Chapter 10: The Appointment

On Tuesday morning the family doctor ordered bloodwork, and Lawson told Jonas to drive me to the lab on Third Avenue.

I had been waiting for exactly that.

In the back seat, I took out the gray phone with its sound off.

I texted the number on Poppy's note.

*Annabel Draper. I'll be in the pharmacy under the lab at eleven. Poppy sent me.*

The answer came before we reached Seventy-Second Street.

*I'll be the woman buying cough drops.*

The pharmacy had a stockroom behind the register, full of cardboard boxes and one folding chair.

The reporter was fifty, with short gray hair and a wool coat that had seen a lot of newsrooms.

She did not offer her name, and she did not offer her hand.

"I'm going to listen to this once," she said. "Then I'll tell you whether I believe you."

I held out the gray phone with the recording of Rowan.

She listened to all fourteen minutes with her eyes closed and her face blank.

When it was over, she sat down on a box of aspirin.

"I'll need that on something safer than a pharmacy phone," she said.

"And I'll need it said in public, in front of people who can't pretend they didn't hear."

"The Draper Foundation gala is in three weeks," I said. "Every donor in New York will be there."

"Then that's your stage." She looked up. "What do you want me to do?"

"Be in the room," I said. "Keep your camera on."

She nodded slowly.

"I have one more question, and I'll ask it once," she said. "Are you safe in that house?"

"No," I said. "But I'm not alone."

She wrote a second number on the back of a receipt and pressed it into my hand.

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