She glanced at him and saw his face and immediately forked the sirloins into two plates. There were some chopped up carrots on the plates alongside potatoes that she'd baked until they were shrunken and wrinkled. It no longer surprised him that she was so skinny.
She put his food in front of him and handed him butter and salt like she knew he was going to need a lot of it to kill the taste. She smiled at him in a pleasant, Isn't this a nice way to spend the evening kind of way.
She didn't know how it was done. Joan used to give him the real thing, every night, the perfect homemaker, loving and kind, sweeter with him than he deserved, but somebody he always had to put a front on for. She loved him through all his cynical silence and blamed only herself when he asked for a divorce. It showed him just how off the mark he'd gone. Any other man would be thankful to have a wife like that.
"You aren't eating," Reb said. "Too well-done for you?"
"No," he said, and started cutting into the charred meat.
She sipped her wine and stepped over to the sideboard, got out two candlesticks, placed them on the table, and lit the candles. She sat and began eating and he couldn't figure out why she was trying to get at him this way, acting the part of a lover, attempting to be a spouse, doing things to make her man cozy. He knew he hadn't given her that impression.
"You're going to go to the Burkes' house next, aren't you?" she asked.
"Soon."
"You remember those people?"
"Yes," he said. He'd never spoken to Mary's parents, but he knew their faces. They'd stare at him in town and he'd stare back, his father's iniquity marking him. He knew that no matter how he approached them or what he said, it was bound to be an awful scene. But he couldn't see any way around it.
"You'll never find out what happened," Reb told him. His own thoughts tossed back at him. "Digging it up now will only cause more trouble."
"Maybe not," he said. Suddenly the burned steak didn't taste so bad anymore. It had no taste at all. He finished the meal very quickly and opened a second bottle of wine. It was old cheap stuff, the kind somebody who doesn't really like you gives you for a present over the holidays. It didn't make a difference.
He felt like he was on a stage, being watched by an audience interested in farce, all of them out in the darkness waiting for him to say something funny, to snap off a well-written piece of dialogue.
This was parody. This was burlesque.
"What happens if you find the money?" she asked. "What do you mean?"
"Who gets it? Who are you supposed to turn it in to? Do the Burkes get it again? I mean, can they prove it's theirs? If you just find a stash?"
He tried to picture Reb laid back across the leather sofa in Tucco's penthouse, with the coke and H spread out on the glass-top table, the wads of cash stacked all over the place. Guys heating spoons and hitting the spike side by side on the U-shaped sectional, watching the Jets on the HD plasma. If she was ever dropped into the middle of that kind of life she'd be dead inside of three months.
Truth was, he didn't know what would happen to the money. If he turned it in, Edwards would probably march off with it. He looked at Reb and saw her mind twirling with the wanting of the fifteen grand. The pulse in her throat was pounding so hard he thought it might break the thin, silver necklace she wore tonight. He wondered what it might be like to care that much about money. About anything.
"I don't know," he said.
That got her dreaming up more ideas. The fire was growing within her. He didn't have the heart to tell her that fifteen k just isn't that much. Why didn't she already know that?
He sat there holding the glass of wine, sipping it and trying to figure what her next move would be. She was already trying to show him that she knew him better than anybody else, that she was inside his head, dirty and sharp as he was. That they were two of a kind.
Maybe it didn't have everything to do with the lost ransom. Maybe she had something else brewing. He tried to picture what it might be, and saw her unfolding a piece of paper across the dining room table and showing him little x's on a map of the town bank. Telling him, Here's the manager's desk, and here's where the head teller does her transactions… only one security guard, an old guy named Edgar…
Reb looked at him and said, "What?"
"Nothing."
"You thinking about your son?"
"Yes," he said.
"You make time for him?"
"Not enough," Crease admitted.
Reb stood, sort of pirouetted around him. She took his hand and led him across the room to the couch. She pressed him down and lay stretched out, half in his lap, her hair strewn across his legs.
"You never loved your wife," she said. "It's pretty clear to me."
"I loved her as well as I could. As I can."
"It's not enough though."
"It is for her, but it shouldn't be. I couldn't do it to her any longer."
"You knew it was going to be like that even when you married her, didn't you?"
"No," he told her. He'd had no idea that the distance between him and Joan would be so great. The distance between him and anyone else, everyone else, except maybe Tucco.
"You think you became a different person along the way?"
He'd thought about that a lot. "No, but you don't know what your strengths and weaknesses are until you're forced to find out."
He could see she wanted to ask him, And what are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? But she was too smart to come right out with it. She wanted to take the time to maneuver things properly. It was fun watching her try to work him.
He knew that as soon as she figured out she wasn't going to get anything from him, she'd toss him out of the house. Maybe even call Edwards and try to incite the sheriff to bust him. Or go back to Jimmy or somebody just like Jimmy and hope to spur him on to take a shot at Crease. You never knew what the next dilemma was going to be or where it was going to come from.
"Now do you want to go to bed?" she asked.
Crease let out a grin. It was starting to feel like New York around here.
Chapter Six
Wildlife had overtaken the old mill. The log ramps and tramcar flatbeds where the rough-cut lumber used to be loaded were covered over by tall grass, weeds, and saplings. He walked around the mill. There were broken floorboards everywhere. The roof had collapsed from heavy winter snows over the last four decades, and the rotted timbers lay crossing each other in heaps. Daylight shined in, and there were animal nests and signs of teenage vandalism everywhere.
Crease tried to piece together the events of that night, the way his father had laid them out. Old rusted steam-powered saws and other machinery still lay about in the long, wide main room.
His father would have been behind one of the trimmers, where the carriages worked back and forth ripping through the grain. There was a man-sized open area between two of them where a man could stretch out. From there he would be able to see the front door, down the length of the factory floor, and also keep his back mostly protected.
Crease looked around and found where his father most likely hid the cash. Probably inside the rusted metal spoked wheels where the cut slabs were placed on flatbeds reeled down the slope by cables out the back of the mill. It was an incline system, typical of the way things were done in the '30s and '40s. The wheels were overhead but close enough.
Crease had seen fifteen grand in tens and twenties before. It didn't look like much. A couple of stacks a few inches high. He acted out taking the bundles of cash from the satchel and placing the money beneath the flatbed.
The mill was a good spot for the kidnappers to make the trade. No way for an ambush to work. Plenty of exits. Line of sight was fifty yards to the tree line in any direction. There were logging trails all up and down the hills. They could shake anybody chasing them.