Coy picked up the phone on the manager’s desk and dialed the number he had been given. Ben answered, but it sounded as though he were on speakerphone. “Hello?”

“I found it,” Coy said.

The manager cried out in pain. His voice when he spoke was higher and more stressed. He was speaking quickly. “It can’t be there! Are you sure?”

“It’s right on your desk.”

“You lied to us,” someone said in the background. The accent sounded British.

“I told you.” Coy recognized Pickering’s voice.

“That’s impossible,” Ben shouted. “I didn’t—” He screamed in agony, and the connection was cut. There was only a loud dial tone.

Startled and alarmed, Coy put down the phone. Before he could pick it up again to dial 911, it rang. Answering, he heard Pickering’s threatening voice. “Don’t even think about it.”

Again, the connection was severed.

He stood there stupidly, phone in hand. Would he be putting Ben in even greater jeopardy if he called the sheriff? There was no doubt in his mind that that was exactly what Pickering was implying would happen, but Coy wasn’t sure he could live with himself if something actually happened to the manager—

if he was killed

—because he did nothing.

Coy looked down at the ledger. What was that thing? And what was its significance? It seemed to be the impetus for whatever was going on at the other end of that telephone line, and his first impulse was to take it immediately over to the sheriff’s office and describe exactly what he’d heard. But then he thought about Pickering’s warning—

Don’t even think about it

—and what had happened to Jimmy, and realized that he was way out of his depth.

He put the phone down. Whatever had happened to Ben had happened. If it turned out that he was dead, or if he didn’t come back by tomorrow, Coy would go to the sheriff with what he knew. If it turned out to be something less, he would confront Ben and demand that the manager tell him what was going on. Either way, he was pretty sure he was through here. He couldn’t see himself continuing to work in this bank, in this environment. Not with everything that had happened.

He thought for a moment, then left the ledger in place and walked out of the manager’s office, over to Cal and Maggie’s adjoining desks. “We need to talk,” he said.

3

When Jen awoke, she was back in the house.

She and Lane had gone to bed early after what had been a long day for both of them, falling asleep to a rerun of The Office on the bedroom TV. That had been in their apartment. But when she woke up, it was still night, and she was lying on the floor of the empty bedroom in the house they had bought and abandoned.