Chapter 5 — Four Hundred and Twelve Thousand Dollars

By ten the next morning Jonathan was down at the marina inspecting the slip repairs, and the house was quiet enough to hear the refrigerator humming three rooms away.

I went into his study with the brass key I had taken from the kitchen hook heavy in the pocket of my cardigan.

The mahogany desk was bare except for a leather blotter and a single manila folder near the brass lamp, and I opened the folder expecting surveyor reports for the Beach Avenue development.

Instead, on top, lay a single-page loan guarantee stamped with the logo of a bank in Newark, and in the middle of the first paragraph, in sharp clean typeface, a figure.