“He had a secret place,” he went on. “I thought you’d know where it was.”
So this was about some bauble: a tiepin, a cigarette case, one of those old watches in the boxes Uncle Cyrus had shown me.
“What did Peter steal from you?”
“This is all kind of…embarrassing.”
I took a slow step forward.
“He didn’t steal anything!” Ashton squeaked. “I just wanted to pay him back.”
His fists were balled, his knees bent, like he was about to launch a hopeless attack. But he was telling the truth.
“Lower your voice,” I said.
His hands unclenched.
“Explain,” I said.
“I owed Peter money. After he…fell, no one came asking for it. I wanted to pay you back, but my brother said to keep quiet about Peter helping me. Because your family never justhelps.”
I was starting to recall a Cormac Hale, classmate of Aunt Arabella.
“I figured you’d lead me to Peter’s stash eventually,” Ashton went on. “I was going to leave it there, anonymously.”
“You have failed at anonymously.”
“Well, it worked, sort of.” He reached into his back pocket and handed me an envelope. Uncirculated money: eight $100 bills and a twenty. “That’s the rest of it.”
I stared at the money in my hand. So my little cousinhadbegun the work of incorporating Ashton. If Grandmother Elizabeth had known, the order to cull him wouldn’t have come.
“Did Peter have you sign anything?”
“Like an IOU? No.”
“Are you sure? Even a blank piece of paper?”
“Why would he…” He looked confused. “Listen, it was Gallows Night. My dorm had a team, and our effigy was finished except for the head. All the skulls in the Anatomy lab were already taken. But we had this brainwave—”
“A pumpkin, from the farmer’s stand across the highway from the music building. Except the police know about Gallows Night.”
“So you heard.”
I had not. But Ashton was as original as he was stealthy.
“Most of us got away,” he said. “But me and a couple of friends got caught. Peter wasn’t even there.”
That much I’d known. Mortons never pointlessly break the law.
“My parents would’ve freaked, so I called him. He bailed me out the next morning.”
“How much?”
“Two grand.”
That made no sense. Young Mortons don’t really have money. The Trust lends us what we need, and we never pay it back. We’re all tax write-offs, in the end.
“This is the rest of his interest,” Ashton said. “A hundred percent! Took me till now to skim it off my allowance. Are we square?”
