“Come in,” Robbie replied.
June set a tray on the desktop containing two mugs of coffee and a plate of powdered donut holes. When she saw Luke’s body language, she stilled. “Is something the matter?”
“Finley’s been injured,” Robbie answered. “She’s in stable condition at Northwestern Hospital in a medically induced coma.”
June rested her palm over her heart. “Oh no.”
“Luke was in the middle of explaining what happened,” Robbie said. “I’ll be out in just a minute, and I’ll relay everything to you.”
“Do the doctors think she’ll make a full recovery?” June asked Luke.
“They hope so. But they’re not sure.”
“This is heartbreaking. Robbie, I’ll call Eric and Leslie and the four of us can drive over to see her.”
“Absolutely.”
“Thank you for letting us know about this, Luke.” June hesitated on the room’s threshold. “I’ll get things ready out here so that we’re prepared to leave.” The door clicked behind her.
“When Finley and I came here for dinner,” Luke said, wasting no time, “we came because Ed sent us. Through a treasure hunt clue. He told Finley to ask you about the day before Carla was shot.”
Robbie reminded Luke of a house hit by a hurricane. Too late, its owner was trying to protect it by shutting all the doors and windows.
“Finley and I realized that Ed was telling us a story through the clues. One of the clues was a book. It was calledBrothers: Twenty-Five Stories About the Ties That Bind. As soon as Finley saw that gold, she knew the two of you would have been together when the discovery was made. So I don’t buy the story that Ed spent theday before Carla died driving to Macon with you to check out a horse. What actually happened on that day?”
“It ... it was just like I told you.”
Luke moved forward. Getting right up in Robbie’s face, he fisted his hand in the fabric of the older man’s sweater. “Tell me the truth. Right now.”
Robbie stiffened with fear.
“Do you understand me?” Luke asked in an ominously quiet tone.
“Yes.”
Luke removed his hand.
Robbie put several feet of space between them. He went to stand by the bookshelves, then smoothed the clothing Luke had wrinkled.
“What happened nine years ago on April twentieth?” Luke demanded.
“Ed and I ...” He cleared his throat. “Ed and I went out on one of our expeditions, as we liked to call them. With our metal detectors. Carla, Ed’s girlfriend, had come with us on our expeditions a few times. She enjoyed them, and so she came along with us that night, too. The three of us went out to eat. Then, after dark, we drove to a piece of land east of Washington. It was a crisp, clear, beautiful night.” He pushed his hands into his pockets. “We’d done a great deal of reading over the years about the Confederate gold. We’d learned from the experiences of other treasure hunters and formulated our own theories about where portions of the gold might have ended up. We had good reason to think that if someone had buried the gold, they’d buried some of it in that general region. We’d gone over other sections of that piece of land with metal detectors in the past.” His words ended in prolonged silence.
“And you returned that night to check a section you hadn’t before,” Luke supplied.
“Yes. The gold had been lost a hundred and fifty years before.We’d been searching for it for most of our lives without success. It was mostlythe thought, you see, of discovering something so elusive that we liked. It kept us going.”
As if his knees had gone too weak to support him, Robbie lowered onto a wingback chair. “That night, we walked back and forth with our detectors for an hour or so. Then we took a break. We sat around a camping lantern, eating the brownies Carla made.”
“And?”
“Then we resumed the search. Fifteen minutes or so later, Ed’s metal detector started going off. I brought mine over. Carla came with the shovel. It wasn’t unusual for us to find things. Tin cans. Belt buckles. Knives. Coins. We started digging.”
“And ended up finding the missing Confederate gold.”
Robbie gave Luke a look that asked for understanding. “To our astonishment, we did. Our mother had raised us on legends of that gold, so it was like coming face-to-face with Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Surreal. Euphoric.”
“The land where you were digging did not belong to you.”
