“Ask Richard what happened after the fire alarm stopped,” he read aloud.
“Those words weren’t on the invitation when it was printed,” Caroline said.
“Who wrote them?”
“I did.”
Daniel sat very still.
“You sent an invitation to Jessica knowing it was a trap?”
“No,” Caroline said.
“I took an unused invitation out of Richard’s office months afterward.
I added those words before I showed it to you.
I wanted you to ask a question he couldn’t answer with a speech.”
“You could have told me the answer.”
“I don’t know it yet,” she replied.
“But I know the alarm did not fail in the way the public was told.”
When the call ended, Daniel opened the hotel’s curtains.
Across the parking lot, a family hurried from a minivan beneath a shared umbrella.
A small boy stopped to retrieve a stuffed dog that had fallen in a puddle.
His mother waited, annoyed but patient.
Daniel watched them disappear into the lobby.
He wanted a world in which a lost toy was the worst thing that could happen in a rainstorm.
He was about to turn away when his phone vibrated.
Jessica had sent a photograph of an old postcard she found among her mother’s recipes.
It showed Saint Alden’s red brick dining hall with sunlight on the lake.
On the back, in Peter’s handwriting, were four words: Ask about the basement bell.
Underneath was a date, three days before the fire.
Daniel stared at the postcard.
The invitation mentioned the alarm after it stopped.
Peter had mentioned a bell below the building before the fire began.
The phrases might have nothing to do with each other.
They might also describe two ends of the same event.
He saved the image and wrote the date on his hotel stationery, leaving a blank space beside it for whatever came next.
The county historical society occupied a converted courthouse where generations of clerks had stored maps and probate records before anybody imagined an electronic archive.
Its reading room smelled of paper, floor polish, and rain-soaked coats.
Daniel arrived ten minutes early, signed the visitor register, and chose a table beneath a wall clock that ticked louder than it should have.
He did not recognize Caroline until she took off a plain dark scarf beside the circulation desk.
She was smaller than he remembered from photographs of charity galas, with gray at her temples and a scar across one knuckle.
She carried a canvas tote rather than a designer handbag.
