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By Root 976 0

take-out menu from First Won Ton, in Chinatown. She scanned it quickly. One item, a Chef’s Special, spicy fragrant duck with cherries, was circled in pencil. Beneath the menu was a photo of Caroline and her mother. Caro was young, ten or eleven maybe, but already you could see that she strongly resembled her mother, Heidi, who was tall, slim in an athletic way, blond—pale as a ghost, really—with a high, intelligent forehead and light eyes; it was impossible to tell what color from the photo and Alli didn’t remember her well enough to recall whether they were blue or green or hazel. Mother and daughter looked like two equestrians, models out of a Ralph Lauren ad. Sad now to think of Heidi somewhere on the West Coast and Caro in the particular level of limbo reserved for the disappeared. Alli put the photo and the take-out menu back, and closed the drawer.

Perhaps there was nothing.

She sat back on her heels, rocking back and forth thoughtfully, as she stared at the desk. On an impulse, she pulled open the drawer with the hanging files. She pushed them back and forth on their metal tracks, listening to the scraping, dry as an insect’s chirrup. All at once, a frown creased her face and, pushing the files as far as she could to the rear, she peered down at the bottom of the drawer. Looking again at the outside, it appeared as if there was a two- or three-inch differential. Rapping a knuckle against the bottom of the drawer, she heard a hollow echo, but feeling around there was no way in. Pulling the files toward her, she drew the drawer out to its fullest extent. A tiny half-moon indentation in the wood presented itself.

Hooking her fingernail into it, she pulled and was rewarded with a meticulously milled rectangular piece of the drawer’s bottom detaching itself. Inside the hidden cubbyhole she found a cell phone, and that was all. She double-checked the space before fitting the cover back on, pushing the files back into place, and closing the drawer.

She walked to the study door, pressed her ear against the carved and polished wood, and heard the murmuring of her uncle’s voice as he talked with other men, then the muffled slam of the front door. Crossing to the window, she was just in time to see her uncle and Jenkins climb into the backseat of a gleaming black Lincoln Town Car, which immediately drove off in a spray of gravel.

Returning to the wing chair, she curled up and examined the cell. Though it was a brand she recognized, the model was one she had never seen before. She wondered whether it was an old model. Most people threw away their old cell when they got a new one; they did not hide it away in a secret compartment of their desk. She pressed the On button. The phone lit up immediately, connecting to a network. So it wasn’t an old phone, or, if it was, its SIM card was still active. Plus, the battery was fully charged.

She waited for the network to give her a signal, but nothing showed except a tiny red SOS.

“Shit on a fucking stick,” she muttered. She’d heard stories of certain hotel chains using wireless dampers to keep their clients from using cell phones in their rooms, forcing them to use the hotel’s more expensive wired system, but why would Uncle Hank employ one in his house, except as a security measure.

She stuffed the phone in her pocket and tried to get a grip on her rising panic.

* * *

INTERVIEWING ARJETA Kraja was proving frustrating, principally because she seemed to have vanished.

“It’s as if she never existed at all,” Pete McKinsey said when he, Naomi, and Jack rendezvoused in the small suburb closest to Fearington.

“Her name doesn’t come up in any government database,” Naomi said, consulting her PDA. “Nor does she possess a driver’s license, health insurance, or even a Social Security number.”

“Family?” Jack asked.

“Negative.” McKinsey shuffled from one foot to the other as if he were itching to go someplace.

“Friends?”

“Not anyone we could find when we canvassed the area.”

“So either she’s a ghost,” McKinsey said.

Jack nodded. “Or she’s an illegal immigrant.”

“Either way,” Naomi