Archie and Katie were front of mind, naturally. Nothing was more important than being reunited with her kids. But something was nagging at her, something that didn’t quite add up.

Something about Joe.

Did he seem a bit . . . odd when she came back with the first aid kit? Well, okay, he probably did, and wasn’t he entitled to? Ruskin had died. That would have been upsetting. No question.

So yeah, if Joe didn’t quite seem himself, what of it? Who wouldn’t be a bit off his game with all that was going on? They were all dealing with tremendous stress.

And yet . . .

Joe sure had gotten a lot of information out of Ruskin in his final moments. Stuff he hadn’t been willing to tell her he’d gone and shared with Joe. And why was Joe making excuses for Albert Ruskin? Suggesting Ruskin had never intended for things to get so out of hand. How did Joe know that? Why downplay the damage the bastard had done?

It just seemed weird, was all. And what about—

Hang on. Arrival at three o’clock.

She was riding across a street, leaving one sidewalk and heading for the opposite one, when she saw one coming from her right. Quickly, she cycled down a driveway and turned in behind a house, nearly catching her neck on a low-hanging clothesline. She hopped off, wheeled the bike along by the handlebars, crept to the corner of the house, and peeked.

The Arrival drove on by.

She got back on the bike, taking a circuitous route back to her house that kept her off wider streets where she figured she was more likely to encounter Arrivals.

So, yeah, back to Joe.

The password.

He’d been able to get into Lisa Carver’s computer right away because Ruskin had given him the password. It was believable Ruskin might know it, and if he was feeling some remorse for what he’d done, it was conceivable he would reveal it to Joe.

Except . . .

Joe had said the password was Carver’s daughter’s name spelled backward, followed by numeric dates.

But when Sandra had asked Ruskin whether Lisa Carver had children, he’d said he did not know. There was talk, he’d said, that she’d had a child in her teens.

So how did Ruskin know a password based on the name of a child that he did not know, with any certainty, existed?

There had to be an explanation, Sandra thought. Ruskin could have lied to her, although she couldn’t understand why he’d have lied about that.

Even as she rode the bike, Sandra shook her head.

As she got to within a block of her house, and her hopes rose that her kids would be there, she pushed these riddles out of her head.