“Please draw me a picture, Ed. I need to know what I’m dealing with. And who.”

“I need to think about that.”

“It seems that Will and Joe have already done the thinking for you, otherwise the case wouldn’t be in my safe.”

“Who knows you’re here?”

“The short answer to that is Jimmy Hotchkiss.”

“Hah! You mean everybody knows.”

“Everybody on the island.”

“Who off the island knows you’re here?”

Stone shrugged. “I took some steps to avoid being seen headed here. The trail of bread crumbs stopped in Oxford, Connecticut.”

“You mean you turned off your transponder there.”

“I mean I stopped for fuel and left without filing a flight plan and squawking twelve hundred.”

“That was a good idea, Stone,” Ed said with something that sounded nearly like admiration.

“And he never even went to the Farm,” Holly said, referring to the Agency training school in Virginia. “If he had, maybe nobody would know he has the case.”

“Who knows?” Rawls asked.

“We were followed once in Santa Fe,” Stone said. “And that night, somebody broke into my house and tried to get into my safe. I spoke to Will after that, and he told me that someone had visited Joe when he was taking the sun in his garden, and Joe had thought he was speaking to me. Apparently, they discussed the case.”

“Oh, shit,” Rawls said.

“When I heard that, we decamped for here.”

“Did you fly nonstop from Santa Fe to Oxford?”

“Yes, and I filed a flight plan.”

“They’re going to look here,” Ed said. “They’ll know you have a house on the island.”

“Maybe,” Stone replied. “I expect they’ll be more careful next time, given what happened to the last people they sent.”

“Where’s your airplane?”

“Locked in a hangar at Rockland Airport. We were flown here in a little Cessna.”

“That’s good. You’d better have another word with Jimmy and tell him to keep his mouth shut.”

“Good idea.”

“I want to show you something,” Ed said. “Something that only I know about.”

“All right.”

Ed went to a window facing the rear of the house and drew back the curtain. Stone followed him. “You see that rose garden there, with the concrete edge around it?”

“Yes.”

“When I bought this property there was another house on it, old and in disrepair. I tore it down. Where that rose garden is was a small swimming pool. I built a new bottom in it, two feet down and filled it in with dirt.” He paused and waited for Stone to catch up. “Get it?”

“So, below the new bottom, the old pool is still there?”