“No,” Meredith said flatly. “I’m not.”

“You have to,” Connie said.

“The man wants you to himself,” Meredith said. “Last night was fine, but I’m not going to be a tagalong all summer.”

“Well, I can’t leave you here by yourself,” Connie said. “Not after what happened this morning.”

“I’m a big girl,” Meredith said. “I’ll be fine.”

Connie grinned. It was amazing what a little romance did for a person. Her tires had been slashed with a hunting knife, and yet Connie was floating. Meredith thought she might insist one more time that Meredith come along, and if she had, Meredith would have agreed. She liked the sound of a boat ride-out on the open water, Meredith wouldn’t be confronted with anyone she knew. And she was afraid to be left home by herself. She would spend the day behind locked doors, huddled on the floor of her closet.

But Connie didn’t insist, and Meredith figured that Connie was ready to be alone with Dan. The phone in the house rang just then, and Meredith nearly jumped out of her skin. Connie hurried to get it-she may have thought it was Dan, or the police with a suspect. A few seconds later, she said, “Meredith? It’s for you.”

Leo! Meredith thought. Carver! But then Meredith chastised herself. She had to stop thinking like that. It was hope, ultimately, that would bring her down.

“Who is it?” Meredith asked.

“Some fifteen-year-old boy who says he’s your attorney,” Connie said.

Meredith took the phone. She felt a surge of jangly nerves. Good news? Bad news? Bad news, she decided. It was always bad news.

“Meredith?” the voice said. It was Dev. Meredith pictured his shaggy black hair, his vampire teeth, his rimless glasses. She hadn’t made the connection before, but she realized she now wore the same kind of glasses as Dev. They looked far better on him.

“Dev?” she said.

“Hey,” he said. His tone was soft, nearly tender. “How’s it going?”

“Oh,” she said. She thought for a moment that Dev had heard about the slashed tires and was calling to offer her some legal counsel-but that was impossible. “It goes.”

“Listen,” Dev said. “Burt and I had a meeting with the Feds. They’re now convinced there is upwards of ten billion dollars stashed somewhere overseas. Freddy’s still not talking. The Feds are willing to hold off pressing conspiracy charges on you, and possibly Leo also, if they get your cooperation.”

Meredith sank into one of the dining-room chairs. From there, she could see the blue of the ocean. It was a dark, Yankee blue, different from the turquoise water in Palm Beach or the azure water of Cap d’Antibes. “What kind of cooperation?” Meredith said. She sighed. “I’ve already told you everything.”

“I need ideas about where that money might be,” Dev said.

“I thought I was clear,” Meredith said. She took a metered breath. “I don’t know.”

“Meredith.”

“I don’t know!” Meredith said. She stood up and walked over to the window. “You were very kind to me back in New York. And I repaid you by being honest. I told the Feds the truth. Now they’re trying to bribe me with my own freedom and, worse still, my son’s freedom, which we deserve anyway, because I didn’t know the first thing about what was going on. And you know and I know and Julie Schwarz knows that Leo didn’t either. I wasn’t privy to any of Freddy’s business deals. They didn’t interest me. I’m not a numbers person. I majored in American literature. I read Hemingway and Frost, okay? I did my thesis on Edith Wharton. I can give you a detailed explanation on the use of the outsider in The Age of Innocence, but I don’t know what a derivative is. I don’t properly know what a hedge fund is.”

“Meredith.”

“I don’t know where Freddy put his money.” Meredith was screaming now, though in a low voice, so as not to alarm Connie. “There was an office in London. Have you checked there?”

“The Feds are investigating the people in London.”

“I never once visited the London office. I didn’t know a single person who worked there. And those were the bad guys, right?”

“Those were some of the bad guys,” Dev said.

“I don’t even know their names,” Meredith said. “I was never introduced. I couldn’t pick them out of a crowd of two. Freddy took me to London three times, and the first time we were college kids, backpacking. The other two times Freddy visited the office, and do you know where I went? I went to the Tate Gallery to see the Turners and the Constables. I went to Westminster blinking Abbey.”

“What the Feds are looking for are buzzwords,” Dev said. “Phrases. People’s names. Things Freddy repeated that might not have made sense. One of the words that turned up in the files is ‘dial.’ Do you know the meaning of the word ‘dial’?”

Meredith gave a short laugh. “That was the name of Fred’s eating club at Princeton.”

“Really?” Dev said. He sounded like he’d discovered a gold nugget in his sieve.

“Really,” said Meredith. Freddy had been the king of the pool table at Dial. He had wooed Meredith with his dead eye, twelve ball in the right corner pocket. They used to get drunk on keg beer and raid the kitchen at Dial late at night, and Freddy would whip up his specialty-a fried chicken patty with a slice of tomato and Russian dressing. Nothing Meredith had eaten before or since had tasted better. Freddy had been able to let loose back then-drink too much, stay up late. He had those incredible looks-the black hair, the clear blue eyes. Meredith remembered asking him if he resembled his father or his mother. I don’t look like my mother, he said. And I never met my father, so I couldn’t say. What kind of name was Delinn, anyway? Meredith asked. Because it sounded French. It’s a French name, Freddy said. But my mother always said the old man was Irish. I didn’t grow up the way you grew up, Meredith. I don’t have a pedigree. Just pretend like I hatched from an egg.

Devon said, “What about the word ‘buttons’?”

“Our dog,” Meredith said. Buttons had been a gift for the boys when they were ten and eight. Freddy had an investor who owned a kennel upstate, where the dogs consistently won awards. Freddy wanted a golden retriever. Meredith had lobbied to give the puppy a literary name-Kafka or Fitzgerald-but Freddy said it was only right to let the kids name the dog, and they named him Buttons. Meredith could still picture the boys and that tiny, impossibly cute butterscotch-colored puppy. Freddy had snapped pictures with this silly grin on his face. That night in bed, he’d said to her, We’ll give them cars on their sixteenth birthday and Rolexes when they turn twenty-one, but no present will ever beat the one we gave them today.

And Meredith had to agree.

“Could it be a code word?” Dev asked.

“I suppose,” Meredith said. “Freddy was very fond of the dog. He took him to work. They walked there, they walked home. Sometimes they detoured through the park. I used to take the dog to Southampton for the summer, and Freddy would get very depressed. Not without us, mind you, but without the dog.”

“Really?” Dev said. Another gold nugget.

Meredith shook her head. This was a wild-goose chase. There was most certainly money hidden; Freddy was too cunning not to have buried millions, or even billions, but he would have hidden it where it would absolutely never be found.

“What about the word ‘champ’?” Dev said. “That was a word that turned up frequently.”

Oh, God. Meredith coughed, and fought off the urge to spit. Champ? Frequently? How frequently? “Champ” was Freddy’s nickname for their decorator, Samantha, because her maiden name was Champion. (Meredith had always thought that the nickname was meant to be a jab at Samantha’s husband, Trent Deuce, whom Freddy disliked and dismissed.)

“ ‘Champ’?” Dev asked again. “Ring a bell?”

Meredith paused. “Where did this word ‘champ’ turn up? I’m curious. In his date book? His diary?”

“I really can’t say,” Dev said.

Right, Meredith thought. The information flowed only one way.

“Does the word mean anything to you?” Dev asked.

Meredith thought back to the day when she’d come across Freddy with his hand on Samantha’s back. She remembered how he’d whipped his hand away when he saw Meredith. She could still see the expression on his face: What was it? Guilt? Fear? Despite this memory, which always made Meredith uneasy, she didn’t want to turn Samantha over to the FBI. Samantha was Meredith’s friend, or she had been. Plus, she was a decorator; she had nothing to do with Freddy’s business or the Ponzi scheme.

Still, Dev was asking. She wasn’t going to be the woman the media thought she was: a woman who lied to her lawyer. And there was Leo to think of. Leo!

“ ‘Champ’ was Freddy’s nickname for our decorator. Samantha Champion Deuce.”

“Oh, boy,” Dev said quietly.

“She was a friend of Freddy’s, but a better friend of mine,” Meredith said. “She was our decorator for years.”

“How many years?”

“Ten years? Twelve?”

“So there are lots of reasons why her name might turn up,” Dev said. “Reasons that have nothing to do with the business.”

“I guarantee you, Samantha didn’t know a single thing about Freddy’s business,” Meredith said. “She used to call where he worked the ‘money shop.’ Like he was dealing in ice cream or bicycles.”

“But now you understand what we’re looking for?” Dev asked. “Words that have meaning. They might be a clue, a contact, a password. The money could be anywhere in the world. I spoke to Julie Schwarz…”

“You did?” Meredith said.

“Leo is making a list of words, and so is Carver. But they said we should ask you. They said Freddy talked only to you, confided only in you…”

“He was my husband,” Meredith said. “But there are a lot of things I didn’t know about him. He was a private person.” For example, Freddy never told Meredith who he voted for in an election. She didn’t know the name of the tailor in London who made his suits. She didn’t know the password on his phone or his computer; she had only known that there was a password. Everything was locked up all the time, including the door to his home office.