Rick said, “Would you please stand and turn around slowly?”

“Sure.” As she did so, Elaine and the boys stared at the laptop. “Pretty amazing,” Elaine said, almost to herself. “Take a look, Mercer.”

Standing beside the table and facing the front door, Mercer glanced down at the screen and was surprised at the clarity of the image. The sofa, television, armchair, even the cheap rug in front of her were vividly clear. “All from this tiny camera,” she said.

“It’s a piece of cake, Mercer,” Elaine said.

“The scarf really doesn’t match anything I have.”

“Then what are you wearing?” Elaine asked, reaching for a bag. She pulled out half a dozen scarves.

Mercer said, “Just a little red sundress, I think. Nothing fancy.”

13.

Jake opened the front door and locked it behind her. He introduced himself and said he’d known Noelle for many years. He was a craftsman with rough, callused hands and a white beard, and had the look of a hard worker who’d spent a lifetime with hammers and tools. He was gruff and explained that the writer’s desk was already in the basement. She followed him down the steps, slowly and at a distance, trying to remind herself that everything in front of her was being filmed and analyzed. Down ten steps with her hand on the rail and into a long, cluttered room that seemed to run the length of the store, which, as she well knew, was 42 feet wide and 165 feet in depth, same as the bookshop next door. The ceiling was low, no more than eight feet tall, and the flooring was unfinished concrete. All manner of disassembled, broken, unfinished, and mismatched furniture and furnishings were stored haphazardly along the walls. Mercer nonchalantly browsed around, turning slowly in all directions. “So this is where she keeps the good stuff,” she said, but Jake had no sense of humor. The basement was well lit and there was a room of some sort near the back. Most important, there was a door in the brick wall between the room and the basement next door, the basement where Elaine Shelby and her mysterious company were betting that Mr. Cable was hiding his treasure. The brick wall was old and had been painted many times, now a dark gray, but the door was much newer. It was metal and solid and there were two security sensors at its top corners.

Elaine’s team knew that the two stores were virtually identical in width, length, height, and layout. They were part of the same building, one that had been built a hundred years earlier, and had basically been split in two when the bookstore opened in 1940.

Sitting in a van across the street and staring at their laptops, Rick and Graham were delighted to see that a door connected the two basements. Sitting on a sofa in the condo, Elaine had the same reaction. Go, Mercer!

The writer’s table was in the middle of the room, with newspapers spread below it, though the floor had collected paint droppings for years, and Mercer examined it carefully, as if it were some prized possession and not simply a pawn in their game. Jake pulled out a sheet of paint colors and they talked about several, with Mercer being quite hard to please. She eventually settled on a soft pastel blue that Jake would apply with a thin coat to produce the look of something old and distressed. He didn’t have that color in his truck and it would take a few days to find it.