“Son of a bitch,” Mitch said.
When I read the line about Bob, Frank, and Donny working together to bury the body, I stopped and looked up. “Has anyone heard of Kat, or Katherine? Or know who Donny is?” I asked. “Frank only gives a first name.”
Nobody answered around the table, and everyone shook their heads as if answering was too hard.
I made a note. Koolaroo Station. 1977. Donny, no surname. Katherine–AKA Kat. No surname.
There would be a file in the system. An old one, and probably very thin. Kat, a girl with a history of running away who’d run away one last time, and nobody had cared enough about her to look for her properly. Bloody sad.
I would look. No matter how long it took or how cold that trail was, that girl deserved better than a closed file and nearly fifty years of silence.
“So, Frank murdered a girl when he was a teenager and buried her here.” Cassidy looked toward the dark window. “On Koolaroo. Somewhere.”
“It doesn’t say who killed her, but they all buried her,” I clarified.
“And Bob covered it up,” Kayden said.
“Jesus.” Declan pressed his knuckles to his mouth as if trying to hold back his shock.
Mitch hadn’t moved a single muscle.
I picked up the note again. “There’s more.”
I kept reading aloud until I reached the line.
Me, because I knew where to hide the body. Turns out that lesson served me well over the years.
I stopped there and lowered the note again.
The room was quiet.
“Over the years?” Mitch said, as if he were assessing the implications that I’d already worked through.
“Yes.” I held his gaze. “Kat wasn’t the only body he buried on Koolaroo.”
Nobody spoke.
But Kayden’s eyes went straight to Cassidy, and Cassidy’s went straight back to him, and that little exchange lasted less than a second and told me everything.
They knew something. Or suspected something. And they’d made a collective decision not to tell me.
And that pissed me off.
Trying to keep an eye on them, I kept reading.
Another line stopped me.
I cleaned out his cash. Well, as much as I could carry. Turns out cash is heavy.
As much as I could carry.
I set the note down and looked up slowly. Everyone had their heads down, reading their own pages.
Frank was a sick man in his sixties running in the middle of the night. He could’ve managed a duffel bag, two at an absolute stretch. However, his earlier notes talked about millions. Stacked inside walls. Years of it.
The eastern outstation walls had been stripped bare before Bob had ever gotten there. Bob had walked in, seen the empty cavities, and panicked.
But Frank hadn’t taken all his money. Frank had barely made a dent in it.
