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After a snack downstairs in the Brasserie Margaux, Stephanie and I led the girls to a private room off the lobby. There we met the attorney she’d befriended in Tacoma and she and I signed the legal documents, having already consulted with the girls about our plan.

Attorney Davies was a tall, plum-faced man with a bad toupee—his wife, who’d come along as a witness, was a short, bulging-eyed woman with crooked teeth and a personality wound tighter than copper wire on a stick. We’d bought bouquets from the gift shop for the girls, trying to make this more of a celebration than a wake.

Every once in a while Allyson would get a look in her eyes as if she were about to cry, but Britney was contained in the event, grinning ear to ear.

The rest of the afternoon was spent in our rooms either making phone calls or in a chatty marathon four-handed game of Monopoly. The girls were losing their father tomorrow and you might think we’d be talking about that, but none of us did. With a smidgen of help from Stephanie and a wink from Allyson, Britney won the Monopoly game and declared herself queen of the world.

It was three when I finally reached Carl Steding. “Carl. Jim Swope here. From North Bend. You were going to look for a complete list of the companies that had packages at Southeast Travelers for me?”

“Yeah, yeah. I said I would do it and it’s done. I’ve been calling your fire station all morning. Had a long chat with a young woman there. She’s kind of wigged out. Says she has the syndrome.”

“That would be Karrie.”

“Yeah, that was her name. Does she really have it?”

“I think so. What’d you find?”

“No JCP, Inc., involved. Nowhere. I even went as far as to find out if any of their two subsidiaries might have been involved. Or anyone who ships to them. Near as I can tell, they didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

“Are you absolutely sure?”

“As sure as anyone can be. If I were you, I’d start looking someplace else.”

I felt as if I’d been hit with a two-by-four. Everything had pointed to JCP, and now on my last good day I find out they had nothing to do with it and I’d been looking in the wrong direction all along. I was on the verge of panic but knew I had to think this through calmly. My brain was cycling through everything I knew about the Southeast Travelers incident and our own accident response in February, trying to sort it all out. “Tell me something, then. That young woman you said died in the house fire?”

“Which young woman?”

“You told me the daughter of one of your firefighters died in a house fire around the time you guys were investigating this.”

“Oh, yeah. Anastasia Brown. Sure. What about her?”

“Did Scott Donovan know her?”

“Yes. Of course. In fact, they were working together right before the fire.”

“Thanks.”

Stephanie looked at me after I hung up. “Jane’s didn’t have anything there?”

“Nope.”

“So what do you think?”

“I think if it wasn’t Jane’s, it was somebody closer.”

Stephanie and I looked at each other for a moment. Allyson said, “So what are you going to do, Daddy? Is there no hope? No hope at all?”

“There’s always hope, sweetheart.”

Twenty minutes later Stephanie contacted Donovan by phone for the first time that day. She’d left half a dozen messages on his voice mail, but he hadn’t returned any of them. I listened at the earpiece, the warmth of our cheeks mingling. “Good God,” Stephanie said. “Have you made any progress? Have you figured out this syndrome?”

“No, I’m sorry to report. I’ve been consulting with people from the company about Achara’s death all day. It’s shaken people up pretty bad. There’s so much going on. The sale of the company. This business out in North Bend. What happened to Achara. I still don’t understand it. Say . . . where are you guys? I’d like to come over and see how you’re doing.”

“We’d better not say right now. So what do you think happened to Achara? When was the last time you saw her?”

“Last time I saw her was the last time you saw her. She was headed for the library. I was supposed to go