When she’d called last night, Lara had sounded shaken. Immediately, he regretted not having gone with her… not that she’d invited him. When he heard she’d been chased through the Père Lachaise, he had the urge to get a ticket and fly to Paris, but she’d assured him that Gaston Boucher and this Barrow gentleman were taking no chances. Still, he found that Lara often thought she could handle things and sometimes got in over her head without realizing it. He thought of her house and how she’d just leapt at the chance to buy it with no idea how to fix it up, as well as the radio station that she’d plunked down a fortune for. Lara was impulsive. And if she was thinking she saw Todd Sutton, then she was certainly stressed. Had he pushed her toward seeing things by moving too soon and asking her to the gala as his date?

When he got back to the office, he pulled out the Peter Beaumont case files again. There were four thick files that appeared to be in chronological order. Ben sat down with a hot cup of coffee and began slowly scanning each piece of paper, looking for a note or scrap of paper that referred to another case. Looking at his father’s handwriting after all these years, he felt a pang of nostalgia.

There was more background in his father’s files on Peter. Attached was a photo of Peter Beaumont—the bad 1970s film exposure gave his features a yellow wash, but you could tell he’d been tan. It was a summer picture. Peter was laughing, his sun-bleached long hair contrasting with darker-blond sideburns. Ben studied the photo—something about the man looked familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

In another pen from another time, a phone number had been quickly jotted down. Looking it up in the file, Ben saw that the number belonged to Fiona Beaumont; his dad had added Kinsey to the name, along with got remarried. Ben checked “Fiona Kinsey” in the old Kerrigan Falls phone book, finding an F. Kinsey listed at 777 Noles Street. He called the number, trying to do the calculation on Fiona Kinsey’s current age. She had to be seventy-four, seventy-five years old now. It was a long shot that she was still alive, though according to the 1997 phone book, she was.

On the sixth ring, Ben was just about to hang up when a woman answered. “Hello.”