She lowered her gaze as if saddened and nodded. Mr. Thompson was capable of terrible things. The words “Rhonda Whitmore!” were scrawled in red ink across her mind. Was he capable of murder? Had he already found Max?

“Have . . . the police found her yet?”

“Not yet, but don’t worry, Beatrice. We will.”

Hours after her interview with Mr. Thompson, the words “we will” repeated in her head. She sat at her desk under the watchful eyes of the entire office and tried to look as shocked as everyone else. Mr. Thompson had set the scene perfectly. All of the employees were on high alert, anxious to find Max and save the bank. She looked down at the flip calendar on the edge of her desk. The next day was Friday—the day the bank was going to let the City of Cleveland default.

After the other women had seemed to tire of sneaking glances at her, Beatrice carried her purse to the bathroom and locked herself in a stall. She put her head to her knees and rocked for a little while, tracing the floor tiles with vacant eyes. Tony wouldn’t let them arrest Max, she told herself, but she didn’t believe it. If Tony had enough clout to save her, Max would have given him the key. But Max had given it to her instead.

She finally left the bathroom and took the elevator down to the main lobby and the pay phone in the corner. She deposited her money and dialed. She listened to the hypnotic ring of the telephone and squeezed her eyes shut.

“Hello?” said a voice on the other end of the phone.

“Mother? This is Beatrice,” she said. “Don’t hang up.”

After a long silence, the voice said, “You’ve got a lot of nerve calling me up like this. After all this time . . . What the hell do you want?”

Beatrice tried to picture the black-and-white photograph of her mother and aunt arm in arm when they were young, before they hated each other. “It’s Doris. She’s in the hospital.”

“So that’s where you’ve been all this time. I guess that figures, don’t it?” Ilene breathed cigarette smoke into the receiver.

“What figures?”

“Huh.” Her mother chuckled. “I guess Doris never told you why she left town all those years ago.”

Doris hadn’t told her a thing. Beatrice had been too afraid to pry. None of it mattered now. “She’s dying, Mom. I just thought you should know. She’s at University Hospitals in Cleveland.”

Beatrice hung up the phone before her mother could say another acidic word. There was no tenderness, no concern, no relief her daughter was still alive. She never should have called. Ilene would never come for Doris.

When she returned to her desk, she began to methodically remove every last trace of Beatrice Baker from the Auditing Department. She tried to make it seem as if it were business as usual. Drawer by drawer, she picked her station clean of anything personal. There wasn’t much. Several folders were packed in the last drawer. They were her filing assignments for Randy. He had said the files were sensitive, and that he would only trust them to her. She decided to decipher why.

She pulled them out as if to sort them and studied the pages more closely. Each file contained a list of transactions. The only thing that made any of them different from the other accounting records Beatrice had filed was the labeling system. Instead of a client name and account number, there were a bunch of symbols, “$#$,” and a jumble of letters, “LRHW.” The symbols and letters varied, but none of them made much sense.

“What are you reading, dear?” Ms. Cunningham’s voice boomed behind her. Beatrice jumped.

“N-nothing,” she stammered, and shoved the sheet in her hand into the nearest folder. “It’s some filing for Mr. Halloran. I . . . wanted to make sure I sorted it correctly.”

“Of course. Keep up the good work.” She then raised her voice to the entire room of women. “Filing is an important responsibility that shouldn’t be taken lightly. A bank is only as good as its records.”

Then Ms. Cunningham waddled away. It was the closest thing to a secretarial staff meeting Beatrice had ever witnessed at the bank. Maybe her supervisor was trying to calm everyone’s nerves, but she also seemed to be pointing her comments directly at Beatrice.

Once she was certain no one else was looking over her shoulder, Beatrice cracked the folder where she had buried the page she’d been holding. The sheet didn’t belong there, she realized, checking the label. Beatrice started to refile it correctly but stopped herself. She stared at the accounting record in her hand and silently repeated what old Cunny had said. A bank is only as good as its records.

Beatrice squeezed the paper between her fingers. No one was going to believe a thing she had to say about the bank, Bill Thompson, or the money men, but no one would ever be able to piece together what had happened to the accounting record in her hand either. Her mind made up, she proceeded to shuffle pages randomly into the wrong folders, scattering the data across thirteen files. She walked them over to Mr. Halloran’s mailbox and shoved the files inside before she changed her mind. It might not make any difference, but it was something.

When the clock struck five, Beatrice Baker left the bank for the last time.

CHAPTER 60

Beatrice didn’t realize where she was heading until she got there. She stepped off the bus in Little Italy and walked the three blocks up Murray Hill to her aunt’s apartment, looking over her shoulder the whole way. She stood at the bottom of the dark, covered steps that led up to her aunt’s door. The lights were out. There weren’t any suspicious cars parked along the curb. It all looked exactly the way she’d left it thirteen days earlier.

She climbed the stairs holding her breath and listened again for footsteps. Nothing. She swung the door open and tentatively stepped inside the cold, dark room. With the flick of the wall switch, light poured down the stairwell. The apartment was just as she’d left it—a wreck. The furniture was still strewn about. Loose papers and kitchen utensils were still scattered across the floor. She stepped over the ravaged pieces of Doris’s life and headed to the bedroom. She searched the rubble until she found the photograph of her mother and aunt together. She picked it up and slid it into her purse. Someday she would visit Doris’s grave, she promised herself.

Her eyes circled the room, looking for anything else she should take with her on her way out of town. The mink coat was in a pile next to the bed. She shook off her own wool coat and slid the mink onto her shoulders. She was amazed the knee-length fur almost fit. She tightened the belt. Her aunt was overweight from years of greasy diner food, but the young woman in the photograph was different. She had been small like Beatrice once. She hugged the soft coat to her chest as if it were Doris herself.

“I wish I didn’t have to go,” she whispered.

The clock inside her head ticked loudly, reminding her to hurry. She ran to the hall closet and grabbed a small suitcase. She needed more clothes. Her stash of belongings had been discovered deep in the bank while she was hiding in the hotel. The thought of what might have happened if she had returned to the eleventh floor the night before made her shudder.

Beatrice grabbed the few items she’d left at the foot of the radiator. She ran to the bathroom and threw a spare toothbrush and other essentials into the bag. She glanced up at the mirror and shrieked.

There was writing on the glass. At first she thought it was blood, but she looked closer and realized it was lipstick. It looked like nonsense before she realized it was shorthand. It was Max. She must have been there sometime in the last twelve days. Beatrice scanned the smeared, greasy marks slowly, her heart rate speeding up as she read.