“Can you use one of your fingernails to lift the panel, if that’s what it is?” CJ asked, drawing closer, his breath warm against her hair as he peered down at the drawer.
“No. Do you have a fingernail file?”
“Turn it upside down.”
She did and it rattled a bit, which she figured was the loose panel or the bottom of the drawer no longer fitting snuggly against the sides.
“Okay, let me see what I can find.”
She kept trying to slip her fingernail between the panel and the front of the drawer without success.
“This is a long shot,” CJ said, returning with a thin screwdriver and a magnet.
He used the magnet first and it immediately grabbed hold of the panel and lifted it. “Well, I’ll be damned.” A piece of metal glued to the underside of the panel had attracted the magnet.
But they didn’t find any secret items or documents. Just lots of big, green bills—ten-thousand-dollar bills. Ten of them.
“Ohmigod, CJ.” She turned to pull another drawer out. “Why would he have all this money hidden in here? And such big bills?”
“Grandfather Silver didn’t trust the banks. We found around five hundred thousand stuffed in his mattress. I’m surprised Dad didn’t come across the false drawers. Then again, each of the drawers was stuffed with stationary supplies—pens, ink, envelopes, notepads, paper clips, scissors, and the like. Dad never emptied them.
“Before I brought it home, I dumped all the stuff in the drawers into one of the boxes we searched through. And everything was rattling around so much in the drawers, I never considered they might have false bottoms.” He smiled again. “Man, are my brothers going to be surprised. None of them wanted this old chest. But I’d always loved it. Grandfather built it himself. Now I know why.”
“Where did he get the money?”
“He worked hard all his very long life. Made some wise investments in land and ended up having property with a gravel pit. Gravel made a mint for him.”
“Wow. Are you going to share? Or turn the bills over to a museum?”
“I’ll ask my brothers what they want to do with the money, though since you’re my mate…”
“It’s your family’s. You and your brothers need to decide.”
She rattled the second drawer. “He can’t have had false drawers in all of these.”
CJ was grinning his head off as he watched her use the magnet on the second drawer. Up came the panel. And more greenbacks. Ten more.
“I’ve got to call Mason, the owner of the bank. We need to put these in the safety deposit box tonight,” CJ said.
“They’ll open the bank for you?”
“Hell, yeah. It’s pack run and we do things for each other like that. Banker’s hours don’t count if we’ve got a real issue to deal with.”
“I love it.” As if the money didn’t mean anything, she grabbed for another drawer. This time so did CJ.
Thirty drawers. A mix of money—from one-hundred-dollar bills to piles of the granddaddy of them all, the ten-thousand-dollar green note. CJ stared at one of the big notes. “I wonder who Samuel P. Chase was.”
Laurel was busy counting the money, stacking the bills in like denominations, then counting the stacks.
“Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.”
CJ shook his head. “Let me make this call and get this money to the bank, and then I’m taking you to bed.”
She laughed.
“What?”
“We’ve been mated how long and money is the priority?”
He smiled and took her in his arms. “You’d rather we made love first?”
“No. Really, just teasing. It would kill me if someone broke into the house and stole all that money. Go call and make the arrangements. I’m going to take a nice, warm bath and see you when you return.”
“If you go to sleep on me, I’m waking you.”
“Promises.” She kissed him, then hurried off to the bedroom.
He got on the phone, wishing he didn’t have to take care of this right now. “Hey, Mason? I need to make a nighttime deposit.”
“What’s going on?”
“Remember when my brothers and I found all that money Granddad hid in his old mattress? I just found more. But let’s keep this just between you and me—and my mate, of course.”
* * *
Before Laurel took a bath, she wondered if anything as simple as a magnet could locate false bottoms to the drawers in her aunt’s furniture. She called Ellie. “Ellie, I don’t think we have any, but we just found a secret hideaway in CJ’s grandfather’s old chest, using a magnet to lift the false drawer bottom.”
“Oh, cool. Um, I don’t think we have any magnets in the house. And I’m on a date right now.”
Shocked that her sister would start dating as soon as Laurel mated a wolf, she realized just how much her sisters had put their lives on hold because of her. “Who?”
“Brett. We’re at the tavern. I’ll see if he has a magnet, but we’re going for a moonlit run tonight first.”
“I’ll call Meghan.”
“Can you call her a little later?”
Suspicious, Laurel asked, “Why?”
“She’s got company.”
Laurel smiled. When the pack leader was away… “Who?”
“Peter.”
Laurel chuckled. “All right. I’ll check with her later.”
After that, she climbed into the warm water in the tub and had nearly dozed off when she heard her phone ringing in the bedroom. She groaned and climbed out of the tub. Seizing a towel, she wrapped it around herself, then hurried into the other room. When she grabbed the phone, she saw it was Meghan. “What’s wrong?”
“We just had a break-in.”
Laurel heard CJ in the living room and wondered when he’d gotten home from the bank.
“I just had to call and let you know that we were broken into. Peter had already left and said CJ was at the bank and was closer. CJ’s here now and wanted me to let you know we’re all right, and he’d be home soon.”
If CJ was with Meghan… Her heart racing to the moon and back, Laurel hurried to the bedroom door, shut it, and locked it. “Someone’s in the house,” she whispered. “I’m shifting.”
“Ohmigod,” was all Meghan said before Laurel dropped the phone on the bed, leaving the line open in the event something happened to her. Then her sister shouted, “CJ, someone’s broken into your house!”
Laurel had already shifted into her wolf form and had been staring at the door for a second when she heard footfalls headed toward the bedroom door. Her heart in her throat, she didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know if CJ had another gun in the house, but she’d never used one anyway, so she figured her teeth were a better bet. Still, if someone in the house had a gun, she wouldn’t be any match for him.
She shifted back into her human form, ran to the window, unlocked it, and then slid it open, hoping whoever it was wouldn’t realize she was trying to escape that way.
The doorknob twisted. She shifted and leaped through the window as a wolf. She suspected many of CJ’s neighbors were wolves, but she didn’t know for sure.
Then she wondered why anyone would have broken into her sisters’ home and now CJ’s. What was the man—as she was certain it was a man—looking for?
But she figured running outside in the snow would be a safer bet, and she headed for the hotel, hoping she’d encounter CJ, who would be driving back here at once.
If the Wernicke brothers had been taken in for questioning, they’d be in jail, not out breaking into homes. Unless Darien had incarcerated only one of them. Yet, she wondered how the person had broken into the hotel’s guest house. They had an alarm set. Maybe it had gone off and that’s why they knew someone was breaking in.
She raced along the wide front yards of the homes in CJ’s development, the houses all looking cheerfully Christmas-like in their holiday finery, many of them having icicle lights that dripped off the eaves, simulating real icicles, though they all had some of those too.