Suspecting that she might find these boxes in her basement wasn’t the same as actually finding them. No wonder Frank had been so upset when the police took the box of padlocks, an item specifically listed in the search warrant. Those are mine, he’d said. Only they weren’t.

Frank had to have been in the storage unit Sunday night. Emily had come back from Quinn’s house, shaken by the incident at the coffee shop and only slightly drunk. Soon after she drank the cocoa that Frank had made for her, she’d conked out and slept so soundly that she hadn’t gotten up once to pee during the night. So soundly that she’d had trouble waking up the next morning. At the time she assumed she’d been sleeping off the prosecco, but now she wondered if she’d been drugged.

Did Frank know Quinn Newell? When Emily introduced them, Quinn had acted as if she despised Frank, as if the very notion of a male attorney gave her indigestion. They’d both made it seem as if they were strangers who couldn’t even get each other’s name straight.

One thing was for sure. Walter Newell had coveted Quinn’s first husband’s collections, or he wouldn’t have paraded them on his walls. Frank would have coveted them as well. Emily could imagine Frank, thirty years from now, wizened and gaunt, chanting My Precioussss as he gazed at his own holy grail, the original art for an early MAD magazine cover. Or the cover art for Creepy, which he claimed to have found between the pages of a two-dollar scrapbook at a yard sale. It occurred to her to wonder what had been tucked into that portfolio he’d been carrying when he found Emily in the basement, about to be attacked by the piano frame. Another treasure he’d never have been able to afford? What would he have been willing to do in return? And was that all it was, a business transaction? Emily had written off Frank’s recent indifference to sex as the stress and disappointment of fertility testing, but maybe he’d been getting it somewhere else. And if he had, for how long?

Just then, car tires crunched in the driveway. Through the basement window Emily caught a glimpse of Frank’s car’s mag wheels rolling past. A minute later she heard the back door to the house open. “Emily!” Frank called. The door closed. “Emily? Are you here?”

Emily didn’t answer, the seething in her stomach curdling into outrage. She heard footsteps overhead. A pause. She looked up at the insulated water pipe that snaked across the ceiling. Footsteps again, moving across the kitchen’s tile floor. The door opened, then slammed. Then, silence. Frank had gone back out.