“Oh,” Connie said. “Yes, absolutely. That would be wonderful.”

“Okay,” the chief said. “Your first priority will be getting the paint off your house, and our first priority will be finding out who did this.”

“There’s something I should explain,” Connie said.

“And what’s that?” he asked.

“Meredith Delinn is staying here.”

“Meredith Delinn?”

“Yes. She’s the wife of…”

“I know who she is,” the chief said. “She’s staying here?”

“She’s a friend of mine from growing up,” Connie said. “We’ve been friends forever.”

The chief removed a pen from his back pocket and started taking notes. (What would he write? BFF?) He said, “Well, that explains things a little bit, doesn’t it? Explains them but doesn’t excuse them. We’ll do what we can to find out who did this and to make sure it doesn’t happen again. I’ll start by putting a squad car on this road every hour throughout the night. Do you mind if I speak to Mrs. Delinn?”

“Um,” Connie said. Meredith was still in her nightgown, and Connie was protective and suspicious. This guy was the chief of police, but what if he turned around and sold the story to the National Enquirer? “Just a minute. Let me ask her.”

The chief nodded. “I’ll call my power-washer connection from my car. I take it you’d like him here as soon as possible?”

“Yes,” Connie said. “Thank you.” She was trying not to look at the front of her house. That poisonous green, the absurd size of the letters, the ugly word. It was a scream, written on her house. CROOK. People had called Richard Nixon a crook. John Dillinger had been a crook. Bonnie and Clyde. But none of those people had been a crook like Freddy Delinn.

“Meredith?” Connie said. She saw that Meredith had gone upstairs and changed into what Connie thought of as her Doomsday outfit: her white button-down shirt, now a little wrinkled, jeans, suede flats. Already, it was too warm for the jeans. “The chief of police is here. He has questions for you. Is that okay?”

Meredith nodded.

“You don’t have to talk to him,” Connie said.

“I will.”

Connie beckoned the chief inside, and the three of them sat at the dining-room table.

Connie said to the chief, “Can I get you some coffee?”

The chief held up a hand. “I’ve already had my three cups.”

“Ice water then?”

“I’m all set, thanks,” the chief said.

Connie brought a pitcher of ice water and three glasses to the table nonetheless. She poured herself a glass, returned to the counter where she sliced a lemon and put the slices in a shallow bowl. The three of them were sitting in a house that screamed CROOK, but there was no reason they couldn’t be civilized.

“So,” the chief said. “You’re in luck. I’ve gotten hold of a man to do the power washing. He’ll be here before noon today, he said.”

“Excellent, thank you,” Connie said.

The chief lowered his voice to speak to Meredith. He was responding to the situation, or to her pinched face, which was drained of all color. Or he was responding to her diminutive size-five foot one, a hundred pounds. Meredith had complained all her life that her petite stature caused people to treat her like a child.

“Do you have any idea who might have done this?” the chief asked her.

Connie couldn’t help herself from interjecting. “Well, yesterday, something happened.”

“What happened yesterday?” the chief said.

“Someone left an envelope on my front porch,” Connie said. “And in the envelope was this photograph.” She slid both the photograph and the envelope across the table.

The chief studied the photograph. “So you don’t know who took this?”

Connie shook her head. “It was just left on our porch. Like someone was telling us they knew Meredith was here. It was creepy.”

“Creepy,” the chief agreed. “You should have called us then.”

Connie felt a flash of triumph. Meredith cast her eyes down at the table.

“We figured out it was a photographer dressed as a seal,” Connie said. “It was taken from the water, night before last, around six o’clock.”

“And then it was left on your porch. You found it when?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“Yesterday morning. And you didn’t call the police. And now this morning you have this vandalism.”

Meredith said, “I’m sorry. I should have let Connie call the police. She wanted to. But I didn’t want anyone to know I was here.”

The chief took a noticeable breath. “You’ll forgive me for being indelicate and asking the obvious. Are any of your husband’s former investors living on Nantucket that you know of?”

Meredith raised her face to the chief. Her expression was so blank, Connie was scared.

“Mary Rose Garth lost forty million. The Crenshaws lost twenty-six million; Jeremy and Amy Rivers lost nine point two million; the LaRussas lost six million and so did the Crosbys and so did Alan Futenberg. Christopher Darby-Lett lost four and a half million.”

The chief scribbled. “These people live on Nantucket?”

“They’re summer residents,” Meredith said. “The Rosemans lost four point four, the Mancheskis lost three eight, Mrs. Phinney lost three five; the Kincaids, the Winslows, the Becketts, the Carlton Smiths, Linsley Richardson, the Halseys, the Minatows, and the Malcolm Browns all lost between two and three million. The Vaipauls, the McIntoshes, the Kennedys, the Brights, the Worthingtons…”

Connie sucked down a glass of cold water and tried not to let her surprise show. She had no idea so many of Freddy’s investors were on this island. She and Meredith were sitting in the heart of enemy territory.


The chief left an hour later with a list of fifty-two names of Nantucket summer residents who had lost over a million dollars in Freddy’s scam. He couldn’t question any of them without probable cause, but it was good to have the list to reference, he said. Of course, he pointed out, it wasn’t certain that the vandal was an investor; there were all kinds of creeps in the world. The chief was taking the photograph and the envelope with him. The main thing, he said, was that Connie and Meredith should try to relax while remaining vigilant. The house had an alarm system, though Connie had never felt the need to set it. Nantucket-and Tom Nevers in particular-was so safe! She would set it tonight; she would set it from now on.

“And we’ll send a squad car out like I promised,” the chief said. “Every hour on the hour throughout the night.”

“Thank you,” Connie said. She hated to see him go. He was the first man to help her in this kind of practical way since Wolf had died. And he was handsome. She checked for a wedding ring. He wore a solid gold band-of course. Chiefs of police were always happily married, with a couple of kids at home. That was as it should be. Still, Connie was pleased with herself for noticing him. It felt like some kind of progress.


Less than an hour later, there was a knock at the door, and both Connie and Meredith froze. They were still at the dining-room table, drinking coffee and letting their bowls of cereal grow soggy. Meredith was talking in circles-mostly about the investors who lived on Nantucket. She only knew a few of them personally. She, of course, knew Mary Rose Garth (net loss $40 million); everyone in New York society knew Mary Rose Garth, the anorexically thin, sexually lascivious rubber heiress. She had served on the board of the Frick Collection with Meredith.

And Jeremy and Amy Rivers (net loss $9.2 million) had been friends of Meredith’s from Palm Beach.

Meredith told Connie that she had met Amy Rivers during a tennis clinic at the Everglades Club. Amy had a high-powered job for a global consulting firm; she had gone to Princeton three years behind Meredith, though Meredith didn’t remember her. But they bonded over their equally pathetic backhands and their mutual admiration of the tennis pro’s legs, and became casual friends. Amy traveled all the time for business-Hong Kong, Tokyo, Dubai-but when next she was in Palm Beach, she called Meredith to go to lunch. They sat out on the patio at Chuck and Harold’s-very casual, very friendly-but at the end of the lunch, Amy bent her head toward Meredith as if to confide something. Meredith was wary. Palm Beach was a vicious gossip town. Meredith was okay with accepting confidences, but she never, ever told any of her women friends a single thing about her personal life.

Amy said, “I have money to invest. In the neighborhood of nine million. Do you think there’s any way I could get into your husband’s fund? I hear his returns are unbelievable.”

“Oh,” Meredith said. She felt a bit deflated. She had thought that Amy Rivers had chosen to befriend her because she recognized Meredith as being in a category above the run-of-the-mill Palm Beach matron. While it was true Meredith didn’t teach anymore, she was extremely smart and capable. But now it seemed that what Amy had been after, really, was a way into Delinn Enterprises. The fact of the matter was, Meredith had no say in who was chosen to be an investor. People asked her all the time if she could “get them in” with Freddy; even the cashier at Publix, who had inherited money from her great-uncle, had asked. But when Meredith mentioned these people to Freddy, he always said no. He had some secret set of criteria for accepting investors that he wouldn’t share with Meredith, and quite frankly, she didn’t care. Still, for certain people, she agreed to ask. Although she felt a tiny bit stung by Amy Rivers, Meredith promised to lobby Freddy on her behalf. Amy clapped a hand over her mouth like she had just been named Miss America.

“Oh, thank you!” she said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you! Here’s my card. You’ll let me know what he says?”

When Meredith talked to Freddy about Amy Rivers, Freddy asked who she was.