Fuck.
I look at the ceiling.
One more lie is about to catch up with me.
In three… two… one…
“Oh my god, you’re squatting?And whythatland? You know that was owned by someone from Sarcasm.What do you know,Davis Remington? And don’t fucking lie to me.”
“My great-grandfather owned it. I didn’t buy it. It’s been in my family for generations. We just didn’t know until the safe-deposit box at the bank.”
She makes a choking noise. “I thought he didn’t have any heirs.”
“Didn’t have any heirsanddidn’t acknowledge any heirs other than that one line in his willare two different things.”
She leans over the map again, then hops out of her seat and heads into the museum.
I watch her ass again as I follow.
Stop it stop it stop it.
No good comes from obsessing about a woman. Especially a woman who lives in a town that I like to visit.
We need to find this treasure so I can move.
Preferably somewhere halfway around the globe.
I like India. I could go back to India.
Sloane won’t be in India.
India fucking sucks.
“Look.” She aims her phone’s flashlight at a painting on the wall.
I know the painting well. “Tillie Jean painted that, and that’s Norfolk. Not Shipwreck or Sarcasm.”
“When Pop asked her to paint it, he demanded—demanded—that Long Beak Silver be in the picture, and that he be sitting on the Shipwreck town flag with a baseball bat as the flagpole. Tillie Jean was like, ‘I’m not feeding Cooper’s ego,’ but Pop insisted so much that she finally caved.”
I lift my brows at her.
She dashes across the room to another painting, this one much older, of Shipwreck from the late eighteen hundreds. “Look at the tree.”
I tilt my head, and I see it.
In the distance, back behind the buildings and nestled between two mountains, there’s some kind of tree that’s too large for its space. It looks like one of its branches is a baseball bat, with the leaves hanging off of it like a flag, and there’s a crow sitting where Long Beak Silver is sitting in the other painting.
She dashes to the third wall in the room. “Now look at this map.”
It takes me a minute, but when I see the tree again, this one in a field, I almost grab her again.
Almost.
But I stop myself.
And I think she notices.
She goes pink in the cheeks and takes a subtle step away from me before pointing at the painting again, this time above the tree. “Look. This land? That’s where the high school was eventually built. The county high school.” She points below the tree. “And this is your cabin. I doubt the tree still exists, but the diary I copied—that one talked about the curtained oak that the ravens loved. Both men had to have known where the treasure was buried. It all makes sense—they spent their lives trying to outsmart each other so that one of them could steal it out from under the other.”
