“Because you have money.”
“Exactly.”
“You’re making an assumption—the same mistake Nora’s parents made.”
Adeline narrowed her eyes, and Daniele continued.
“You’re assuming your circumstances will never change. They could. They do for a lot of people—in the blink of an eye. One minute your family is rich. The next, you’re carrying every dollar to your name in your pocket, you have no home, and you don’t know where you’re going to sleep that night. Right now, you don’t care about money because you have it. You’ve never had to wonder how you’ll afford your next meal.”
“That happened to you?”
“It did.”
“When?”
Daniele studied Adeline a moment. “When I was about your age. A little older.”
“What happened?”
“We’re not going to talk about that. My point is, knowing how to manage your money is an important life skill. Even if someone else is investing it, you should be able to read the statements and understand what they’re doing. Your father is gone. Preparing you for what’s ahead is now my responsibility. Finance is something I know a lot about. And I’m going to teach you about it—because someone was kind enough to teach me a long time ago, and frankly, that’s the only reason I’m here talking to you now.”
“I thought you went to Stanford.”
“I did. For a while. But I had to drop out.”
“Why?”
“My family needed me. And then… things changed. But this isn’t about me. Will you at least listen?”
“All right.”
“First things first. There are two rules that will greatly simplify investing for you.”
“I like simplicity.”
“The number one thing to know is that investing is, at its core, an exercise in predicting the future.”
Adeline was surprised by that. “I don’t get it.”
“Think about it. When you buy a stock, bond, or other security, you’re making an educated guess about what’s going to happen, not just with the company or interest rates, but about what the future is going to look like. And you’re also making a guess about the market—whether it’s too optimistic about the future or too pessimistic. That is where fortunes are made and lost: in excess. In knowing when there’s exuberance or despair. But that’s only half of the key. The other half is the human factor. Both yourself and others.”
Daniele stood. “Remember this: people matter. The history of capitalism is fundamentally about people. Great companies are built by great people. That’s the key to making market-beating returns—spotting those people.”
She slid one of the books across the table. “But let’s go back to times of exuberance and despair. We’re going to start by studying the global financial crisis that began in 2008.”
*
That night, Adeline lay in her bed, mentally examining the pieces of the puzzle that was the mystery of Nora’s death and her father’s banishment.
In Daniele’s basement, the four scientists had sounded sincere in wanting to get her father back from the past. And clearly, they had some method of doing it. That had to be Absolom Two. But there seemed to be a problem with it.
Was killing Nora and getting rid of her father just a means to an end—to ensure Absolom Two was built? That made sense to Adeline.
That was a motive for the murder and for framing him. But what was the larger purpose of completing Absolom Two?
The answer seemed obvious to Adeline: to bring someone from the past to the present, as they were talking about doing with her father. If that was the case, it reinforced her theory that Constance was the killer—she was clearly obsessed with the past, with tracking people and finding their whereabouts in the past.
Her mind went around and around with those thoughts, debating how she could get to the bottom of what was happening.
Finally, she took out her phone and checked her email and social media feeds. Condolences for her father and messages from friends were still trickling in. They had helped a great deal in the days and weeks after her father’s arrest. Now, Adeline found that they just made her sad. They reminded her of what had happened. She didn’t want to remember. She wanted to work on the problem. She wanted to solve it.
She was about to set the phone down when she remembered the tracking app for Hiro’s phone: BuddyLoc.
She clicked the icon and studied the map that appeared. It showed a residential neighborhood in Las Vegas, easily within an afternoon’s drive from Absolom City. She pulled up the history and found that Hiro had worked at the Absolom Sciences research labs until about 5 p.m., then driven straight home. He had been there since.