He had not once questioned the novelist Arnold Bennett’s role as Harold’s and Louis’s protector. What if the opposite had occurred? What if the writer was also a British spy? Like Abbington-Westlake, hiding behind a scrim of upper-crust, above-it-all mannerisms and a witty tongue?

The train pulled into Sacramento. Bell bolted to the telegraph office and sent a wire to New York. Was Bennett the one who recruited the tong hatchet men and dressed them up as divinity students? Talk about hiding in plain sight. For all he knew, Bell realized, Arnold Bennett was the spy himself, the leader of the ring.

KATHERINE DEE cursed aloud.

Like a sailor, she laughed, giddy on little sleep and lots of dust. Cursing like a sailor. Wind and spray were playing hell with the cocaine she was sniffing from an ivory vial to stay awake on the final night of her voyage from Newport. She could not see the coast, but the thunder of the surf told her she had she veered too close.

She had sailed the heavily laden catboat down the southern coast of Long Island, timing her passage from Montauk Point to enter Fire Island Inlet at first light. She steered, unseen except by some fishermen, through the opening in the barrier beach. Once inside, out of the ocean swells, she followed a channel marked with stakes and watched for her landmark on the Long Island shore five miles across the bay. When she spotted it, she crossed the choppy waters of the Great South Bay steering for a white mansion with a red roof. Stakes marked the mouth of a newly dredged creek bulkheaded with creosoted wood.

The catboat glided up the glassy creek.

The boathouse was clad in new cedar shingles. The roof was tall, the opening high enough to accommodate the low mast. Katherine Dee lowered her sail and let the boat drift. She had timed it just right. It stopped close enough for her to toss a looped line around a piling. Pulling on the line, directing her strength with economy, she eased the heavily laden boat stern first into the shadows under the roof.

A man appeared through the back door that opened to the land.

“Where’s Jake?”

“He tried to kiss me,” she answered in a distant voice.

“Yeah?” he said, as if to say, You’re a girl, what do expect alone on a boat in the middle of the ocean? “So where is he?”

She looked him full in the face. “A shark jumped into the boat and ate him.”

He considered the way her smile stiffened her mouth, the iceberg grimness in her eyes, and the people she knew, and decided that Jake had gotten what he deserved, and he was not at all interested in how it had happened. He held up a wicker basket. “I brought you supper.”

“Thank you.”

“I brought enough for two. Not knowing that—”

“Good. I’m starving.”