He smiled at me as though I were a child. “How do you feel about funeral home directors, David? Is what they do wrong? They make money out of death. But they’re providing a service, and they’re entitled to make money doing that. Same for estate lawyers, the florists you call to send flowers to loved ones, the man who cuts the lawn at the cemetery. What I do is, David, is make America a better place. The good citizens of this country are entitled to feel safe when they go to bed at night, and they’re entitled to feel that way knowing they’re getting the best bang for their tax dollar. That’s what I do, with all the facilities I run across a great many of these wonderful United States of America. I help people sleep at night, and I help keep their taxes down.”

“And all you get out of it is, if last year is any indication, a $1.3 billion payoff.”

He shook his head in mock sadness. “Do you work for free at the Standard?” he asked.

“Your company’s actively involved in trying to see minimum sentences raised across the board. You’re telling me your only motive there is to make Americans sleep safe at night?”

Sebastian glanced at his watch. I thought it might be a Rolex, but the truth was, I’d never seen a real Rolex. But it looked expensive.

“I really must be going,” he said. “Would you like me to make a copy of the check for the purposes of your story?”

“That won’t be necessary,” I said.

“Well then, I guess I’ll be off.” Sebastian rose from the bench and started walking across the grass back to his limo. He brought his take-out cup with him, but even though he walked right past an open waste bin, he handed it to Welland to dispose of. Welland opened the door for him, closed it, got rid of the cup, and before getting into the driver’s seat he looked at me. He made his hand into a little gun, grinned, and took a shot at me.

The limo drove off. It was looking very much like they weren’t going to be giving me a lift back to the paper.

Ten days after our dinner at Gina’s, Jan got us tickets to go to Five Mountains, the roller-coaster park. It seemed the perfect metaphor for her moods since our dinner at Gina’s. Up and down, up and down, up and down.

She’d been doing her best to be herself around Ethan in the ten days since she’d said I’d be happy to be rid of her, and my tactful suggestion that she might be paranoid. If Ethan had noticed his mother was not well, he hadn’t been curious enough to ask what was up. He usually asked whatever question came into his head, so that told me he really hadn’t noticed. Jan had taken a couple of days off from work in the last week, but I’d still taken Ethan to my parents’, thinking maybe what she needed was time to herself. She’d never actually come out and said she wanted to kill herself, but I still felt a low-level anxiety when I thought about her home alone.

The day after Gina’s, I snuck out of the office for a hastily booked afternoon appointment with our family doctor, Andrew Samuels. When I called, I told the nosy receptionist, who always wanted to know why you were seeing the doctor, I had a sore throat.

“Going around,” she said.

But when I was alone in the office with Dr. Samuels, I said, “It’s about Jan. She’s not herself lately. She’s down, she’s depressed. She said she thinks Ethan and I would be better off without her.”

“That’s not good,” he said. He had some questions. Had something happened recently? A death in the family? Financial problems? Trouble at work? A health matter she might not have told me about?

I had nothing.

Dr. Samuels said the best thing was for me to suggest she come and see him. You couldn’t diagnose a patient who wasn’t there.

I started pushing her to go talk to him. At one point, I said that if she refused to go, I’d go see him without her, never letting on I’d already done it. She was furious. But later she came into the kitchen and told me she’d made an appointment to see him the following day, which she was taking off.

The next evening, I asked how it had gone. I tried hard not to make it the first thing I asked when I saw her.

“It was good,” Jan said without hesitation.

“You told him how you’ve been feeling?”

Jan nodded.

And what did he say?”

“Mostly he just listened,” she said. “He let me talk. For a long time. I’m sure I ran into the next appointment, but he didn’t rush me at all.”

“He’s a good guy,” I said.

“So, I told him how I’ve been feeling, and I guess that’s about it.”

Surely there was more. “Did he have any suggestions? Did he write you out a prescription or anything?”

“He said there were some drugs I could try, but I told him I didn’t want anything. I’ve already told you that. I’m not going to become some drug addict.”

“So did he do anything?”

“He said I’d already taken the first positive step by coming to see him. And he said there were some people who were better at this sort of thing-”

“Psychiatrists?”

Jan nodded. “He said he’d refer me to one if I wanted.”

“So you said yes?”

Jan eyed my sharply. “I said no. You think I’m crazy?”

“No, I don’t think you’re crazy. You don’t have to be crazy to go see a psychiatrist.” I’d almost said “shrink.”

“I’m going to try to deal with this on my own.”

“But those thoughts you were having,” I said. “About whether to harm yourself.” I couldn’t bring myself to say “suicide.”

“What about them?”

“Are you still having those?”

“People have all kinds of thoughts,” she said, and walked out of the room.

That same day Jan ordered the tickets, an email arrived in my in-box at work:

“We spoke the other day. I know you’re looking into Star Spangled Corrections and how they’re trying to buy up all the votes on council. Reeves is not the only one they’ve treated to trips or gifts. They’ve gotten to practically everyone, so there’s no way this thing is not going to go through. I’ve got a list of what’s being paid out and who’s getting it. I don’t dare phone you or say who I am in this email, but I’m willing to meet you in person and give you all the evidence you need for this. Meet me tomorrow at 5:00 p.m. in the parking lot of Ted’s Lakeview General Store. Take 87 north to Lake George, up by the Adirondack Park Preserve. Take 9 North, which goes for a ways alongside 87. There’s an area where the woods opens up, and that’s where Ted’s is. Don’t come early and hang around and don’t wait long for me. If I’m not there by 5:10, it probably means something has happened and I’m not coming. I’ll tell you this much: I’m a woman, which you probably figured out when I called you, and I will be in a white pickup.”

I read it through a couple of times, sitting at my desk in the newsroom. Rattled, I signed out, went to the cafeteria for a coffee, took a couple of sips, left it there, and returned to my desk.

“You okay?” Samantha Henry, at her desk next to mine, asked. “I said hello to you twice and you ignored me.”

The Hotmail address it had been sent from was a random series of letters and numbers that offered no clues about the author. I made a couple of notes, then deleted the email. Then I went into the deleted emails and made sure it was purged from the system. Maybe I was paranoid, but ever since learning that the paper’s owners had an interest in selling land to Star Spangled Corrections, I’d been looking over my shoulder a bit more.

I didn’t trust anyone around here.

“Holy shit,” I said under my breath.

Someone had dirt on the members of Promise Falls council who were accepting bribes, gifts, kickbacks, whatever you wanted to call them, from Elmont Sebastian’s prison corporation.

My story on Reeves’s Florence vacation had never made the paper. His check to Sebastian was obviously written after he’d found out I knew about his Florence trip, but it was enough to bury the story as far as Brian was concerned, and I wasn’t sure I blamed him. I needed something that really nailed Reeves and possibly other council members to the wall.