Chương 3
The paramedic was a woman in her forties named Elena. She checked Rachel’s blood pressure, pupils, breathing, and circulation. She asked how long Rachel had been in the soil.
Rachel didn’t know.
“Maybe thirty minutes.”
Evan, from across the yard, said, “Twenty-two.”
Everyone looked at him.
He lowered his eyes.
Rachel did not know what disturbed her more: that he knew the exact number or that he had been counting.
Elena helped Rachel onto the stretcher.
“I can walk.”
“I’d rather you didn’t yet.”
Rachel almost argued.
Then her left knee buckled.
She sat.
A younger officer approached the table where the phone and evidence pouch rested.
“Who found these?”
“I did,” Evan said.
Rachel said, “The phone is mine.”
The officer looked between them.
“The pouch?”
“Mine too.”
Margaret said, “That cash belongs to me.”
Rachel turned her head.
Margaret’s attorney voice had arrived.
She wasn’t an attorney. She had spent thirty years running the administrative side of her husband’s construction company. But she had learned how people sounded when they wanted to appear reasonable in front of authority.
“That key was taken from my home,” Margaret said.
Rachel almost admired her.
Even now.
Especially now.
The officer looked at Rachel.
“We’ll need to talk about that.”
“Yes.”
Margaret folded her hands.
“She broke into my house.”
Rachel watched Evan react.
There.
A flicker.
He had not known that part.
Good.
Margaret continued.
“She stole cash and a key. She has been obsessing about my late husband’s estate for months.”
“That’s not true,” Sophie said.
Margaret turned.
“You know nothing about this.”
Sophie took a step backward, then stopped.
“No,” she said. “I know what I just saw.”
Margaret’s jaw tightened.
Rachel looked at Sophie differently after that.
Not because Sophie had defended her.
Because she had sounded afraid and spoken anyway.
That was harder.
At the hospital, Rachel asked for her phone.
The real one.
Not the mud-covered device.
Sophie had retrieved Rachel’s purse from the house before following the ambulance.
A nurse handed it over after Rachel’s examination.
Seventeen missed calls.
Four from work.
Two from a number she didn’t recognize.
Eleven from Evan.
All made during the hour before he buried her.
Rachel stared at that.
Sophie sat in the visitor chair, wearing a hospital blanket around her shoulders because she had given Rachel her shirt and refused to go home for another one.
“He called you?”
Rachel nodded.
“Before?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t answer.”
“Why not?”
Rachel opened the call log.
Because at 8:12 that morning she had been hiding in Margaret’s upstairs study while Margaret stood in the hallway speaking to someone on the phone.
Because at 8:14 Rachel had slipped a folded document into the waistband of her jeans.
Because at 8:16 she had heard Evan enter the house.
Because she had known instantly that Margaret had called him.
Because she had been afraid.
But that was not the answer Rachel gave.
“I didn’t want to hear his voice.”
Sophie stared at the floor.
“Okay.”
A bruise was forming along Rachel’s right shoulder where Evan had grabbed her near the hole.
The nurse photographed it.
The dirt had been washed from Rachel’s face, but it remained in her hairline and under her nails. She kept rubbing her thumb against the side of her index finger, feeling grit.
Sophie noticed.
“You want me to find something?”
“What?”
“To clean your hands.”
Rachel looked at her.
“They’re clean.”
“Oh.”
Sophie pulled the blanket tighter.
A few minutes passed.
Then she said, “Grandma used to bury jars.”
Rachel frowned.
“What?”
“When I was little. Not people.”
“I assumed.”
Sophie gave her a tired look.
“In the garden. Cash. She said banks failed.”
Rachel stared at her.
“How much cash?”
“I don’t know. Hundred-dollar bills. Sometimes more.”
“Did your dad know?”
“My dad?”
Sophie always called Evan and Rachel’s father “Dad,” though he had died when she was seventeen. She and Evan were fifteen years apart, born from the same parents after Margaret believed she could no longer have children.
Rachel nodded.
“Yeah. Did he know she hid money?”
“I think so.”
Sophie picked at a loose thread on the blanket.
“He called it her Depression habit.”
“She was born in 1957.”
“I know. He said it as a joke.”
Rachel smiled despite herself.
That sounded like Thomas Hayes.
He had been a difficult man in some ways and a gentle one in others, which Rachel had found more confusing than if he had simply been good or bad.
Thomas liked crossword puzzles, black coffee, old jazz, and building shelves no one asked for. He also let Margaret control every family holiday, every financial discussion, most friendships, and eventually the company he had founded.
He could see people clearly and still fail them.
Rachel had loved him for his kindness and resented him for his cowardice.
Six months before his death, he had asked her to drive him to an appointment.
Not medical.
Legal.
He had not explained.
That memory returned now because Sophie mentioned the jars.
Thomas sitting in Rachel’s passenger seat, pressing his thumb against a coffee stain on the lid of his paper cup.
Margaret thinks money disappears if she can’t touch it, he had said.
Rachel had laughed.
What does that mean?
Nothing good.
Then he changed the subject.
At the time, Rachel thought he meant retirement investments.
Now she closed her eyes.
Sophie leaned forward.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“That was not a nothing face.”
Rachel looked at her.
“When your father died, did Margaret tell you exactly what was in his will?”
Sophie hesitated.
“She said the house and company ownership went to her. Evan got part of some investment account. I have a trust.”
“Did you see the will?”
“No.”
“Did Evan?”
“I don’t know.”
Rachel unlocked her phone.
A detective had asked her not to access the muddy device until they could document it properly. She understood.
That phone was not the important part anyway.
May you like
It was bait.
The important document was somewhere else.
