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quite prissy or repressed, but, for all the flirting with wine waiters and bell hops, a tangibly non-sexual, almost other-worldly vibe about her. Maybe it’s the sacred and profane Californian divide – in the mountains, the quest for the spiritual, the lure of every new pseudo-religion and cult; in the valleys, the all-night debauch of movies and pornography – hence the ability to be naive and cynical, idealistic and venal, pure and lecherous. Claire can imagine her in school, the bossier girl in the group who knew what dirty words meant first, found her mom’s boyfriend’s porn, was brash and forward with boys and actually turned out to be a bit prudish and was the last to lose it. Turned out, beneath it all, she was a bit frightened and uncertain.
    But that could be Claire applying an actor’s technique to real life: confidence is always a front for some kind of insecurity or neurosis; the talkative person is blustering to cover some up some guilty secret; the sexy girl will be a lousy lay. It could as easily be the other way round: that Dee’s sassy-girl-with-a-dirty-mouth act is just that: a routine, a burlesque got up to pass the time, or to conceal the real her, or even – and Claire can totally identify with this – to stand in for a personality she’s not sure she possesses. Claire felt that way about acting – sure she liked to show off, to be the center of attention, but she also needed for sustained periods of time to pretend to be someone else. It was so much easier than pretending to be yourself.
    â€˜All right, sweetheart,’ Dee says, in her talking-the-suicide-down-from-the-ledge voice. ‘Look at it another way. Can you think of any reason he might have done this? According to your account of it, married life has not been the most exciting for the last stretch, but storming out after a row and crashing in a hotel for a couple nights usually works for most people.’
    â€˜No. I can’t think of any reason he might have done this.’
    â€˜No little
amour
you might have confessed to him?’
    â€˜Shut up!’
    â€˜Money worries?’
    â€˜The business is booming, far as I can tell. There was no real hit from the recession, not in Brogan’s. And Danny owns the freehold. And there’s no mortgage on the house. So, you know, there’s no major overheads, there’s a limit to how exposed we could be.’
    â€˜No investments that went wrong?’
    Deep breath, Claire
.
    â€˜Well … since you mention it … we had some money … the girls’ college fund, basically … with Jonathan Glatt.’

Blame it on my Youth
    W hen Dee hears Jonathan Glatt’s name, she does her Edvard Munch
The Scream
face, and Claire feels like doing it right back. Jonathan Glatt was indicted last year for wire fraud and money laundering and is currently being held without bail at the Federal Prison Camp in Oxford, WI. What he did was what Bernie Madoff did, using one client’s investment to pay off another, except Glatt only needed twenty million for his expenses, and his clients were mainly middle-class families with college funds who were tempted by his ability to get a substantially higher return on their money.
    Danny met him through an old school friend of his, Gene Peterson. Claire and Danny then had dinner with Glatt and his then-wife, and they were everything she expected a financial advisor and his wife to be: earnest and faintly humorless, discreetly but expensively dressed, full of small talk about golfing breaks and ski lodges and a discussion about retirement plans Claire thought would never end. Claire felt they deserved the extras for that evening alone. And the thing about it was, it never really felt like greed, because it was a friend of a friend, and being in the right place at the right time, but of course greed is almost certainly what it was.
    When they began to read in the newspapers that