“Of course.” Adinah quietly backed away, giving us privacy.

“I’m sorry we didn’t get to talk at the church,” Jude said. Her brown eyes were red rimmed, but otherwise she looked beautiful. She wore a simple black dress and jacket, and her dark curly hair was pinned back in a restrained bun. She wore no jewelry except a small silver crucifix. She’d been born in Haiti but raised in Queens; she and Caro had been best friends since middle school. “Be honest—how are you holding up?”

“Who was that woman?” I asked.

“Adinah runs Diotima,” Jude said. “Caroline gave them a lot of help from the time she was in college.”

I recognized the name immediately—Caro was devoted to the Diotima Civic Society—but I had something else on my mind. “What were you saying about Caro going crazy?” I demanded.

“Oh, no, that wasn’t . . . um, that wasn’t about her. I’m sorry if it sounded that way, Dee.”

“Oh.” I felt foolish. My confrontation with Theo had left me paranoid.

“There is something else that’s going to make you upset with me,” Jude said. “Your father asked me to give you this, and I said I would.”

She held out a small square box made of plain brown paper. It fit in the palm of her hand.

“Whatever it is, I don’t want it,” I said.

“Won’t you even open it?”

“Nope.” I didn’t want anything from my father, ever, and I didn’t plan to explain why. Even though they were close, I was pretty sure my sister had kept Jude in the dark about our father’s true nature. Why else would she still speak with him? “But I need to ask you something. Did you know Theo was married before?”

“What are you talking about?”

“He had a first wife. Caro didn’t mention that?”

Jude’s face was stunned and intrigued all at once. “She never breathed a word to me. Theo’s divorced?” She said the word with horror. Jude was a devout Catholic, and that fact reared its head at the oddest times. I considered showing her Caroline’s message. But we couldn’t talk about it with Thraxton minions nearby.

“No, she’s dead,” I admitted. “I asked Theo about her, and he stormed off.”

“To be fair to him, he’s dealing with a terrible loss.”

“I drove here with Theo, and he basically accused Caro of sleeping with another man.”

“That’s horrible,” Jude whispered. “What exactly did he say?”

“That she was meeting with another guy the morning she died. Can you believe that? It’s so obviously insane.”

“Right.” Jude blinked a couple of times. “Exactly. Insane.”

Her reaction bothered me. It didn’t seem like she thought the idea was that crazy. “Was Caro seeing someone else?”

Jude considered my question. “She never said that, but you know—aside from coparenting Teddy—they were basically living separate lives.”

“Do you remember when that started?”

“Maybe a year after Teddy was born? Right around the time Theo left the family business.”

“That’s how I think of it too,” I said. “Caro said Theo thought he was better than the rest of his family. But I remember thinking it was a lot cooler to be tracking down stolen idols like Indiana Jones instead of working for a hotel chain.”

“He spends more time in boardrooms than ancient temples,” Jude answered wryly. “Caroline felt like he was leaving her in the lurch.”

“Because of her postpartum depression?”

“She struggled hard with it,” Jude said. “Caroline told me her in-laws were really supportive of her, but Theo wasn’t. He wanted her to travel with him. Just bring the baby and go. Oh, and he wanted her to quit her job at his family’s company and become a journalist again. But Caroline needed help. Her in-laws stepped up. Theo didn’t.”

I recognized the truth of Jude’s words. Theo’s sister had never done much for her, but Theo’s father and stepmother had. I knew Caro genuinely loved them.

“Do you think Theo would ever hurt Caroline?”

“Physically? No.”

The ache to show her Caro’s message was stronger than ever. What’s holding you back? I asked myself. No matter what, I hated airing my family’s dirty laundry.

“Did you know she wanted to divorce Theo?” I asked.

Jude was silent, pursing her lips. Her phone buzzed.

I was incredulous. “You knew?”

Jude touched my arm. “Caroline swore me to secrecy,” she said. “Even though she’s gone, I can’t talk about it.” She glanced at her phone. “I’m sorry, but I have to get going.” Jude worked for the mayor, and she always had other places to be.

She tugged me into another awkward half-hug.

“You know you can call me if there’s anything you need—at any time—right?” she asked. “Please take care of yourself, Dee.”

Jude took off across the green grass with unusual speed for someone in heels. I shouldn’t have been surprised that my sister had confided far more in her best friend than she had in me. Caro and Jude had been close all their lives. I was Caro’s baby sister, and there was a long gap in our relationship that we’d papered over but never really resolved. I could pretend it didn’t bother me, but the truth was the distance between us had always hurt like hell.

CHAPTER 7

DEIRDRE

Everyone else cleared out of the cemetery before I did. I watched gravediggers from a distance, filling in the void around Caro’s coffin, and I wanted to cry. I knew I should have shown my sister’s message to Jude, but I hadn’t been able to work up the nerve. It still felt unreal. I pulled out my phone and looked at the letter again.

The logical option was to go to the cops, but my experiences with the NYPD when I was a teenager made me never want to set foot in another police station. I knew they’d laugh at me if I went in armed only with that email. I needed more, and I had to dredge it up myself.

That meant starting with Osiris’s Vault. Under Caro’s words was some boilerplate legalese about privacy and opting out of future messages, which felt like a bad joke. But I kept scrolling and found the company’s address in the Bronx. I walked to the nearest subway stop, passing businesses offering headstone engraving and other funeral services. They certainly hadn’t vanished in the pandemic. I got on the R train and headed back into Manhattan, switching at Union Square for the 4 express train north.

The subway spat me out at Yankee Stadium. I’d heard that games would start up again, but the neighborhood was so desolate I wondered if a nuclear blast had gone unreported. The first couple of blocks east of the train were boarded up, some with restaurant signs forlornly hanging above. After I passed Walton Street, there were signs of life: people young and old in Joyce Kilmer Park, ringed around the fountain, and others congregating on the steps of the majestic Bronx courthouse. But after that it got eerily quiet again. Even the sidewalk was a mess, with broken concrete slabs and ringed with tall weeds. I turned left at Sheridan Avenue, which had fewer abandoned storefronts but more bail bondsman offices. It felt like a tumbleweed might blow by at any moment.

“This looks like a place where you’d find messages from dead people,” I murmured aloud.

The front door was shut tight, of course. This was the kind of place where you’d lock down a bag of chips. Next to the door was a rusty buzzer with company names and suite numbers. It looked like it’d been updated around the time I’d been born, when some eager beaver got a label maker. Osiris’s Vault wasn’t on the list, but something called Joy Spa was. I pressed some buzzers until a garbled human voice came through the intercom.

She let me in.

Inside, the hallway was blindingly bright with yellow walls. The result was pathologically cheerful, like someone thought they could drag sunshine indoors against its will. I spotted Osiris’s digs from down the hall, thanks to a blown-up image of their dead god—his skin a brighter green than his digital twin’s—attached to the door. There was a keypad lock, and on impulse I tapped in 9-5-7, the code my employer used on an identical lock—the numbers formed a little triangle. At a soft click, I pushed the door open.

Inside the offices, it looked like someone had sprayed Martian blood on the walls. Beyond an open doorway were seven people at computers in a socially distant hive that could’ve easily seated twenty. Images of Osiris were stenciled on the wall. Somebody really liked that graphic.

Nobody looked up when I invaded the hive, probably because they all had headphones on. I scanned the worker bees carefully. No tech company worth a damn handed out client information without a subpoena. I was looking for an ally, someone who’d help me out because of sympathy or sadness. I picked a woman with candy-pink hair and an impressively large silver ring lodged in her nasal septum.

“Hi,” I said. “My name is Deirdre Crawley. I got a message from my sister through Osiris’s Vault. Could you help me find out—”

“Noah!” the woman shouted, without even a glance at me. “We’ve got another one!”