“How much time do you have?”
“She’s calling me again after one. Gives me better part of four hours. Gotta get moving.”
“Wait. Just hang on,” Cynthia said. “Let me get this straight. You have to go to how many homes? Where the money’s hidden?”
He rolled his eyes up into his forehead, thinking. “Five — maybe six — oughta do it. If the money’s there. If we didn’t get ripped off like at the Cummings.”
“And you’ve got keys and security codes?”
“At the office.”
“And if the people are home? What then? You going to shoot them? But get them to hold the ladder first so you can get into their attic? You’re already woozy. I don’t see you crawling around cramped spaces. There’s no way you can do this.”
“This has nothing to do with you,” he said and took another step toward the door.
But it did. What happened at the Cummings house had everything to do with us. Grace had been there. Someone had seen her, and might still consider her a threat. Until we knew who that was, we were still very much involved.
Cynthia pressed on. “You don’t want to call the police, but you think you can barge into people’s homes and they won’t dial 911?”
He had the door open, then raised a hand high and placed it on the jamb, leaning into it.
“What the hell am I supposed to do?” he asked, his back to us, his voice breaking. I could see his body heaving with each exhausted breath.
“Give us a minute,” I said, then touched Cynthia’s arm and led her into the kitchen, past Grace, still sitting on the stairs.
“What?” she whispered once we got there. I closed the door so Vince, as well as Grace, could not hear what I was going to say.
“I can’t believe I’m thinking this way, but maybe we should help him,” I said.
“The only way we can help him is to call the police.”
“I don’t know about that. You were saying, what happens if he goes to these houses and someone’s home? What’s he going to say? ‘Hi, I hid money in your attic. You mind if I come in and get it?’ For sure that’ll get him arrested. But the alternative, going to the cops, that may not work, either. He needs to be able to get into those houses and get the money if he’s got a shot at saving Jane.”
Cynthia wasn’t certain. “But if he explains things to the police, makes them understand, quickly — You remember that detective? The woman? Rona Wedmore?”
“I remember.”
“If Vince talked to her, if we talked to her with him, maybe they wouldn’t waste a lot of time worrying about Vince’s business. They’d worry about Jane.”
“It’s not just about Jane,” I said. “I mean, I don’t want anything to happen to her, but there’s more at stake than just her.”
Cynthia looked at me blankly for a second, but then she got it. “Grace.”
“Yeah. Once this whole can of worms gets opened, everything’s going to come out. Including the business about our daughter breaking into that house. And there’s the matter of who was there, who may be worried that Grace got a look at him.”
She was shaking her head. “But nothing that bad even happened in the house. Grace has heard from Stuart. Those texts. He’s okay. If we call the cops, Grace may not be in as much trouble as we first feared, and we’ll be helping Jane at the same time.”
I wasn’t so sure.
I decided to try another tack with Cynthia.
“That man out there, I know what he is. He’s a thug. I get that. But I still feel I owe him. For how he helped us before. If he hadn’t come with me that night, I wouldn’t have found you — you and Grace — in time. And like they say, no good deed goes unpunished. He nearly died.”
Cynthia’s eyes softened. “I don’t feel any different. I know the sacrifice he made. But what can we do? Jesus, Terry, what the hell can we do?”
“I have an idea how we can get into those houses so he can get the money. Any house where there are people.”
“How?”
“Mold.”
She blinked. “I’m sorry?”
“Mold,” I repeated. “Your latest project. Mold infestation in houses. In damp attics. Health risks. Fucking spores floating around in the air getting into people’s lungs.”
“I’m not following.”
“Get your purse,” I said.
She didn’t ask why. Instead, she went out into the hall and was back in ten seconds.
“They’re talking out there,” she said.
“What?”
“Vince and Grace. They were talking, and then stopped when I came in.”
I couldn’t care about that right now. “Get out your ID.”
“What ID? My driver’s license?”
“No. From the health department.”
Something sparkled in her eyes. She knew what I was thinking. Cynthia dug into her bag, pulled out her official ID from the Milford Department of Public Health.
“That’s what you’re going to show when they answer the door,” I said.
She nodded. “I tell them we’re checking homes in the area. That there’s some kind of mold epidemic.”
“Has there ever been a mold epidemic?” I asked.
“Not that I know of,” she said. “But I’ve got pamphlets on household mold in the car. It outlines the risks. There’s pictures in them that’ll scare any home owner to death.”
“We tell them we need to see the attic. That that’s where it grows.”
“We?”
“You tell them,” I said. “But I’ll be with you. With a ladder. We leave Vince in the car because he’ll scare the hell out of people.”
“It’s beyond crazy,” Cynthia said.
“I know.”
I could tell she was considering it, though. She said, “If you thought you had mold in the attic that could make you sick, wouldn’t you want to know? We get in, we get up in the attic — that can be your job — you get the money, and we get out.”
“Yeah.”
I thought I’d won her over to the idea, but then she shook her head. “No, it’s too crazy, too risky. I want to help Vince — I really do — and I want to help Jane, but the best way to do it is to call the police. And with Stuart alive—”
On the other side of the door, Grace let out a mournful wail.
We found her in tears, her back leaned up against the wall, standing across from Vince.
“He’s dead,” she told us. “Stuart’s dead. They made it up. The texts, they were all bullshit. Vince told me.”
Vince looked at us with heavy eyes. “I needed you to stop nosing around. But we’re past that now. There’s no sense lying about any of this anymore.”
Through tears, Grace said, “He says I didn’t shoot him.”
Vince nodded wearily. “Last night, I was using the gun as leverage. But Eldon’s gun, the one Stuart gave your kid, it hadn’t been fired. Full clip.”
Cynthia turned and said to me, “I’ll get the pamphlets.”
Fifty-one
She had no idea where she was.
In a room, of course. In a house, somewhere. Felt cool, so she was guessing a basement. Duh. They did walk her down a flight of stairs once they got her here. They’d driven into a garage, and then she heard the noise of the door rolling down once they were inside.
They’d kept the cloth bag on her head since the moment they’d grabbed her, except for a few seconds after they’d thrown her into the car, when someone pulled it up just far enough that they could slap some tape over her mouth. Then they’d done a loop of tape around the bag at her neck so it wouldn’t fall off, which scared the hell out of her at first. She thought they intended to strangle her. But they hadn’t made that tape so tight that she couldn’t breathe. They bound her wrists together behind her back, and ended up roping her ankles, too, when she started kicking wildly. They kept her down on the floor of the backseat, two of them, because she could feel the weight of two pairs of feet holding her down. One pair on her back, the other on her thighs.