A man’s head popped up over a cubicle at the far end of the room. “Can I help you?”

“I got a message from my sister, Caroline Crawley Thraxton,” I said, opting to use her maiden and married names, in case that might jog his memory. “She passed away last week.”

“Condolences.” He dispensed the word slowly, like it was honey in his mouth. “I’m Noah, manager for community relations.” He slunk out from behind the cubicle wall, a scrawny man with spiky ginger hair cut flat across the top. Thanks to his pointy goatee, his head was a perfect triangle. He sported Buddy Holly glasses, an eyebrow ring, and a tattoo of a mandala on his forearm. A perfect hipster trifecta.

“Deirdre Crawley.” I took a step closer.

“Whoa.” Noah put up his hands, as if I’d pulled a knife on him. “Step back. More.”

“Okay.” People had been jittery about their personal space since the pandemic. A couple of worker bees had pulled off their headphones and were watching me. “Like I said, I’m here because of my sister. Today, at her funeral, I got a message saying that if she died, it was because her husband was going to kill her.”

“Let me get you a form.”

“Maybe I wasn’t clear. My sister said her husband was going to kill her, and now she’s dead.” I gulped. I’d psyched myself up to tell the story in an unemotional way. I wasn’t ready to fill out paperwork.

“Hold on,” Noah said, ducking back toward his cubicle. He threw a bright-green sheet of paper at me. “This is what you need.”

I caught it in midair. “My sister might have been murdered. In her message, she said—”

“Fill out the form.” Noah’s face was impassive.

“Her message said her husband, Theo Thraxton, killed his first wife. Until I read that, I didn’t know he had a first wife. Nobody did. But it’s true.”

“Fill out the form.”

All over my body, muscles were clenching in tight knots. I was desperate. “Can you at least tell me when her message was created?”

“We can’t give information out about our clients. That would be a violation of confidentiality.”

“But she’s dead.”

Noah shrugged.

“What will the form do for me?” I asked.

Noah sighed, as if I were being obtuse. “Then we’ll check our records to see what information we can release.”

I couldn’t hide my disappointment, but I fished a pen out of my bag. The questions on the form were basic: my name and address, my sister’s name and address, the reason for my inquiry. I filled it in, writing My sister was murdered as the reason for my query. Noah took back the form, holding it at arm’s length between thumb and forefinger.

“Okay. Now you need to go. You’ll hear from us in the next thirty days.”

I choked. “Thirty days?”

“Look, we’re a digital-storage service that promises our clients absolute confidentiality,” Noah said. “We don’t give information to anyone who walks in off the street.”

“But the message said there were files.”

“Then click through for them.”

“There weren’t any!”

“That means you’re not authorized to see them,” Noah said. “That’s a dead end.”

“I came here before talking to the cops,” I said, desperate to spur him to action. “You want them to come in here?”

“They can fill out the form too.” Noah shut the door behind me.

I braced myself against the wall, feeling physically ill. I’d been operating under a delusion, telling myself if people knew there was something suspicious about my sister’s tragic death, they’d help me. If Noah was anything to go by, I was dead wrong. Worse, I’d had visions of myself finding a key piece of evidence, bringing it to the cops, and forcing them to investigate Theo. But I was closing in on a truth I wanted to avoid: I had no clue what the hell I was doing.

I left the building with my tail between my legs. Outside, on the cracked sidewalk, I kicked the side of the building. I did it again and again, until my foot hurt.

Bring him to justice, no matter what you have to do, Caro had written. My sister had faith in me, but it was misguided.

I lurched away from the building, my foot aching. I felt like an idiot. Moving slowly, I made my way south back toward 161st Street. After a block, I heard steps behind me. Turning, I spotted a heavyset guy hurrying toward me. “Hey!” he called, waving.

“Hey,” I answered back. He’d been tucked into a cube in the office, though all I’d seen of him was a shaved head and a T-shirt with “Rough Trade” written across the top. As he came closer, I could make out the photo underneath. It looked like an album cover, with two androgynous figures, one in silhouette and the other in a white suit. When we were finally face-to-face, I realized the suited character was a curiously attractive woman.

He noticed me staring at it. “Carole Pope. She’s an icon.”

I didn’t recognize the name, but I nodded. “Cool shirt.”

“Noah sucks,” the guy said, slightly out of breath. “He just called you a bitch and shredded your form.”

“I regret not poking him in the eye. I should go back and take care of that.”

“He gets away with shit on account of being the CEO’s kid brother.” The guy took a couple of breaths. “I really need to get out more. I’m Todd, by the way.”

“Deirdre.”

He handed me a folded sheet of paper. “I printed this for you.”

I unfolded the page. Caroline Crawley—account created April 3, 3:25 p.m.

“That was two weeks before she died,” I said. “What are the other dates on this page?”

“Most people create an account and log in a bunch of times to fine-tune their messages,” Todd said. “Your sister logged in a lot on April third and fourth, checked in on the eleventh, then not again until the fifteenth.”

I scanned them and almost stopped breathing at the last one. “April fifteenth, 5:17 a.m. That’s the day she died.” I stared at him. “You’re telling me my sister wrote this message to me right before she died?”

“She started writing a message to you before that,” Todd said. “I can’t tell you about earlier versions. They’re on a server somewhere, but you really will need a subpoena to get them.”

“Why did I only get her message a week after she died?”

“That was the dead man’s switch.”

“The dead man’s what?” My shock must’ve shown in my face, because Todd took a step back and put a hand up, like he was warding off evil.

“Don’t freak out,” he said. “You never heard that phrase? It’s a security feature, basically a fail-safe. It’s dormant so long as a person is checking in on it, but if they fail to log in within a certain time frame . . . boom. It goes off.”

“The letter went out because my sister didn’t check in?”

“Exactly. Her account was set for a week-long delay.”

My eyes stung as if a thousand invisible hornets were attacking me. “Sorry.” I wiped away a tear. “That’s helpful.”

“The bad news is the dead man’s switch deleted all her files,” Todd said.

“But the police can get that with a subpoena, right?”

He shook his head. “We’re called Osiris’s Vault for a reason. Our shit is locked down tight. Those files are gone for good. There’s no way to recover them.”

I felt so lost at that moment. My sister needed my help, and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do for her.

“The other thing I can tell you is that your sister wrote messages to three people,” Todd added.

I took a breath. If Caroline had written to me, she’d surely sent a message to our father as well. “Let me guess: Ryan Crawley?”

“Yeah. I didn’t print that one out because I figured he’s family, and he can show it to you. I don’t need more trouble.”

“Oh,” I said, disappointed but unwilling to spill the truth, which was this: I was more likely to visit the moon than see any message Caro sent our father. She had always been close to him. When she’d had to choose between us, she’d taken his side. “Was the other one to Theo Thraxton?”

Todd shrugged. “Maybe? I don’t know. In the name field, your sister put an X.”

“Like X marks the spot?” I asked. Heathcliff was the only alias I remembered her using for Theo.

Todd shrugged. “I figured you’d know. I wrote down the email address for you.” He handed me another piece of paper. “With the message.”

My hands shook as I unfolded the page. There was Caroline’s third message in black and white:

If I fail, you have to do it. I am putting all of my faith and trust in you. My son’s future depends on it.

“What the hell?” I asked aloud.

“It made the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” Todd said. “It’s spooky as fuck, right?”

It was, and it tightened the knot in the pit of my stomach. What had my sister been up to before she died?

CHAPTER 8