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leapt up as if this were what she’d been waiting for all along. The scream trailed off before she reached Ruby’s room. And there she was, staring at her computer screen. In the center of the blue window for the Internet portal, above the news from Afghanistan, was the LinkAge corporate logo. “More arrests in the telecom industry” read the caption. The logo blinked into a photo of Frank, evidently taken earlier. His hands were cuffed behind his back. His face was in shadow. Then he was transformed back into the LinkAge logo. Photo, logo, photo, logo. Pat watched, mesmerized.
    Frank spoke from behind her: “Just a guy who works for the phone company.”

CHAPTER
3
    P at felt sorry for anyone without a real past. She was proud of having had a youth she wouldn’t want to describe to her children. It could make her smile in the unlikeliest settings—the dullest fund-raiser or sit-down company dinner: “This is not me, I have a wild core,
I am in disguise.
”
    Pat had been so spirited and friendly as a teenager that no one noticed how eccentric she was. She barely noticed her parents’ divorce. She had money to spend because her mother paid her to iron her own clothes, and she could have a cheerful conversation with anyone. She was the only person who could make Ginny Howley giggle. Most kids were afraid of Ginny, because her mother had killed herself years before, and because she could spend a whole evening sitting in a corner and frowning, a feat Pat wished she could pull off but had never been able to. What the other kids didn’t seem to realize was that Ginny’s severity meant she mattered. Sometimes when classmates said idiotic stuff, it was easier for Pat to nod and agree. Ginny’s face would darken, and she would tell Pat later what was wrong with the stupid comment she had agreed with or been amused by. Pat didn’t mind. Ginny never thought that what Pat said was stupid, although a lot of it was.
    The two girls read mysteries all the time. Their tastes were surprisingly similar, given how finicky Ginny was in the rest of her life. She didn’t like anything regular—“nice” boys, for example, or girl singers or trips to the beach. Pat didn’t expect her to like the books of Scott Fein, creator of the first counterculture detective; he seemed a bit too pop for her taste. But Ginny liked them so much she put a newspaper photo of the author up on her wall. He was young and curly-haired.
    It was Ginny’s idea to go to Fein’s book signing at The Black Cat in the city. In fact, she insisted. Then they decided to tell their parents they were going to be at each other’s houses that night. They figured out that between them they had enough money for a room at the Chelsea Hotel, a place they’d read about in
Rolling Stone.
Ginny was going to contribute the most. Although her allowance was minimal and she’d never been paid for ironing clothes, she always seemed to be able to find an extra twenty. Pat gave her what she had to make up the difference.
    Pat tried to straighten her hair with an iron, and Ginny curled her hair by weaving dozens of little wet braids all over her head. Ginny’s attempt was the more successful. She was undoing the braids when she bought one-way tickets from the conductor on the train, and by the time they reached Penn Station, she had a puff of zigzagged hair. It shivered a little as they walked uptown.
    Pat and Ginny had spent endless hours at Hart Ridge Books, where the mysteries had their own metal racks. But The Black Cat was different, a hybrid of bookstore and club. Two writers sat at a long cafeteria-style folding table at one end of the store. Customers lined up in front of each to get their books signed. Scott Fein, Ginny’s baby-faced poster boy, was even cuter in person than he was on her wall. His eyes sparkled; his smile lit up the ordinary words that Pat managed to overhear as she slid by. “Aren’t you going to go up there?” she asked Ginny covertly, opening