Chapter 4: Terms

Bridget picked up a cast-iron pan and held it over the little black disc.

"Don't," Margot said.

"It's tracking you."

"Then it's telling him I'm at your bar. He already knows that. If it goes dark, he knows I found it."

Bridget lowered the pan very slowly.

"That's annoyingly smart."

"I learned it from him."

They put the suitcase in the back storeroom with the green light still blinking.

At six in the morning Margot climbed out the bathroom window in Bridget's spare room, down the fire stairs, and into a car with its engine running.

She had called the number on the card at five.

The man who answered had said only, "Come to the Drake. Fourteen twelve."

The suite had a long table by the window and the whole gray lake behind it.

Elias Brubaker had taken off his coat and rolled his shirtsleeves to the elbow.

On the table lay a black cloth, a loupe, and a row of tools smaller than eyelashes.

"Sit," he said. "Give me the watch."

"You said I'd call when I'd decided whether I believed you."

"Have you?"

"No. I decided I'd rather be wrong near you than wrong alone."

He almost smiled.

She set the box in front of him and he lifted the watch out and pressed the back of the case with his thumbnail.

It opened.

"You do this yourself?" she asked.

"My grandfather taught me. I had a spare crystal sent over at midnight."

His hands were broad, with a healed cut across the right thumb.

They worked without hurry, and the cracked glass came away in one piece.

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