Asher already saw where this was going. It was like watching an avalanche coming straight at him, without the ability to move away.
“So, school is out now,” Nora said. “Who picked you up?”
“Mom did,” Asher said. “She brought us a bag of chips and a cold drink to share, when she picked us up.”
“Then what? How was the party?” she asked.
“It was like always. Dad came from the bar long enough to eat cake and watch Gunner open presents. Mom was licking icing off her fingers. We had hot dogs and chips for supper because that’s what Gunner wanted. We watched a Disney movie. We went to bed,” Ash said, but his heart was pounding. “I don’t know anything after that until Gunner woke up bawling, covered in blood.”
“We slept together, Gunner and me… I had to change my pajamas, too, because some of his blood was on me,” Dylan said.
Gunner’s face was white. “I had a loose tooth. I swallowed it in my sleep and woke up to all the blood. I was upset about no tooth for the tooth fairy.”
Nora could hear the panic in their voices and hated beingthe reason it was there, but she couldn’t stop. It wouldn’t show them what they needed to see. What they’d known all along.
“Then what happened?” she asked.
Asher couldn’t look at her—at the sympathy on her face. “Gunner was hysterical, and when Mom didn’t show up, I got out of bed and went to see what all the crying was about. When I went in the boys’ room and saw all the blood, then figured out Gunner was mad, not dying, I went looking for Mom, but she wasn’t in the house. I got a clean washcloth and handed it to Gunner to stop the bleeding, then made a second sweep through the house, calling for her and…” he hesitated, frowning…trying to remember the order of it all. “She was in the kitchen then, and her hands were dirty, so she washed up at the sink and followed me back to the boys’ room, calmed Gunner down, cleaned him up and put clean sheets on the bed, then wrote a note to the tooth fairy to excuse his missing tooth and all was well. We went back to bed.”
Nora’s heart skipped. “Her hands were dirty? How were they dirty, Ash? What was on them?”
He closed his eyes, trying to recall the details of that moment. “Dirt. It was dirt… On her hands…and on the knees of her jeans.” And then he stood abruptly. “Shit… Oh shit… She was coming up from the basement. She didn’t hear me the first time because she was down in the basement.”
Dylan was flat on his back, staring at the ceiling, while his brothers were miles away, staring at the basement door.
“Do you store tools down there? Yard tools? Like rakes and shovels?” Nora asked.
“Yes,” Dylan said. “I was the kid who loved tools. I knew where every tool was, and where it belonged on the board where Dad hung them.”
“When you couldn’t find her the first time, she could have been outside burying the box, or in the cellar, burying a box,” Nora said. “And when you came looking for her the second time, she could have already come back into the house and was putting up a shovel, or coming up from the basement after using it down there. And again…it’s just a theory. But it does make all of your random facts fit, doesn’t it?”
Gunner’s face was frozen in a grimace of disbelief, and Asher was staring at the kitchen clock above the stove. Dylan was trying to absorb the fact that the basement that had once been his best place to play, could have been hiding such a secret.
Nora couldn’t bear it for them anymore. “I can only imagine what you’re all going through, and I’m so sorry. But you want to make the world safe for Jacob again, and being the ones to find that money first, removes every aspect of the danger it put Jacob in. Forgive me if I’ve hurt you. Please don’t hate me for it.”
“No hate for you ever,” Dylan said, but they could hear the tears in his voice.
Asher reached for her hand. “Nobody hates you. You’re freaking good at what you saw that we didn’t. And you’re right. We were too close to see the obvious.”
“No hate for you ever,” Gunner said. “But answer me this? Why would Brandt lie and say he hid it?”
Nora paused before answering, carefully measuring her words.
“Again, this is supposition, but if Brandt already knew your mother was dead before he was officially interrogated, and if he said he’d given it to her to hide, the Feds would have tracked the timeline and eventually found it for sure. But since Brandt knew your dad was completely oblivious to their affair, if he stayed quiet, he knew Jacob would nevereven think it was on his property. Nobody would ever think to look for it here.”
Gunner got up. “You know we have to go down there. Let’s get it over with.”
“And you also know we’re not going see a damn thing, because all three of us played in that dirt, and it wasn’t covered with bricks until my senior year of high school. And we’ve stomped all over that place countless times in the years since, carrying stuff up and down the stairs for Dad,” Ash said.
“Hell, I played down there, and I didn’t see anything. I was in and out of that place all through high school because I’m the one who kept Dad’s old truck running, until he finally traded for a new one,” Dylan said.
“I’m still going down there. Are you coming?” Gunner asked.
“We’ll all go,” Nora said.
Asher unlocked the door. It swung back into the kitchen as he reached inside the stairwell and flipped on the lights, instantly flooding the entire interior.
“I’m going down first. Gunner, you follow Nora.”
