picture was a few years old, taken around the time Candy Girls first

aired, and showed her with her real hair, dark brown and shoulder

length, layered to frame her face. It was a dead ringer for the image

on a hundred billboards and magazine ads, and no port wine stain

marked her cheek. She held it for a second, not wanting to pass it

over. What if this guy recognized her? Would he think to ask a question? Would he say she looked like that actress? The name on the

ID. was her real name, Elaine Hayes, not Laney Thayer, but still,

the leap was small.

Find it. Fast. Bennett’s voice ringing in her ears.

Elaine Hayes passed the card across the desk and made herself

smile.

The man punched a few keys, his eyes on the computer monitor.

He glanced at the license, punched a few more keys. Finally he said,

“Here we are. Box 152?”

“Yes.”

“Okay.” He typed some more. “Did you hear the news?” “What’s that?”

“There was a shooting at the Farmers Market.”

“Really?”

“Just this morning.” He looked across the desk at her. “Can you

believe it?”

“Wow. No. My husband and I go there all the time.” “Scary, isn’t it? You think you’re safe, that that sort of thing only

happens somewhere else, but.” He shook his head. “Right this way,

Ms. Hayes.”

She followed him, keeping her head down, feeling the cameras

pointed like accusing eyes. He led her to a side door, typed a quick code on a number pad. An LED went from red to green, and he

opened the door, then gestured her through.

The room was just as she remembered. A wall of numbered boxes

with metal doors, gray carpet on the floor, and a clean, powdery

smell. A closed-circuit camera stared from the corner.

“Here you are,” he said. “You can use this for privacy.” He gestured to a desk framed with a curtain. “When you’re done, just put

the box back. The door will lock behind you.”

“Thanks,” she said, and waited for him to leave. Then she took

out her key chain and used the smallest one to open the lock, pulled

out the box, and took it to the desk, closing the curtain behind. She said a little prayer to the universe: Let it be here, please, let it

be here and I’ll finish this quietly. Daniel will never need to know. Elaine flipped up the lid of the box. Inside were papers in manila

folders, contracts and tax statements. Two passports, hers and his.

An envelope with a dozen photographs. She’d forgotten about those,

the pictures she’d let Daniel take of her; he’d called them “erotic,”

she’d called them “porno,” but posing for them had been fun, given

her a glow, knowing that in fifty years they would have these shots,

the two of them young and lusty and naked. Once the show hit,

they moved them here, not wanting some ambitious faux-friend to

ransack their drawers and sell the pictures to paparazzi. There was

a brooch that had belonged to her mother, and seeing it gave her a

flash of memory, golden sunlight and hair that smelled like honey

and the necklace dangling down as her mom leaned over her. What was not there, what was conspicuously absent, was a diamond necklace worth half a million dollars.

She wanted to turn the box upside down and shake it. She wanted

to punch the table and scream.

Be calm. If you want to keep your secret, you have to be calm. Elaine closed the box. Slid it back in the frame. Walked out the door. The same man wished her a good afternoon as she passed, but she just kept her head down until she stepped back out onto

Wilshire.

Somehow things had gotten worse instead of better. Laney

Thayer raised a hand to her forehead, squeezed her temples. It had

been a long shot, she supposed. But where else would Daniel have

put the necklace? This was the safest place. Though now that she

thought about it, she couldn’t imagine him driving in from Malibu

to tuck it safely away before he went on his cross-country suicide

run. That was the problem with improvising, you just had to hope

that you were going in the right direction. If it had paid out, and the

necklace had been here, she could have called Bennett— “Hey, is that Laney Thayer?”

She whirled.

Bennett smiled at her. He wore the same nondescript clothes as

before, the same bland expression, but in one hand he held an ice

cream cone, a scoop of pink perched atop one of white. “How—what are you—”

“Last time I was in your house I went through your bank records.

Terrible habit of mine. I saw you had a safe deposit box, and thought

you might have stowed my necklace there.” He bit a chunk out of

the ice cream.

“No.” Her skin was cold despite the sunlight. The gun bit into

her belly. “I thought Daniel might have. But it’s not.”

“Want a lick?” Bennett held the cone out to her. When she just

stared at him, he shrugged, pursed his lips around it, rounding and

smoothing the portion he’d bitten.

“I need more time,” she said.

“We all need more time, sister.”

“I’m trying. But I don’t know where it is.”

“Daniel does.”