ONE

It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, mid October, with the sun not shining and a look of hard wet rain in the clearness of the foothills. I was wearing my powder-blue suit, with dark blue shirt, tie and display handkerchief, black brogues, black wool socks with dark blue clocks on them. I was neat, clean, shaved and sober, and I didn’t care who knew it. I was everything the well-dressed private detective ought to be. I was calling on four million dollars.

The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armor rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the vizor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying.

There were French doors at the back of the hall, beyond them a wide sweep of emerald grass to a white garage, in front of which a slim dark young chauffeur in shiny black leggings was dusting a maroon Packard convertible. Beyond the garage were some decorative trees trimmed as carefully as poodle dogs. Beyond them a large greenhouse with a domed roof. Then more trees and beyond everything the solid, uneven, comfortable line of the foothills.

On the east side of the hall a free staircase, tile-paved, rose to a gallery with a wrought-iron railing and another piece of stained-glass romance. Large hard chairs with rounded red plush seats were backed into the vacant spaces of the wall round about. They didn’t look as if anybody had ever sat in them. In the middle of the west wall there was a big empty fireplace with a brass screen in four hinged panels, and over the fireplace a marble mantel with cupids at the corners. Above the mantel there was a large oil portrait, and above the portrait two bullet-torn or moth-eaten cavalry pennants crossed in a glass frame. The portrait was a stiffly posed job of an officer in full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican war. The officer had a neat black imperial, black mustachios, hot hard coal-black eyes, and the general look of a man it would pay to get along with. I thought this might be General Sternwood’s grandfather. It could hardly be the General himself, even though I had heard he was pretty far gone in years to have a couple of daughters still in the dangerous twenties.

I was still staring at the hot black eyes when a door opened far back under the stairs. It wasn’t the butler coming back. It was a girl.

She was twenty or so, small and delicately put together, but she looked durable. She wore pale blue slacks and they looked well on her. She walked as if she were floating. Her hair was a fine tawny wave cut much shorter than the current fashion of pageboy tresses curled in at the bottom. Her eyes were slate-gray, and had almost no expression when they looked at me. She came over near me and smiled with her mouth and she had little sharp predatory teeth, as white as fresh orange pith and as shiny as porcelain. They glistened between her thin too taut lips. Her face lacked color and didn’t look too healthy.

“Tall, aren’t you?” she said.

“I didn’t mean to be.”

Her eyes rounded. She was puzzled. She was thinking. I could see, even on that short acquaintance, that thinking was always going to be a bother to her.

“Handsome too,” she said. “And I bet you know it.”

I grunted.

“What’s your name?”

“Reilly,” I said. “Doghouse Reilly.”

“That’s a funny name.” She bit her lip and turned her head a little and looked at me along her eyes. Then she lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain. I was to get to know that trick. That was supposed to make me roll over on my back with all four paws in the air.

“Are you a prizefighter?” she asked, when I didn’t.

“Not exactly. I’m a sleuth.”

“A–a–” She tossed her head angrily, and the rich color of it glistened in the rather dim light of the big hall. “You’re making fun of me.”

“Uh-uh.”

“What?”

“Get on with you,” I said. “You heard me.”

“You didn’t say anything. You’re just a big tease.” She put a thumb up and bit it. It was a curiously shaped thumb, thin and narrow like an extra finger, with no curve in the first joint. She bit it and sucked it slowly, turning it around in her mouth like a baby with a comforter.

“You’re awfully tall,” she said. Then she giggled with secret merriment. Then she turned her body slowly and lithely, without lifting her feet. Her hands dropped limp at her sides. She tilted herself towards me on her toes. She fell straight back into my arms. I had to catch her or let her crack her head on the tessellated floor. I caught her under her arms and she went rubber-legged on me instantly. I had to hold her close to hold her up. When her bead was against my chest she screwed it around and giggled at me.

“You’re cute,” she giggled. “I’m cute too.”

DAY ONE

I forget everything between footsteps.

“Anna!” I finish shouting, snapping my mouth shut in surprise.

My mind has gone blank. I don’t know who Anna is or why I’m calling her name. I don’t even know how I got here. I’m stood in a forest, shielding my eyes from the spitting rain. My heart’s thumping, I reek of sweat and my legs are shaking. I must have been running but I can’t remember why.

“How did—” I’m cut short by the sight of my own hands. They’re bony, ugly. A stranger’s hands. I don’t recognize them at all.

Feeling the first touch of panic, I try to recall something else about myself: a family member, my address, age…anything, but nothing’s coming. I don’t even have a name. Every memory I had a few seconds ago is gone.

My throat tightens, breaths coming loud and fast. The forest is spinning, black spots inking my sight.

Be calm.

“I can’t breathe,” I gasp, blood roaring in my ears as I sink to the ground, my fingers digging into the dirt.

You can breathe; you just need to calm down.

There’s comfort in this inner voice, cold authority.

Close your eyes. Listen to the forest. Collect yourself.

Obeying the voice, I squeeze my eyes shut, but all I can hear is my own panicked wheezing. For the longest time it crushes every other sound, but slowly, ever so slowly, I work a hole in my fear, allowing other noises to break through. Raindrops are tapping the leaves, branches rustling overhead.

SUNDAY, October 24

1

HER HUSBAND’S ALMOST HOME. He’ll catch her this time.

There isn’t a scrap of curtain, not a blade of blind, in number 212—the rust-red townhome that once housed the newlywed Motts, until recently, until they un-wed. I never met either Mott, but occasionally I check in online: his LinkedIn profile, her Facebook page. Their wedding registry lives on at Macy’s. I could still buy them flatware.

As I was saying: not even a window dressing. So number 212 gazes blankly across the street, ruddy and raw, and I gaze right back, watching the mistress of the manor lead her contractor into the guest bedroom. What is it about that house? It’s where love goes to die.

She’s lovely, a genuine redhead, with grass-green eyes and an archipelago of tiny moles trailing across her back. Much prettier than her husband, a Dr. John Miller, psychotherapist—yes, he offers couples counseling—and one of 436,000 John Millers online. This particular specimen works near Gramercy Park and does not accept insurance. According to the deed of sale, he paid $3.6 million for his house. Business must be good.

I know both more and less about the wife. Not much of homemaker, clearly; the Millers moved in eight weeks ago, yet still those windows are bare, tsk-tsk. She practices yoga three times a week, tripping down the steps with her magic-carpet mat rolled beneath one arm, legs shrink-wrapped in Lululemon. And she must volunteer someplace—she leaves the house a little past eleven on Mondays and Fridays, around the time I get up, and returns between five and five thirty, just as I’m settling in for my nightly film. (This evening’s selection: The Man Who Knew Too Much, for the umpteenth time. I am the woman who viewed too much.)

I’ve noticed she likes a drink in the afternoon, as do I. Does she also like a drink in the morning? As do I?

But her age is a mystery, although she’s certainly younger than Dr. Miller, and younger than me (nimbler, too); her name I can only guess at. I think of her as Rita, because she looks like Hayworth in Gilda. “I’m not in the least interested”—love that line.

I myself am very much interested. Not in her body—the pale ridge of her spine, her shoulder blades like stunted wings, the baby-blue bra clasping her breasts: whenever these loom within my lens, any of them, I look away—but in the life she leads. The lives. Two more than I’ve got.

Her husband rounded the corner a moment ago, just past noon, not long after his wife pressed the front door shut, contractor in tow. This is an aberration: On Sundays, Dr. Miller returns to the house at quarter past three, without fail.

Yet now the good doctor strides down the sidewalk, breath chugging from his mouth, briefcase swinging from one hand, wedding band winking. I zoom in on his feet: oxblood oxfords, slick with polish, collecting the autumn sunlight, kicking it off with each step.

I lift the camera to his head. My Nikon D5500 doesn’t miss much, not with that Opteka lens: unruly marled hair, glasses spindly and cheap, islets of stubble in the shallow ponds of his cheeks. He takes better care of his shoes than his face.

Back to number 212, where Rita and the contractor are speedily disrobing. I could dial directory assistance, call the house, warn her. I won’t. Watching is like nature photography: You don’t interfere with the wildlife.

Dr. Miller is maybe half a minute away from the front door. His wife’s mouth glosses the contractor’s neck. Off with her blouse.

Four more steps. Five, six, seven. Twenty seconds now, at most.

She seizes his tie between her teeth, grins at him. Her hands fumble with his shirt. He grazes on her ear.

Her husband hops over a buckled slab of sidewalk. Fifteen seconds.

I can almost hear the tie slithering out of his collar. She whips it across the room.

Ten seconds. I zoom in again, the snout of the camera practically twitching. His hand dives into his pocket, surfaces with a haul of keys. Seven seconds.

She unlooses her ponytail, hair swinging onto her shoulders.

Three seconds. He mounts the steps.

She folds her arms around his back, kisses him deep.

He stabs the key into the lock. Twists.

I zoom in on her face, the eyes sprung wide. She’s heard.

I snap a photo.

And then his briefcase flops open.

A flock of papers bursts from it, scatters in the wind. I jolt the camera back to Dr. Miller, to the crisp “Shoot” his mouth shapes; he sets the briefcase on the stoop, stamps a few sheets beneath those glinting shoes, scoops others into his arms. One tearaway scrap has snagged in the fingers of a tree. He doesn’t notice.

Rita again, plunging her arms into her sleeves, pushing her hair back. She speeds from the room. The contractor, marooned, hops off the bed and retrieves his tie, stuffs it into his pocket.

I exhale, air hissing out of a balloon. I hadn’t realized I was holding my breath.

The front door opens: Rita surges down the steps, calling to her husband. He turns; I expect he smiles—I can’t see. She stoops, peels some papers from the sidewalk.

The contractor appears at the door, one hand sunk in his pocket, the other raised in greeting. Dr. Miller waves back. He ascends to the landing, lifts his briefcase, and the two men shake. They walk inside, trailed by Rita.

Well. Maybe next time.

TED

“Hello, there,” she said.

I looked at the pale, freckled hand on the back of the empty bar seat next to me in the business class lounge at Heathrow Airport, then up into the stranger’s face.

“Do I know you?” I asked. She didn’t look particularly familiar, but her American accent, her crisp white shirt, her sculpted jeans tucked into knee-high boots, all made her look like one of my wife’s awful friends.

“No, sorry. I was just admiring your drink. Do you mind?” She folded her long, slender frame onto the leather-padded swivel stool, and set her purse on the bar. “Is that gin?” she asked about the martini in front of me.

“Hendrick’s,” I said.

She gestured toward the bartender, a teenager with spiky hair and a shiny chin, and asked for a Hendrick’s martini with two olives. When her drink came she raised it in my direction. I had one sip left, and said, “Here’s to inoculation against international travel.”

“I’ll drink to that.”

I finished my drink, and ordered another. She introduced herself, a name I instantly forgot. And I gave her mine—just Ted, and not Ted Severson, at least not right then. We sat, in the overly padded and overly lit Heathrow lounge, drinking our drinks, exchanging a few remarks, and confirming that we were both waiting to board the same direct flight to Logan Airport in Boston. She removed a slim paperback novel from her purse and began to read it. It gave me an opportunity to really look at her. She was beautiful—long red hair, eyes a lucid greenish blue like tropical waters, and skin so pale it was the almost bluish white of skim milk. If a woman like that sits down next to you at your neighborhood bar and compliments your drink order, you think your life is about to change. But the rules are different in airport bars, where your fellow drinkers are about to hurtle away from you in opposite directions. And even though this woman was on her way toward Boston, I was still filled with sick rage at the situation with my wife back home. It was all I had been able to think about during my week in England. I’d barely eaten, barely slept.

An announcement came over the loudspeaker in which the two discernible words were Boston and delayed. I glanced at the board above the rows of backlit top-shelf liquor and watched as our departure time was moved back an hour.

“Time for another,” I said. “My treat.”

“Why not,” she said, and closed her book, placing it faceup on the bar by her purse. The Two Faces of January. By Patricia Highsmith.

“How’s your book?”

“Not one of her best.”

“Nothing worse than a bad book and a long flight delay.”

“What are you reading?” she asked.

“The newspaper. I don’t really like books.”

“So what do you do on flights?”

“Drink gin. Plot murders.”

“Interesting.” She smiled at me, the first I’d seen. It was a wide smile that caused a crease between her upper lip and nose, and that showed perfect teeth, and a sliver of pink gums. I wondered how old she was. When she first sat down I’d thought she was in her midthirties, closer to my age, but her smile, and the spray of faded freckles across the bridge of her nose made her look younger. Twenty-eight maybe. My wife’s age.

“And I work, of course, when I fly,” I added.

“What do you do?”

I gave her the short story version, how I funded and advised Internet start-up companies. I didn’t tell her how I’d made most of my money—by selling those companies off as soon as they looked promising. And I didn’t tell her that I never really needed to work again in this lifetime, that I was one of the few dot-commers from the late 1990s that managed to pull up my stakes (and cash out my stocks) right before the bubble burst. I only hid these facts because I didn’t feel like talking about them, not because I thought my new companion might find them offensive, or lose interest in talking with me. I had never felt the need to apologize for the money I had made.

“What about you? What do you do?” I asked.

“I work at Winslow College. I’m an archivist.”

Winslow was a women’s college in a leafy suburb about twenty miles west of Boston. I asked her what an archivist does, and she gave me what I suspect was her own short story version of her work, how she collected and preserved college documents. “And you live in Winslow?” I asked.

“I do.”

“Married?”

“I’m not. You?”

Even as she said it, I caught the subtle flick of her eyes as she looked for a ring on my left hand. “Yes, unfortunately,” I said. 

Chapter 2

CHRISTOPHER

Christopher shuffled from side to side until he reached a comfortable position in the armchair.
        He placed his elbows at ninety-degree angles on the chair’s arms and inhaled deeply to take in the scent of its leathery covering. She hadn’t scrimped on quality, he thought, confident from both its smell and soft touch that it hadn’t been purchased from a run-of-the-mill high-street retailer.
        While she remained in the adjacent kitchen, Christopher glanced around her apartment. She lived on the ground floor of an immaculately restored Victorian building that, according to a stained-glass mural above the front door, had once been used as a convent. He admired her taste in pottery ornaments, which were arranged on shelves built into the walls surrounding the open fireplace’s chimney breast. But her choice of literature left a lot to be desired. He turned his nose up at the paperback works of James Patterson, Jackie Collins and J.K. Rowling.
        Elsewhere in the room, a suede-covered square tray was placed centrally on a chunky coffee table that held two remote controls. Four matching place mats had been perfectly laid around it. Her use of symmetry put him at ease.
        Christopher ran his tongue across his teeth and it hovered over a sliver of pistachio nut that had become trapped between his lateral incisor and canine. When it failed to dislodge, he used his fingernail, but it still wouldn’t move so he made a mental note to inspect her bathroom cabinet for dental floss before he left. Very little irritated him more than a piece of trapped food. He’d once walked out on a date mid-meal because she had a stray piece of kale in her teeth.
        A vibrating from his trouser pocket tickled his groin; not an entirely unpleasant experience. As a rule, Christopher was quite fastidious when it came to turning his phone off at appropriate times and he loathed people who didn’t extend him the same courtesy. But today he’d made an exception.
        He removed the phone and read the message on the screen; it was an email from Match Your DNA. He recalled sending them a mouth swab on a whim some months earlier but had yet to receive a registered Match. Until now. Would he like to pay to receive their contact details, the message asked. Would I? he thought. Would I really? He put the phone away and pondered what his Match might look like, before deciding it was inappropriate to be thinking about a second woman while he was still in the company of the first.
        He rose to his feet and returned to the kitchen to find her where he’d left her minutes earlier, lying on her back on the cold, slate floor, the garrotte still embedded in her neck. She was no longer bleeding, the final few drops having pooled around the collar of her blouse.
        He took a digital Polaroid camera from his jacket and used it to take two identical photographs of her face before waiting patiently for them to develop. He placed both photos in an A5 hard-backed envelope and then slipped it into his jacket pocket.
        Then Christopher scooped his kit into his backpack and left, waiting until he had exited the darkness of the garden before removing his plastic overshoes, mask and balaclava.

Porter 

Day 1 • 6:53 A.M. 

Porter found himself staring down at the body, at the lumpy form under the black plastic shroud. 

Words escaped him. 

Nash asked the other officers and CSI techs to step back and give Porter space, to give him time alone with the victim. They shuffled back behind the yellow crime-scene tape, their voices low as they watched. To Porter, they were invisible. He only saw the black body bag and the small package lying beside it. It had been tagged with number 1 by CSI, no doubt photographed dozens of times from every possible angle. They knew better than to open it, though. They left that for him. 

How many boxes just like it had there been now? 

A dozen? No. Closer to two dozen. He did the math.
Seven victims. Three boxes each. Twenty-one. 

Twenty-one boxes over nearly five years.
He had toyed with them. Never left a clue behind. Only the boxes. A ghost.
Porter had seen so many officers come and go from the task force. 

With each new victim, the team would expand. The press would get wind of a new box, and they’d swarm like vultures. The entire city would come together on a massive manhunt. But then the third box would eventually arrive, the body would be found, and he’d disappear again. Lost among the shadows of obscurity. Months would pass; he’d fall out of the papers. The task force dwindled as the team got pulled apart for more pressing matters. 

Porter was the only one who had seen it through from the beginning. He had been there for the first box, recognizing it immediately for what it was—the start of a serial killer’s deranged spree. When the second box arrived, then the third, and finally the body, others saw too. 

It was the start of something horrible. Something planned. Something evil.
He had been there at the beginning. Was he now witnessing the end?


“What’s in the box?”


“We haven’t opened it yet,” Nash replied. “But I think you know.” The package was small. Approximately four inches square and three inches high. 

Like the others. 

Wrapped in white paper and secured with black string. The address label was handwritten in careful script. There wouldn’t be any prints, never were. The stamps were self-adhesive—they wouldn’t find saliva. 

He glanced back at the body bag. “Do you really think it’s him? Do you have a name?” 

Nash shook his head. “No wallet or ID on him. He left his face on the pavement and in the bus’s grill. We ran his prints but couldn’t find a match. He’s a nobody.” 

“Oh, he’s somebody,” Porter said. “Do you have any gloves?” 

Nash pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and handed them to Porter. Porter slipped them on and nodded toward the box. “Do you mind?” 

“We waited for you,” Nash said. “This is your case, Sam. Always was.” 

When Porter crouched and reached for the box, one of the crime scene techs rushed over, fumbling with a small video camera. “I’m sorry, sir, but I have orders to document this.” 

“It’s fine, son. Only you, though. Are you ready?” 

A red light on the front of the camera blinked to life, and the tech nodded. “Go ahead, sir.” 

Porter turned the box so he could read the address label, carefully avoiding the droplets of crimson. “Arthur Talbot, 1547 Dear- born Parkway.” 

Nash whistled. “Ritzy neighborhood. Old money. I don’t recognize the name, though.” 

“Talbot’s an investment banker,” the CSI tech replied. “Heavy into real estate too. Lately he’s been converting warehouses near the lake- front into lofts—doing his part to force out low-income families and replace them with people who can afford the high rent and Starbucks grandes on the regular.” 

Porter knew exactly who Arthur Talbot was. He looked up at the tech. “What’s your name, kid?” 

“Paul Watson, sir.” 

Porter couldn’t help but grin. “You’ll make an excellent detective one day, Dr. Watson.” 

“I’m not a doctor, sir. I’m working on my thesis, but I’ve got at least two more years to go.” 

Porter chuckled. “Doesn’t anyone read anymore?”


“Sam, the box?”


“Right. The box.”


He tugged at the string and watched as the knot unraveled and came apart. The white paper beneath had been neatly folded over the corners, ending in perfect little triangles. 

Like a gift. He wrapped it like a gift. 

The paper came away easily, revealing a black box. Porter set the paper and string aside, glanced at Nash and Watson, then slowly lifted the lid. 

The ear had been washed clean of blood and rested on a blanket of cotton. 

Just like the others. 

One

I first came to know Sophia Leonides in Egypt towards the end of the war. She held a fairly high administrative post in one of the Foreign Office departments out there.

I knew her first in an official capacity, and I soon appreciated the efficiency that had brought her to the position she held, in spite of her youth (she was at that time just twenty two). Besides being extremely easy to look at, she had a clear mind and a dry sense of humour that I found very delightful. We became friends. She was a person whom it was extraordinarily easy to talk to and we enjoyed our dinners and occasional dances very much.

All this I knew; it was not until I was ordered East at the close of the European war that I knew something else – that I loved Sophia and that I wanted to marry her.

We were dining at Shepheard’s when I made this discovery. It did not come to me with any shock of surprise, but more as the recognition of a fact with which I had been long familiar. I looked at her with new eyes – but I saw what I had already known for a long time. I liked everything I saw. The dark crisp hair that sprang up proudly from her forehead, the vivid blue eyes, the small square fighting chin, and the straight nose.

I liked the well cut light grey tailormade, and the crisp white shirt. She looked refreshingly English and that appealed to me strongly after three years without seeing my native land. Nobody, I thought, could be more English – and even as I was thinking exactly that, I suddenly wondered if, in fact, she was, or indeed could be, as English as she looked. Does the real thing ever have the perfection of a stage performance?

I realized that much and freely as we had talked together, discussing ideas, our likes and dislikes, the future, our immediate friends and acquaintances –– Sophia had never mentioned her home or her family.

She knew all about me (she was, as I have indicated, a good listener) but about her I knew nothing. She had, I supposed, the usual background, but she had never talked about it. And until this moment I had never realised the fact.

Sophia asked me what I was thinking about.

I replied truthfully: “You.”

“I see,” she said. And she sounded as though she did see.

“We may not meet again for a couple of years,” I said. “I don’t know when I shall get back to England. But as soon as I do get back, the first thing I shall do will be to come and see you and ask you to marry me.”

She took it without batting an eyelash.

She sat there, smoking, not looking at me.

For a moment or two I was nervous that she might not understand.

“Listen,” I said. “The one thing I’m determined not to do, is to ask you to marry me now. That wouldn’t work out anyway.”

First you might turn me down, and then I’d go off miserable and probably tie up with some ghastly woman just to restore my vanity. And if you didn’t turn me down what could we do about it? Get married and part at once? Get engaged and settle down to a long waiting period. I couldn’t stand your doing that. You might meet someone else and feel bound to be ‘loyal5 to me. We’ve been living in a queer hectic get-on-with-it-quickly atmosphere. Marriages and love affairs making and breaking all round us. I’d like to feel you’d gone home, free and independent, to look round f you and size up the new post-war world and decide what you want out of it. What is between you and me, Sophia, has got to be permanent. I’ve no use for any other kind of marriage.”

“No more have I,” said Sophia.

“On the other hand,” I said, “I think I I’m entitled to let you know how I –– well –– how I feel.”

“But without undue lyrical expression?” murmured Sophia.

“Darling –– don’t you understand? I’ve tried not to say I love you -“

She stopped me.

“I do understand, Charles. And I like your funny way of doing things. And you may come and see me when you come back –– if you still want to ––”

It was my turn to interrupt.

“There’s do doubt about that.”

“There’s always a doubt about everything, Charles. There may always be some incalculable factor that upsets the apple cart. For one thing, you don’t know much about me, do you?”

“I don’t even know where you live in England.”

“I live at Swinly Dean.” 

I nodded at the mention of the wellknown outer suburb of London which boasts three excellent golf courses for the city financier.

She added softly in a musing voice: “In a little crooked house…”

I must have looked slightly startled, for she seemed amused, and explained by elaborating the quotation ” ‘And they all lived together in a little crooked house.’ That’s us. Not really such a little house either.
But definitely crooked –– running to gables and halftimbering!”

“Are you one of a large family? Brothers and sisters?”

“One brother, one sister, a mother, a father, an uncle, an aunt by marriage, a grandfather, a great aunt and a step grandmother.”

“Good gracious!” I exclaimed, slightly overwhelmed.

She laughed.

“Of course we don’t normally all live together. The war and blitzes have brought that about –– but I don’t know––” she frowned reflectively, “Perhaps spiritually the family has always lived together –– under my grandfather’s eye and protection. He’s rather a Person, my grandfather. He’s over eighty, about four foot ten, and everybody else looks rather dim beside him.”

“He sounds interesting,” I said.

“He is interesting. He’s a Greek from Smyrna. Aristide Leonides.” She added, with a twinkle, “He’s extremely rich.”

“Will anybody be rich after this is over?”

“My grandfather will,” said Sophia with assurance. “No Soak-the-rich tactics would have any effect on him. He’d just soak the soakers.

“I wonder,” she added, “if you’ll like him?”

“Do you?” I asked.

“Better than anyone in the world,” said Sophia.