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Jack had hoped there’d be new names on the list of people who knew the whereabouts of the key, but he hadn’t expected Greta’s to be one of them. “You’ve never been tempted to use it?”

“Ms. Chen,” Greta said, “I’m holding on to this job by the skin of my teeth. It best behooves me to keep my head down. Besides, archivists are only given a copy of the key in case a director misplaces theirs, not so that we can go rooting around where we don’t belong. I’m certainly not about to risk anything for the sake of satisfying my own curiosity. In truth, I don’t even know where the dome is located or what might be inside it, and I prefer to keep it that way.”

As much as Jack wanted Greta to be the Master List thief, as much as she absolutely had been the thief only a short while ago, at least in his mind, he had to loosen his grip on that theory. He had to accept the fact that he was, once again, outfoxed by someone he’d yet to discover. And with the next Bleak Market auction around the corner and Dale’s days numbered, he was running out of time to expose that someone before the list was permanently beyond his grasp.

37

The You Agains were a wreath around Margaret’s kitchen island once again, wedged shoulder to shoulder and, in a few cases, butt cheek to butt cheek on the handful of bar stools around the marble surface.

“So it’s not this Greta person, then?” Greer’s voice was tight, disappointment wafting off her like cheap perfume.

“Doesn’t seem like it,” Jack said on a headshake. “Her only crimes seem to be a powerful stepdad and a fireable personality.”

“What about this Bajwa guy, then?” said Carter. “He’s the only one we haven’t looked into, and we know he’s not opposed to breaking rules when it serves him.”

Jack had already thought of that, which was why he’d called Eli on the way home from work with a new target to look into. He turned the floor over to Eli with a tip of the head.

“It couldn’t be him,” Eli said. He flipped his laptop to face the others. “Bajwa was in Boston running the marathon that week. There are location-tagged pictures all over his social media and an article about the growing popularity of marathoning among the over-fifty crowd that he’s quoted in. Unless you think his stepdaughter would have done the actual thieving for him?”

Jack thought back to his conversation with Greta. He’d hoped that might have been the case, and even questioned her to test if it was, but in light of all he’d learned, he just didn’t think it could be her.

“I doubt it.”

“So that leaves us with nothing,” said Greer. “No leads, no list, no money. Nothing.”

“We’ll figure this out,” Jack said, as much to convince himself as to comfort Greer. The truth was, they’d eliminated all their suspects and were somehow even more in the dark than they’d been when they first found out the list had been stolen.

“Will we?” Greer seemed to shrink into herself, her desperation whittling her down to a soft voice and a diminished presence. “Jack, I’m not so sure. If that list ends up at the market, we’ll have no chance of getting the money from it. We only have like a week; what’s to say it’s not already there now?”

“There’s always next month’s list,” Jack said. “We can try again.”

“There’s no reason the other thief won’t get there before us again. And besides, I’m not sure Curtis has that long.” Her eyes glistened even as she tried to blink the sheen away. With a headshake, she slid from the stool. “Sorry, I just need a minute.”

Greer hurried upstairs before Jack or anyone else could stop her.

“Jeez,” Dale said on a whistle. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen her like this.”

Eli closed his laptop, teeth working at his bottom lip so hard he drew blood. “We have to do something.”

There were two important things about Eli Jack knew for certain. The first was that nothing good ever came from him saying that sentence. The second was that he could never bear to see Greer upset. The combination of the two, Jack decided, could only be cataclysmic. The fact was, at this moment, there was nothing they really could do. The list was gone, and whoever took it remained a mystery Jack wasn’t so sure he had the capacity to solve. He was used to being the one committing the crimes, after all, not preventing them. Short of finding another afterlife retail establishment and somehow passing off their knockoff list as the real deal, they were shit out of luck.

Jack put a hand on Eli’s shoulder, gently pushing him back onto his seat. The man was primed and ready to do something reckless, which meant it was up to Jack to do something sensible instead.

“I’ll talk to her,” he said, and he gave Carter the kind of hard eye contact he’d used many times to alert one of his cooler-headed friends that they were in charge of babysitting Eli’s emotions for the time being. Carter gave a nod and Jack slipped upstairs.

His bedroom door was shut despite him leaving it open that morning, which meant either the house was haunted by a more agile entity than Dale or that Greer was inside. Jack gave a soft rap on the door, which was met with a series of sniffs and a weak “Come in.”

Jack pried the door back and found Greer slumped on the side of the bed, face red and wet and blotchy. In all their years of friendship, he’d only seen her cry on two occasions, and one of them was her fake tears on Mrs. Sullivan’s doorstep the first day they’d met. The other, he was crying too, so it barely felt like it counted. He pushed the thought away and ambled over to her and lowered himself to the bedspread.

“It doesn’t have to be this, you know,” he said. “Selling the list, I mean. There are lots of ways to make a fast buck. Home robbery, bank robbery—mostly robberies, when you think about it. No one would see an octogenarian bank robber coming.”

Greer sniffed again at that, though Jack couldn’t tell if it was a small chuckle or just snot.

“No,” said Greer. “I can’t risk anyone getting caught and going to jail or…or worse. The list made sense. Your job, that world, it operates under different laws. It felt safer somehow. But knocking over a bank or breaking into someone’s house…no. Not after last time.”

Of course she’d say no. None of the You Agains would ever travel back down that road. He should have known as much. But in truth, he didn’t know, or at least he didn’t remember. It was what he’d become most adept at over the years: forgetting some things and remembering others. Sometimes the best way to survive was to swallow down the painful things so they burned a hole through your stomach. You never had to look at them there. It was what kept him alive, even past his death. So to Jack, even after everything, the idea of robbing a home or business sounded like a good time. And on many occasions it had been. The You Agains were no strangers to that particular category of crime. But things were different now, even if Jack struggled to let them be.

That meant they had to find the list; there was no other choice now. And so he decided they would. The question that hung over him like an angry rain cloud was how, but he didn’t have to answer that in this moment. Right now the only thing that truly mattered was that Greer was crying on his rose-patterned bedspread. He let a hand fall tentatively onto her back, still wary about giving the wrong impression after their discussion in the front yard.