be thinking, and then she spoke slowly. “I know a lot about that meteoroid. What’s it worth to you?”
“Excuse me.” Ford was nonplussed. “You want me to pay you for the information?”
Abbey reddened. “I need money.”
“What kind of information do you have?”
“I know where it landed. I’ve seen the crater.”
Ford could hardly believe his ears. Was she lying? “Care to tell me about it?”
“Like I said, I need money.”
“How much?”
A hesitation. “One hundred thousand dollars.”
Ford stared at her, and then started to laugh. “Are you crazy?”
Her face faltered. “I only ask because . . . well . . . that’s what it cost me to find the crater.”
“For a hundred thousand dollars, I could find the crater five times over.”
“Trust me, Mr. Ford, you could search that bay a hundred years and not find it—unless you knew exactly where to look. It’s small and unrecognizable from the air.”
Ford leaned back, sipped his coffee. “Perhaps you might tell me how you made this discovery and why it cost you a hundred thousand dollars.”
The girl took a long sip of her coffee. “I will. Back on April fourteenth, I had just bought a telescope and I was taking a time exposure of the constellation Orion. Wide field. The meteor passed through and I got the streak on film. Or rather digitally.”
“You photographed it?” Ford could hardly believe his luck.
“Then I had an idea—I checked the GoMOOS weather buoy data on the Internet. No waves. I figured it must have hit an island instead of the water. So, by angulating from the photograph, I was able to identify a line along which it must have fallen. I borrowed my father’s lobster boat, took a friend, and went out looking for it.”
“Why so interested in meteorites?”
“Meteorites are worth a lot of money.”
“You’re quite the entrepreneur.”
“To cover our tracks we circulated a phony story about looking for a pirate treasure.”
“I’m beginning to see the real story,” said Ford.
“Yeah. Our meth-addicted stalker was addled enough to believe it and attacked us, sinking my father’s lobster boat. The insurance company wouldn’t pay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“My father’s making payments on a boat that doesn’t exist. We might lose our house. So you see why I need money—to get him a new boat.”
Emotion welled up in her eyes. Ford pretended not to notice. “You found the crater,” Ford said easily. “So what did the meteorite look like?”
“Did I say I found a meteorite?”
Ford felt his heart quicken. He knew instinctively the girl was telling the truth. “You didn’t find a meteorite in the crater?”
“Now we’re getting into the information that’s going to cost you.”
Ford looked at her steadily for a long time. Finally he spoke. “May I ask what a girl with your brains is doing waitressing in Damariscotta, Maine?”
“I dropped out of college.”
“What college?”
“Princeton.”
“Princeton? Isn’t that somewhere in Jersey?”
“Very funny.”
“What’d you major in?”
“I was supposedly pre-med but I took a lot of physics and astronomy courses. Too many. I flunked organic chem, lost my financial aid.”
Ford thought for a while. What the hell. “It just so happens a hundred thousand dropped in my lap the other day which I don’t really need. It’s yours—to buy a new boat. But it comes with conditions. You’re working for me, now. You’ll be absolutely quiet, tell nothing to no one, not even your friend. And the first thing we’re going to do in this new boat is visit the crater. Agreed?”
The girl surprised Ford by the sheer wattage of her smile. She stuck out her hand. “Agreed.”
42
Mark Corso tossed the mail on a table and threw himself into an armchair in his friend’s basement apartment on the Upper West Side. His head dropped back against the cushion and he closed his eyes. He felt logy, an incipient hangover creeping up behind his eyeballs. For the last three nights he had worked double shifts at Moto’s, one to one, and to get through them he’d been nursing screwdrivers under the bar. Even with the long hours he still wasn’t making enough to pay his overdue share of the rent. He needed that severance check from NPF and he needed it fast. In what little free time he had, he’d been job hunting and obsessively going over the images on the hard drive, refining and polishing them. He’d hardly slept. And on top of it, he missed Marjory Leung awfully, fantasized about her long, nude, springy body day and night. He’d talked to her a half a dozen times but it was clear the relationship