Iris shook her head. She was nuts.

She needed some air. She needed to think. She needed to get the hell out of the cubicle farm. Iris pulled herself out of her chair and strolled as casually as she could to the ladies’ room with her giant field bag and purse on her arm.

The bathroom was deserted. Iris caught sight of her hopeless face in the mirror. She was twenty-three years old and officially unemployed. She couldn’t afford to be a felon too. She would have to come clean with Detective McDonnell. The keys would have to go to him, and only him.

She bent down to splash cold water on her face. When she looked back up, Amanda was walking in.

“Iris. I just heard the news. I’m sorry.”

“Thanks.” Iris turned into a bathroom stall to avoid any more small talk and shut the door.

“There are always other jobs,” Amanda continued.

“Yep.” Iris sank onto the toilet, wishing the busybody would just go away.

“Of course, you’ll need a recommendation . . . and to be honest, I’m not sure you’re going to get one.”

Iris didn’t say anything. She was hardly listening.

“Well, it’s not like you were a model employee, Iris.”

“Excuse me?”

“Do you really think no one noticed that you’re constantly late? That you’re hungover half the time? That you had an affair with a coworker?”

Iris gasped. “What?” She slammed opened the door to the stall.

“You’d be lucky to get a referral. I suggest you give Mr. Wheeler whatever it is he wants. He has connections all over the country.”

“I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about,” was all Iris could manage. So that was what Amanda was yelling about in Mr. Wheeler’s office. He’d put her up to this. Iris wanted to add a big “fuck you” but couldn’t muster the breath. The air had been sucked out of the room.

“Have it your way.” Amanda turned on her three-inch heels and left.

Iris slammed the door to the stall and sank onto the toilet with her head between her knees. They knew about Nick. They’d noticed her late mornings. Mr. Wheeler could ruin her career if she didn’t cooperate, but if she handed the keys and everything else over, she had no assurance he wouldn’t just call the police anyway.

She opened her field bag again. A manila folder was sitting next to the vault keys. Maybe the file would be enough to appease Mr. Wheeler, at least for the time being. It wasn’t like he could even read the notes. She lifted it out and skimmed her shorthand translations again.

“In God We Trust is the key . . . Inside man lost . . . Mole hunt bust . . . Fuck the mayor . . . Move the accounts . . . Teddy and Jim . . . Tell Max to stay on vacation . . . A bank’s only as good as its records . . . The meek shall inherit the earth.”

It was all gobbledygook anyway. Iris flipped to the next page, where she’d tried to decipher pages of the other files. “Eleanor Finch: 25,000 . . . Rhonda Whitmore: 50,000.”

The words of the last file were in English clear as day but still made no sense. They were letters to safe deposit box owners, explaining that their unclaimed possessions would be handed over to the state if they didn’t pay up.

Iris stuffed the papers back in her bag. She would hand the files over with her sketches, she decided. If anyone asked about it, she would just say she grabbed them off a messy desk by mistake. She stood up and straightened her unironed pants. Amanda was right. She had been a terrible employee. She deserved to be fired. What was worse, she had failed to find Beatrice and was about to hand the last traces of her away to save her own ass. Iris was going to be sick.

When she left the bathroom, Nick was standing in the hallway outside as if he’d been waiting for her.

“I heard,” he said. The sympathy falling from his face made her want to scream.

“I’ll be fine! I just can’t believe they fired Brad.” If Brad couldn’t hold on to an engineering job in this world, she had no chance.

Brad’s desk was already collapsed into crisp cardboard boxes. The rest of the office, with its matching desks set in neat little rows, didn’t seem to notice. She had never belonged there in the first place. Her chest tightened until she could barely breathe.

“I know.” Nick frowned. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think it had something to do with the old bank.”

“What do you mean?”

“Mr. Wheeler’s been grilling everyone that worked on the bank building. The drafters, the junior architect, even me. It seems like the only people being laid off are the ones that were involved in the project.”

“But doesn’t that make sense? The project has been shut down.”

“I’m not sure. They’ve been asking some pretty weird questions. They also confiscated my camera. And that’s not all.” He lowered his voice. “I went looking for the photos of the bank I’d uploaded to the server last week. This morning they were gone.”

Iris scowled and studied the floor. “Mr. Wheeler threatened to press charges if I don’t return any items I might have taken from the premises. I have no idea what he was talking about.”

“He said something like that to me too. He said if I didn’t divulge all ‘pertinent information,’ I’d be fired. I’m beginning to wonder if I’m next.”

“What did he want to know?”

“He said he knew we were friends and wanted to know if you’d mentioned anything unusual about the bank.”

Iris glared at Nick. “He knew we were friends?”

“Yeah. We sometimes go to lunch together. Everyone knows that.”

“Everyone seems to know a lot more than that.” She stared pointedly at him.

He scowled, catching her meaning. “What? How?”

“I have no idea. I figured you must’ve told someone about us. ’Cause I sure as shit didn’t.”

“Hey.” He held up his hands in self-defense. “I’ve got more to lose than you on this type of thing. I could get nailed with sexual harassment in the workplace. I didn’t say a word.”

She supposed that might be true. “So, what did you tell him?”

“Just the stuff you’d told me about how the building was full of strange files and desks full of paper.”

“Did you tell him anything else?” She clutched her field bag a little tighter.

“Just that you were really curious about the safe deposit boxes in the basement.” He chuckled, nudging her shoulder. “It was like you were obsessed or something.”

“What?”

She almost hit him in the head with her field bag. He’d painted her as a crazed thief. Worse yet, she sort of was a crazed thief.

She headed for the elevators. “I’ve got to go. Just tell everyone that I had a breakdown and couldn’t stop crying, okay? It’s not like I have work to do anyway.”

“Are you okay?” His eyebrows were furrowed with concern as she stepped into an elevator cab. “Was it something I said?”

“No, it’s not you. I just—I just can’t be here right now. I’ll call you later, okay? Thanks for covering for me.”

The doors slid closed. She paced back and forth in the little steel box until the doors opened to the main lobby. It was only 10:00 a.m. She wasn’t supposed to meet the detective at the bank for four more hours, but she needed answers now. Across Euclid Avenue, the abandoned bank was waiting.

CHAPTER 64

Thursday, December 14, 1978

Beatrice slipped out the back door of the diner and headed down the alley toward the hospital. Up ahead on the edge of Little Italy was the old Catholic church, where the local Italians attended Mass and sent their children to school. As she approached the rear entrance of Church of the Savior, she heard a faint melody. It grew louder as she walked. The back door was cracked open to the sanctuary. Voices of children singing and candlelight softly beckoned her in. She recognized the song; it was a Christmas carol she hadn’t heard since she was a little girl. It pulled her up the stone steps and inside.