It was the car.

She had already been through everything two times over, just as Ty had asked. Still, while he was down in Jersey, she felt she had to do something. To keep from worrying.

So Karen tore through Charlie’s things all over again—the old bills, the stacks of receipts he’d left in his closet, the papers on his desk. Even the sites he’d visited on his computer before he “died.”

A wild-goose chase, she told herself. Just like the one before.

Except this time some things came up. A file buried deep in his desk, hidden under a pile of legal papers. A file Karen had never noticed before. From before Charlie died. Things she didn’t understand.

A small note card still in its envelope—addressed to Charles. The kind that accompanied a gift of flowers. Karen opened it, a little hesitantly, and saw it was written in a hand she didn’t recognize.

It stopped her.

Sorry about the pooch. Karen saw that her hands were shaking. Whoever wrote it had to be talking about Sasha. And what did that possibly mean, that the kids could be next?

Their kids…

Suddenly Karen felt a tightness in her chest. What had these people done?

And then, in that same hidden-away file, she came across one of the holiday cards they’d sent as a family before Charlie had died. The four of them sitting on a wooden fence at a field near their ski house in Vermont. A happy time.

She opened it.

She almost threw up.

The kids’ faces, Samantha and Alexander—they had both been cut out.

Karen covered her face with her hands and felt her cheeks flush with blood.

“What the hell is happening here, Charlie?” She stared at the card. What the hell were you involved in? What were you doing to us, Charlie? All of a sudden, the incident in Samantha’s car at school came hurtling back to Karen, her heart starting to race. Accusingly. She got up from the desk. She wanted to hit something. She touched her hand to her face. Looked around the room.

His room.

“Talk to me, Charlie, you bastard, talk to me!”

And then her eyes seemed to fall on it.

Amid the clutter of papers and prospectuses and sports magazines she had still never quite cleared from his office.

The stack. The neatly piled stack Charlie kept on the bookshelf. Every issue. A sure-as-hell fire hazard, Karen always called it. His little dream collection, dating back since he’d first acquired his toy, eight years earlier.

Mustang World.

She went over to it—the stack of magazines piled high. She picked up one or two, the thought now forming in her brain.

This was it! The one thing about him he could never change. No matter what name he was under. Or who he was now.

Or where.

His stupid car. Charlie’s Baby. He read about the damn things in his spare time, checked out the prices, chatted about them online. They always joked how it was a part of him. His mistress that Karen just had to put up with. She called it Camilla, as in Camilla and Charles. Better than Camilla, Charlie always joked. “Better-looking, too.”

Mustang World.

He constantly put the car up for sale, then never sold it. In the summer he drove it in rallies. Monitored the online sites. She didn’t understand what these cards she’d found were about. They scared her. She didn’t know for sure what he’d done.

“But that’s the way,” Karen said to Hauck as she went to dress his wounds now.

She reached into her bag and dropped a copy of the magazine on the table. Mustang World.

“That’s how we find him, Ty. Charlie’s Baby.”