I took my left hand off the steering wheel, crossing it awkwardly under my right arm and reaching it out in his direction.

The ring slid smoothly onto my finger.

Exactly where it belonged.

I caught Peter up on recent events as we sped west along the Interstate. My friends were on the case in New York, reporting to the police that Jake had tried to kill me and urging them to treat him as a suspect. Of course, if you hadn’t actually been there during the actual shooting, the whole story would sound preposterous, and I doubted that sharing it with the authorities would solve any of my problems. This was part of the reason I’d decided to get out of town. The other reason was that I-we-had research to do elsewhere.

Being shot at by Jake was enough to convince me that he was Gallagher’s killer. My earlier gullibility may have been bottomless, but the blinders were officially off where he was concerned.

It was also enough to convince me that there had to be something going on between him and Annabel, regardless of what he’d told me at Starbucks, because it must have been Annabel who’d attacked Dahlia. Jake had put her up to it, of course, which was how she knew to disguise herself as a Rachel lookalike, and Peter had unwittingly let him know how perfectly the timing of my late start would align with Dahlia’s commute. He used Annabel to set me up, both to deflect interest in him as a suspect and because he thought I knew something that would incriminate him. Then, when I eluded the police, he tipped them off as to where I was, helpfully aided by me, since I’d pretty much given him Emma’s address that afternoon. In fact, he’d probably told the police about everything I’d told him all along: my “insurance policy,” my love of Forensic City and my hate of all things Gallagher, not to mention my little jokes about murdering Gallagher by poisoning his stupid pencils. When I eluded the authorities again, he came after me himself.

But while I knew Jake was guilty, I didn’t know why he’d done what he’d done. Was it to secure Gallagher’s fortune for Annabel, and therefore himself, before Gallagher could divorce her? Of course, according to Jake, she was in for only a modest fortune whether she was a widow or a divorcée, but that could have been just another of his lies. Or was it even more complicated than that, related in some way to the intrigue around the Thunderbolt deal? Since New York was dangerous territory for me just now, the default option was to check into the latter. Poking around at Thunderbolt headquarters might help us answer, once and for all, if this entire thing was about the deal and, if so, how. Besides, I’d always heard that Pennsylvania was lovely this time of year.

Peter, meanwhile, managed not to say “I told you so” at any point in my narrative, and he seemed almost reluctant to add to the case against Jake. But he confessed that he’d continued to research him, in spite of our argument the previous day. He’d gleaned some useful information in the process, including that Annabel and Jake should be taken seriously as an item.

“Jake may have said their earlier relationship was a casual thing, but what I found suggests it was a lot less casual than he let on,” he told me. “They went to a wedding together several years ago, and the wedding couple put their album online. The two of them definitely don’t look casual in these pictures, and there’s even a picture of Annabel catching the bride’s bouquet. The caption said something about it being about time that Jake made an honest woman out of her, which implies that they’d been seeing each other pretty seriously for a while.”

Peter had picked up some useful context about Jake’s professional background, too. “I don’t know what he told you about his previous work with Gallagher, but he worked on the Tiger buyout, too. I found an article from a trade magazine that mentioned he was on Gallagher’s team at Ryan Brothers. The article was mostly about organized labor, and how the downturn in manufacturing has been forcing concessions from union leaders, but it talked about the Tiger deal and the Ryan Brothers team, and it mentioned both Gallagher and Jake by name, along with Perry. Are you sure that Jake wasn’t part of whatever Gallagher and Perry had going on?”

“If he was, Gallagher did a pretty good job hiding it. He was just as abusive to Jake as to anyone else, practically. And while I recognize that I have no credibility now when it comes to Jake, there weren’t any sidebars, any one-on-one conversations between the two of them that would indicate they were plotting. And if they were in on something together, why would Jake kill him?”

Unfortunately, all of Peter’s Googling and my being used for target practice hadn’t given us the remotest clue as to what Jake thought Dahlia and I knew that made us so dangerous, much less why he was so eager to set me up as his fall guy. Or fall person.

And while we had a better sense of who the bad guys were, we were still confused about the identity of the good guys. Neither Peter nor I could figure out who the two other men from the boat basin could be or even whether they were definitely good guys. Hilary had been put in charge of canvassing area emergency rooms in an attempt to track down the black-haired stranger. But I didn’t even know where to begin to track down the guy in the ski mask with the familiar voice, much less how he fit in to this entire mess.

When I did find out, it was the biggest surprise of all.

Living in Manhattan can leave one jaded in certain ways. That man jogging up Lexington Avenue in a wig, Wonder Woman costume, and full makeup on a day that most certainly is not Halloween? He doesn’t merit a second glance. The motorcades of visiting dignitaries are a nuisance and the thirty-dollar hamburger is a staple on menus around town. Spa pedicures for seven-year-olds aren’t uncommon in certain circles, although I personally find this tacky. And the city is indisputably a shopping mecca, offering a broader array of wares displayed with more artistic flair than anywhere else in the world.

But there is one type of retail experience denied to Manhattanites that can thrill even the most jaded among us: the mass market chain store.

To be fair, there is a Kmart at Astor Place, but it’s not the same as the Super Ks that sprawl luxuriously in suburbs across America, where there are no space constraints. I’ve also heard rumors of a Target in Brooklyn, but it seems to me that part of the experience is pulling off a highway and into a massive parking lot; not taking the subway or a taxi to another borough.

Peter had spent most of his adult life in California, so he was unprepared for my excitement when we pulled into the lot of a twenty-four-hour Sav-Mart somewhere in western New Jersey.

“Let’s get a cart.”

“We don’t need a cart,” he said. “There are spare clothes for us both in the car. A basket should do it. All we need are some toiletries and a couple of things to freshen up your disguise. The bullet hole in your hat is sort of conspicuous once you know it’s a bullet hole. And have I mentioned how much I hate that hat?”

“But carts are more fun. In New York, they only have the mini carts, and they’re impossible anyhow because the aisles are so narrow.”

“When was the last time you bought enough of anything at a grocery store to actually need a cart?”

“Maybe I would do more grocery shopping if there were big grocery stores with big carts in the city,” I countered.

“Fine. We’ll get a cart.” I had the feeling I was being humored, but that didn’t really bother me.

We made quick work of picking up the basics, like toothpaste, soda and potato chips (it had been a long time since dinner, and I seemed to have developed a salt-and-vinegar fixation in the last forty-eight hours). But it was harder to plan for my new incognito look with so many choices presenting themselves.