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“I opened a bank vault once that had been shut for sixty years.”
“What happened?” Shane said as he leaned into the level.
“Wall cracked a little,” Carpenter said, and Shane looked up at the arched ceiling above him.
“How much is a little?”
“I got it open. It’ll pop, just like?—”
The hatch popped open with a whoosh and a creak of rusty hinges that echoed down the tunnel and through the house.
Voices rose from the other end of the basement, a babble of questions and some contention.
“It’s all right,” Shane called back.
“No, it isn’t,” Agnes yelled back to him. “Brenda’s here.”
Brenda’s voice floated down the tunnel. “Is the shelter open?”
“No,” Shane called back, but she came tapping down the long tunnel in her heels, and the rest of them followed her. He sighed and turned toward the open hatch and stepped over the lower edge.
The first thing he saw was a safe, its door wide open.
Inside the safe was a frying pan, its rim crusted with very old blood.
Inside the frying pan and piled around it in the safe were empty money wrappers. Lots and lots of them. Enough, Shane thought, to go around five million dollars.
“Oh, my God!” Brenda said, her voice full of drama.
“That’s not my frying pan,” Agnes said from behind him, and he turned and saw them, crowding the door, Brenda with her head turned away, Xavier and Agnes behind her, and next to Agnes, Lisa Livia looking pale and the thin brunette holding up her camera.
“I told you,” Brenda said to Xavier, her voice rich with distress. “I told you. Joey and Four Wheels killed him. I can’t bear to look.”
“Look at what, Miz Dupres?” Xavier said.
“At...” Brenda turned to look into the shelter, at first with dread and then with disbelief. “What... Where’s Frankie?”
“He’s not in there,” Lisa Livia said, her voice as stunned as Brenda’s, and Agnes put her arm around her friend.
Lisa Livia turned and walked back down the tunnel.
“She wanted her dad dead?” Shane asked, and Agnes shook her head, giving him a look that said she’d tell him later.
“Joey came in and moved the body,” Brenda was saying to Xavier, grabbing his sleeve. “Him and Four Wheels. They moved it!”
“How?” Xavier asked, but Carpenter had already moved past the safe and was looking up.
“Hmm,” Carpenter said, and began to climb up an old metal ladder welded to the side of the shelter.
Shane went to see what his partner had seen and realized that there was a door at the top, and when Carpenter pushed on the door and flipped it open, sunlight poured in, and above that, a ceiling, blue with gold stars.
“That’s my gazebo,” Agnes said from beside Shane.
Shane turned back to where Xavier was looking at the frying pan.
“Well, someone got whacked a good one,” Xavier said, and looked at Agnes.
“That is not mine,” Agnes said again.
