Devon said, “What about the word ‘buttons’?”

“Our dog,” Meredith said. Buttons had been a gift for the boys when they were ten and eight. Freddy had an investor who owned a kennel upstate, where the dogs consistently won awards. Freddy wanted a golden retriever. Meredith had lobbied to give the puppy a literary name-Kafka or Fitzgerald-but Freddy said it was only right to let the kids name the dog, and they named him Buttons. Meredith could still picture the boys and that tiny, impossibly cute butterscotch-colored puppy. Freddy had snapped pictures with this silly grin on his face. That night in bed, he’d said to her, We’ll give them cars on their sixteenth birthday and Rolexes when they turn twenty-one, but no present will ever beat the one we gave them today.

And Meredith had to agree.

“Could it be a code word?” Dev asked.

“I suppose,” Meredith said. “Freddy was very fond of the dog. He took him to work. They walked there, they walked home. Sometimes they detoured through the park. I used to take the dog to Southampton for the summer, and Freddy would get very depressed. Not without us, mind you, but without the dog.”

“Really?” Dev said. Another gold nugget.

Meredith shook her head. This was a wild-goose chase. There was most certainly money hidden; Freddy was too cunning not to have buried millions, or even billions, but he would have hidden it where it would absolutely never be found.

“What about the word ‘champ’?” Dev said. “That was a word that turned up frequently.”

Oh, God. Meredith coughed, and fought off the urge to spit. Champ? Frequently? How frequently? “Champ” was Freddy’s nickname for their decorator, Samantha, because her maiden name was Champion. (Meredith had always thought that the nickname was meant to be a jab at Samantha’s husband, Trent Deuce, whom Freddy disliked and dismissed.)

“ ‘Champ’?” Dev asked again. “Ring a bell?”

Meredith paused. “Where did this word ‘champ’ turn up? I’m curious. In his date book? His diary?”

“I really can’t say,” Dev said.

Right, Meredith thought. The information flowed only one way.

“Does the word mean anything to you?” Dev asked.

Meredith thought back to the day when she’d come across Freddy with his hand on Samantha’s back. She remembered how he’d whipped his hand away when he saw Meredith. She could still see the expression on his face: What was it? Guilt? Fear? Despite this memory, which always made Meredith uneasy, she didn’t want to turn Samantha over to the FBI. Samantha was Meredith’s friend, or she had been. Plus, she was a decorator; she had nothing to do with Freddy’s business or the Ponzi scheme.

Still, Dev was asking. She wasn’t going to be the woman the media thought she was: a woman who lied to her lawyer. And there was Leo to think of. Leo!

“ ‘Champ’ was Freddy’s nickname for our decorator. Samantha Champion Deuce.”

“Oh, boy,” Dev said quietly.

“She was a friend of Freddy’s, but a better friend of mine,” Meredith said. “She was our decorator for years.”

“How many years?”

“Ten years? Twelve?”

“So there are lots of reasons why her name might turn up,” Dev said. “Reasons that have nothing to do with the business.”

“I guarantee you, Samantha didn’t know a single thing about Freddy’s business,” Meredith said. “She used to call where he worked the ‘money shop.’ Like he was dealing in ice cream or bicycles.”

“But now you understand what we’re looking for?” Dev asked. “Words that have meaning. They might be a clue, a contact, a password. The money could be anywhere in the world. I spoke to Julie Schwarz…”

“You did?” Meredith said.

“Leo is making a list of words, and so is Carver. But they said we should ask you. They said Freddy talked only to you, confided only in you…”

“He was my husband,” Meredith said. “But there are a lot of things I didn’t know about him. He was a private person.” For example, Freddy never told Meredith who he voted for in an election. She didn’t know the name of the tailor in London who made his suits. She didn’t know the password on his phone or his computer; she had only known that there was a password. Everything was locked up all the time, including the door to his home office.

“I understand,” Dev said.

How could he understand? Meredith thought. Dev wasn’t married. He hadn’t slept beside someone for thirty years only to discover they were somebody else.

“This could help you, Meredith,” Dev said. “This could save you. It could keep you out of prison. In a year or two, when all this is in the past, you could resume normal life.”

Resume normal life? What did that even mean? Meredith was tempted to tell Dev about Connie’s slashed tires, but she refrained. She was afraid it would sound like a cry for pity, and the image Meredith needed to convey now was one of strength. She would come up with the answer. She would save herself.

“I can’t think of anything now,” Meredith said. “You’ve caught me unprepared. But I’ll try. I’ll… make a list.”

“Please,” Dev said.


That night, Meredith was too afraid to sleep. She kept picturing a man with a hunting knife hiding in the eelgrass. Meredith rose from bed, crept into the hallway, and peered out one of the windows that faced the front yard and the road. The yard was empty, quiet. The eelgrass swayed. There was a waxing gibbous moon that disappeared behind puffy nighttime clouds, then reemerged. At three fifteen, a pair of headlights appeared on the road. Meredith tensed. The headlights slowed down at the start of Connie’s driveway, paused, then rolled on. It was the police. The squad car parked in the public lot for a few minutes, then backed up and drove away.

She would make a list of words, the way Dev had asked. Resume normal life meant life with Leo and Carver. Leo would be safe and free, and the three of them-including Anais, and whatever young woman Carver fancied at the moment-would have dinner together at the sturdy oak table in Carver’s imaginary house.

Meredith would come up with the answer.

Atkinson: the name of the professor who taught the anthropology class that brought her and Freddy together.

Meredith had given Freddy the used textbook. With that bond between them, they gravitated toward each other on the first day of class. Meredith and her roommate, a girl from backwater Alabama named Gwen Marbury, sat with Freddy and his roommate, a boy from Shaker Heights, Ohio, named Richard Cassel. The four of them became something of a merry band, though they hung out together only in that one class. When Meredith saw Freddy elsewhere on campus, he was usually in the presence of a stunning, dark-haired girl. His girlfriend, Meredith assumed, another upperclassman. It figured. Freddy was too funny and smart, and too beautiful himself, to be available. Through Gwen Marbury, who was far more interested in the social politics of Princeton than in her studies, Meredith learned that the girl’s name was Trina Didem, and that she was from Istanbul, Turkey. Trina was a dual major in economics and political science. Again, it figured: ravishing, exotic, and brilliant, someone destined to be a far-flung correspondent on CNN or the head of the Brookings Institution or secretary of state. Meredith’s crush on Freddy intensified the more she learned about Trina, although Meredith realized that what she was experiencing was nothing more than a freshman crush on a particularly cool upperclassman. It was also a way to stop thinking about Toby at the College of Charleston drinking yards of beer with all the sweet, blond southern girls. But Meredith cherished her time in class with Freddy and Richard and Gwen-the three of them cracked jokes about the clicking language of the Khoisan tribe, and they speculated on the advantages of a matriarchal society-and when class was over, Meredith continued her anthropological study of Trina Didem. Trina waited for Freddy outside on the stone steps of the building so she could smoke her clove cigarettes. She, Trina, wore a black suede choker at all times, as well as dangly earrings made from multicolored stones. She wore tight, faded jeans, and she carried a buttery soft Italian leather bag. Really, Meredith thought, she probably had a crush on Trina as well as Freddy. Trina was a woman, whereas Meredith was a girl trying to become a woman.

At the beginning of December, a knock came on the door of the anthropology classroom. Professor Atkinson stopped lecturing and swooped over to answer the door with a perplexed look on her face, as though this were her home and these were unexpected guests. Standing at the door was Trina Didem. Professor Atkinson looked first to Freddy, perhaps thinking there was going to be some kind of lovers’ spat right in the middle of their discussion of Dunbar’s number. But Trina, it seemed, was there on official business. She read off a slip of paper, in her lilting English. She was looking for Meredith Martin.

Meredith stood up, confused. She thought perhaps Trina had learned of her crush on Freddy and had come to call her out. But a second later, Trina explained that Meredith was needed in the Student Life Office. Meredith collected her books. Freddy reached for her hand as she left. It was the first time he’d ever touched her.

Meredith followed Trina out of the building. She was so starstruck in Trina’s presence that she was unable to ask the obvious questions: Why did you pull me out of class? Where are we going? It looked, from the path they were taking, like they were headed for the office of the dean of students, which differed slightly from the Student Life Office that she’d been promised. Or maybe they were one and the same-Meredith was still too new to campus to know. Trina took the occasion of being outside in the cold, crystalline air to light a clove cigarette. Because she was a step or two ahead of Meredith, the smoke blew in Meredith’s face. Somehow, this snapped Meredith back to her senses. She said, “You’re Freddy’s girlfriend, right?”

Trina barked once, then blew out her smoke. “Not girlfriend. Freddy is my English tutor.” She blew out more smoke. “And my economics tutor. I pay him.”

Meredith felt her own lungs fill up with the cloying, noxious smoke-it tasted to Meredith like burning molasses, and her grandmother’s gingerbread cookies, which she detested-but she didn’t care because she was so excited. Freddy was Trina’s tutor! She paid him! Meredith couldn’t wait to tell Gwen.

Meredith’s elation was short-lived. Once they were in the plush office belonging to the dean of students, which was empty but for the two of them, Trina closed the door. Meredith remembered an Oriental rug under her feet; she remembered the brassy song of a grandfather clock. She noted that Trina had extinguished her cigarette, but an aura of smoke still clung to her. Up close, she could see that Trina had speckles of mascara on her upper eyelids.

What’s going on? Meredith wondered. But she wasn’t brave enough to ask. It was definitely something bad. She fleetingly thought of how ironic it would be if she got kicked out of school right at the moment that she had learned Freddy was unattached.

Trina said, “The dean is in a meeting across campus. I’m an intern here, so they sent me to tell you.”

Tell me what? Meredith thought. But her voice didn’t work.

“Your mother called,” Trina said. “Your father had a brain aneurysm. He died.”

Meredith screamed. Trina moved to touch her, but Meredith swatted her away. She could remember being embarrassed about her screaming. She was screaming in front of Trina, whom she had considered a paragon of Ivy League womanhood. And what news had Trina, of all people, just delivered her? Her father was dead. Chick Martin, of the eggplant parm subs and the monthly poker games; Chick Martin, the partner at Saul, Ewing who specialized in the laws of arbitrage; Chick Martin, who had believed his daughter to be brilliant and talented. He had suffered a brain aneurysm at work. So arbitrage had killed him. Arbitrage was tricky; it had a million rules and loopholes, and while trying to decipher the code that would bring him to his answer, Chick Martin’s brain had short-circuited. He was dead.

But no, that wasn’t possible. Meredith had just been home for Thanksgiving break. Her father had been waiting for her at the Villanova train station. He had wanted to come get her at the university, but Meredith had insisted on taking the train-New Jersey Transit to 30th Street Station, SEPTA to Villanova. That’s what college kids do, Daddy! Meredith had said. They take the train!

Both of her parents had coddled her over break. Her mother brought her poached eggs in bed; her father gave her forty dollars for the informal class reunion that was taking place on Wednesday night at the Barleycorn Inn. Her parents brought her along to the annual cocktail party at the Donovers’ house on Friday night, and as a concession to her new adult status, her father handed her a glass of Chablis. He introduced her to couples she had known her whole life as though she were a brand-new person: My daughter, Meredith, a freshman at Princeton!