“I know that he was banished from the home after this and that he rode the rails west for several years, learning how to fool unsuspecting people into trusting him. I know that during these years he was itinerant he collected birth certificates and death certificates that he could use to create false identities. I know his name isn’t even Martin Hocking. It is Clyde Merriman.”

The deputy stops for a moment as I struggle to take it all in. The room now seems to lack sufficient air. I feel light-headed and afraid.

“I didn’t know,” I whisper, and I taste bile in my mouth.

“I know you didn’t,” Deputy Logan says.

He waits for a moment so that I will hear those words fully.

“I’m aware that you didn’t know we’ve had our eye on the man you knew as Martin Hocking for a long time,” he continues several seconds later. “And I know you are not in possession of Belinda’s gold. I know which assayer’s office Clyde Merriman took the gold to. I know which identity he used to convert the gold to cash. I know he has a safe-deposit box in a San Francisco bank with said cash tucked inside it. I know he was a terrible person who has killed perhaps as many as ten people.”

“Ten?” The word is a gasp off my tongue. Ten people dead by Martin’s hand. Ten!

“Yes, I’m afraid so.”

Belinda and I could have been numbers eleven and twelve. Easily. Hot tears spring to my eyes and I squeeze them back in as best I can. Two slip out anyway. Beneath my shirtwaist and corset my lungs are heaving. I cannot still the rapid rising and falling of my chest. Surely the marshal can see I knew none of this.

“That’s horrific!” I whisper.

“Indeed. As I said, he was a terrible person. But I am a servant of the law, not of my own opinion, and it does not matter what I think about Clyde Merriman,” he says. “What matters is what can be proven in a court of law, and because I have more suspicion than I have hard evidence, you may have done the world a favor if harm has befallen him and you are the person you say you are.”

“I am,” I say, and my voice sounds like a child’s, weak and naïve.

“So you say. But I have a problem.” He opens up the file, reaches in, and pulls out a document. He pushes it toward me.

It is a certified copy of a death certificate from County Down in Ireland for a Sophie Clare Whalen.

My vision is suddenly blurred. The room seems to sway; the whole world seems to sway, just like it did the morning of the quake.

“Where did you get this?” I hear myself ask.

“I told you. We’ve been investigating this man for a long while. We’ve looked into his activities. All of them. We’ve looked into the women he has married. It wasn’t difficult to follow your immigration trail back to where you started. You left Ireland as Sophie Whalen. You obtained a passport with Sophie Whalen’s birth certificate. But that’s not who you are. Because Sophie Whalen is dead.”