Pay attention. It was one of the tenets of journalism. Susan fixed her gaze out the tinted window as the car went over the gated stone bridge to Jack Reynolds’s island and tried to take in as much as she could. The bridge was lined with lit torches that sent threads of black smoke snaking into the dusky sky. Traffic was already backed up, awaiting instruction from men in suits wearing earpieces and carrying clipboards and barking orders at hired valets in red jackets. Cooper ignored the line and went over the bridge in the wrong lane. Once they’d made it the two hundred feet to the other side, he bypassed what appeared to be the main drop-off point. Susan could see partygoers up ahead, people in tuxedos and evening gowns, walking up the trails through the manicured grounds to Jack Reynolds’s neo-Tudor estate. They were all wearing masks—some elaborately festooned with feathers and gems, some basic black. Cooper hadn’t been kidding. This wasn’t just a ball; it was a masked ball. As social anxiety instigators went, masked balls were pretty near the top of Susan’s list, right after playing team sports and giving speeches to old people (the old people always fell asleep and Susan never knew if it was the speech or just their normal nap cycle). But people in masks were always assholes. It was a scientific law. Give someone anonymity and all social niceties break down. The Internet had proven that. By ten o’clock the couples would be fighting and the single people would be hooking up with people they wouldn’t be able to recognize in the morning. This was how masked balls went. This was what made them dangerous. Susan sank glumly in her seat as Cooper continued winding along a private lane that led around the side of the main house.

Susan had been to the island before. Once. Archie had gone to Jack for help on an investigation, and Susan had tagged along. That’s how she had met Leo. Leo had introduced himself as Jack’s attorney. He’d conveniently left out the part about being Jack’s son.

She hadn’t even known there were any islands in Lake Oswego before Archie had driven her over the bridge that first time. Lake Oswego was a large private lake run by the Lake Oswego Corporation and ringed by tony lakeside residences. The city of Lake Oswego, where the lake was, was a wealthy suburb of Portland, a place where Trail Blazer players lived, and people waited twenty minutes in line for a croissant. Most of the Portlanders Susan knew didn’t even know that Lake Oswego had a lake.