“Yeah,” I said. I sat down, carefully, on Lexie’s bed. “Yeah, it does.”

It had been getting towards the end of term, and Frank hadn’t told me whether the operation was going to continue after the summer; I was setting up an exit, in case I needed one. The other point of Vicky: you could always rely on her to get gossip all round college in no time flat.

My head was spinning, strange-shaped things rearranging themselves and falling into new places with soft little clicks. The coincidence of Trinity-this girl heading straight for my old college, picking up where I had left off-had given me the creeps all along, but this was almost worse. The only coincidence was two girls running into each other, in a small city, and Sticky Vicky spends most of her time hanging around town looking for useful people to run into anyway. Lexie hadn’t ended up in Trinity by chance, or by some dark magnetic pull that had her shadowing me, elbowing her way into my corners. I had suggested it to her. We had worked together seamlessly, she and I. I had drawn her to this house, this life, every bit as neatly and surely as she had drawn me.

Frank was still going. “Our girl said no, she wasn’t in college at the moment, she’d been traveling. She was vague about where-Vicky assumed she’d been in the funny farm. But here’s the good part: Vicky figured it was a funny farm in America, or maybe Canada. Partly that’s because she remembers your imaginary family was living in Canada, but mostly it’s because, somewhere between your time in UCD and that day on Grafton Street, you’d picked up a fairly serious tinge of American accent. So not only do we know how this girl got hold of the Lexie Madison ID, and when, but we’ve got a pretty good idea of where to start looking for her. I think we may owe Sticky Vicky a cocktail or two.”

“Sooner you than me,” I said. I knew my voice sounded weird, but Frank was too hyped-up to notice.

“I’ve put in a call to the FBI boys, and I’m about to e-mail them over prints and photos. There’s a good chance our girl was on the run in one way or another, so they might turn up something.”

Lexie’s face watched me warily, in triplicate, from the dressing-table mirror. “Keep me updated, OK?” I said. “Anything you get.”

“Will do. Want to talk to your fella? He’s here.”

Sam and Frank sharing an incident room. Jesus. “I’ll call him later,” I said.

The deep murmur of Sam’s voice in the background, and for a split second out of nowhere I wanted to talk to him so badly it almost doubled me over. “He says he’s got through your last six months in Murder,” Frank told me, “and all the people you might’ve pissed off are out, one way or another. He’ll keep working backwards and keep you up to speed.”

In other words, this had nothing to do with Operation Vestal. God; Sam. Secondhand and at a distance, he was trying to reassure me: he was quietly, doggedly going after the only threat that he understood. I wondered how much he’d slept, the night before. “Thanks,” I said. “Tell him thanks, Frank. Tell him I’ll talk to him soon.”

I needed to get outdoors-partly because of eyeball overload, all those strange dusty objects, and partly because the house was starting to do things to the back of my neck; it made the air around me feel too intimate and too knowing, like an eyebrow flick from someone you never could fool. I hit the fridge, made myself a turkey sandwich-this gang believed in good mustard-and a jam sandwich and a thermos of coffee, and took them on a long walk. Sometime very soon, I was going to be navigating Glenskehy in the dark, quite possibly with input from a killer who knew the area like the back of his hand. I figured it might be a good idea to get my bearings.

The place was a maze, dozens of single-file lanes twisting their way among hedges and fields and woods from nowhere much to nowhere much else, but it turned out I knew my way around better than I’d expected; I only got lost twice. I was starting to appreciate Frank on a whole new level. When I got hungry I sat on a wall and had my coffee and sandwiches, looking out over the mountainsides and giving the mental finger to the DV squad room and Maher and his halitosis problem. It was a sunny, snappy day, hazy clouds high in a cool blue sky, but I hadn’t seen a single human being, anywhere along the way. Somewhere far off a dog was barking and someone was whistling to him, but that was it. I was developing a theory that Glenskehy had been wiped out by a millennium death ray and no one had noticed.

On my way back I spent a while checking out the Whitethorn House grounds. The Marches might have lost most of their estate, but what was left was still pretty impressive. Stone walls higher than my head, lined with trees-mostly the hawthorns that had given the house its name, but I spotted oak, ash, an apple just going into bloom. A broken-down stable, discreetly out of smelling range of the house, where Daniel and Justin kept their cars. It would have held six horses, way back when; now it was all piles of dusty tools and tarps, but they didn’t look like they’d been touched in a very long time, so I didn’t poke around.

To the back of the house was that great sweep of grass, maybe a hundred yards long, bordered by a thick rim of trees and stone wall and ivy. At the bottom was a rusty iron gate-the gate Lexie had gone through, that night, when she walked out onto the last edge of her life-and, tucked away in a corner, a wide, semi-organized patch of shrubs. I recognized rosemary and bay: the herb garden Abby had mentioned, the evening before. That already seemed like months ago.

From that distance the house looked delicate and remote, something out of an old watercolor. Then a fast little wind rippled down the grass, lifting the long trails of ivy, and the lawn tilted under my feet. By one of the side walls, only twenty or thirty yards from me, there was someone behind the ivy; someone slight and dark as a shadow, sitting on a throne. The hair on the back of my neck rose, a slow wave.

My gun was still taped to the back of Lexie’s bedside table. I bit down hard on my lip and grabbed a heavy fallen branch out of the herb garden without taking my eyes off the ivy, which had dropped innocently back into place-the breeze was gone, the garden was still and sunny as a dream. I walked along the wall, casually but fast, flattened myself against it, got a good grip on my branch and whipped back the ivy in one sharp move.

There was no one there. The tree trunks and overgrown branches and ivy made an alcove against the wall, a little sun-splashed bubble. In it were two stone benches and, between them, a thread of water trickling through a hole in the wall and down shallow steps to a tiny, murky pond; nothing else. Shadows tangled together and for a second I caught the illusion again, the benches turning high-backed and sweeping, that slim figure sitting upright. Then I let the ivy fall and it was gone.

Apparently it wasn’t just the house that had a personality all its own. I got my breath back and checked out the alcove. The seats had traces of moss in the cracks, but most of it had been scrubbed away: someone knew about this place. I considered its potential as a rendezvous point, one way or another, but it was awfully close to the house to be inviting outsiders around, and the mat of leaves and twigs around the pond looked like it hadn’t been disturbed in a while. I brushed at it with the side of my shoe and got wide smooth flagstones. Metal glinted in the dirt and my heart bounced-knife-but it was too small. A button: lion and unicorn, battered and dented. Someone, long ago, had been in the British army.

The hole letting the water in through the garden wall was choked with muck. I stuck the button in my pocket, knelt down on the flagstones and used the branch and my hands to clear it out. It took a long time; the wall was thick. When I was finished there was a miniwaterfall, murmuring happily to itself, and my hands smelled of earth and decaying leaves.