lay across a high-backed sofa, talking to Julie Schwarz on the phone. Meredith knew the Feds had seized his computer and were trying to back up Deacon Rapp’s claims and link Leo to the bandits on the seventeenth floor. The Feds were still trying to track down Mrs. Misurelli in Italy so they could depose her. She, apparently, had been the gatekeeper upstairs. In this case, being “under investigation” for Leo was a lot of sit around and wait. Maybe in his spare time-and there would now be much of it-Leo helped Carver paint bedrooms or shingle the roof or repoint the brickwork of the eight fireplaces. Meredith was certain Anais was around; she had remained steadfast. She would cook her famous veggie enchiladas for Leo and Carver, and she would grow jealous about how much time Leo was spending on the phone with Julie Schwarz.

Meredith was okay picturing the boys like this, although Leo was a worrier and she knew he’d be having night sweats. For years when he was a child, Leo had wandered into Meredith and Freddy’s bedroom, afraid of the dark. He had a recurring dream about a scary pelican. Now the scary pelican was real: It was Deacon Rapp, it was the FBI, it was Freddy. Meredith couldn’t stop the unbidden flashes of Leo in prison, his head shaved, the other men coming after him day and night with their sick desires. Leo was only twenty-six.

Fear gripped her like hands around the neck, the way it could only happen in an unfamiliar room in the pitch black of night. Take me if you must, Meredith thought. But do not take my son.

Connie had been right about one thing: Meredith was going to have to save them herself.

But how? How?


In the morning, Connie said, “I’m going to the Sconset Market for some muffins and the newspaper. And I’m going to the package store for a case of wine.”

Meredith nodded and tried not to seem like an eager, panting dog. Don’t leave me here alone, she thought. Please.

“I know you want to come with me,” Connie said. “But Sconset is a tiny village, and everyone who summers there has summered there forever. Strangers are scrutinized. Someone will ask you who you are, guaranteed. The Sconset Market is microscopic. So you’re going to have to stay here. We don’t want anyone…”

“Right,” Meredith whispered. “I know.”

“I won’t be gone long,” Connie said.


Meredith took an old book-club selection of Connie’s out onto the deck. She would read in the sun; this was what people did in the summertime. This was what Meredith had done for days on end all those years in Southampton. She had read by her pool, walked to the ocean, swam with the boys and watched them surf; she had pitched the Wiffle ball to them and chased after their grounders. She had thrown the Frisbee to the dog. She had cut flowers from the garden and had given instructions to their housekeeper, Louisa. She had invited people for dinner, and made reservations at Nick and Toni’s, and dealt with the details of the various fundraisers she was chairing. Her life had been disgustingly easy; it had, in so many ways, been beneath her. Brilliant and talented, her father used to say. And yet, what had she done with it?

Goddamn you, Freddy, she thought (zillionth and third). She tried to concentrate on the words on the page of her book-it was about a woman in a small town who is murdered-but Meredith’s mind was squawking. She lived with a bullhorn in her head, loudly announcing and reannouncing her fears; it was the internal soundtrack of extreme anxiety. There was medication for it, perhaps. Meredith wondered if Connie had anything. She didn’t want to snoop, but a few minutes after Connie left the house, Meredith padded upstairs to the master suite. She just wanted to see it.

The door that led to the suite was closed tight, and Meredith wouldn’t have been surprised or insulted if the door had been locked. After all, Connie was now rooming with the wife of the biggest crook in history. But the door was open, and Meredith tiptoed through the rooms. The bedroom had an arresting view of the ocean, and the bed was made up with Frette linens (Meredith checked, she couldn’t help herself, though she knew she shouldn’t care about things like thread count anymore). The closets were roomy. Wolf’s closet was completely empty except for some padded hangers and a thick, nubby fisherman’s sweater folded on the dresser. Meredith touched the sweater, then felt she had, somehow, crossed a line. She didn’t look in Connie’s closet, though she would have liked to-even as a schoolgirl, Connie had had a flair for fashion. However, Meredith couldn’t help from peeking in the master bath-and that was when she saw the prescription bottles. There were four or five of them, and Meredith was sure that one of those prescriptions would help her. She eyed the brown bottles for a long, hot moment, then she made herself retrace her steps and leave the suite, shutting the door behind her.

She wondered if it was a bad thing that Connie had brought her to this beautiful house where she had nothing to do but think. If she had been scrounging half-eaten Big Macs out of a Dumpster, consumed with worry about her daily survival, she wouldn’t have this much time to think.

And that might have been better.


Back on the deck, Meredith tried to read. The woman in her novel was worse off than she was; she had been murdered in the woods. The mother of that woman was worse off than she was. But then Meredith realized she was that woman. If Leo went to prison, he would be raped, beaten, and eventually killed. She was sure of it. But she had to stop thinking like this. The bullhorn blared in her head. Freddy was in Butner for all eternity. Meredith was here. How had she gotten here?


Before Meredith graduated from high school and attended Princeton and fatefully met Freddy Delinn in the stacks of the campus bookstore, there had been one presiding fact in Meredith’s life, and that was that she loved her parents. She had loved her mother, Deidre, certainly, but she had been especially devoted to her father.