“Okay. Start with the cottage walls.”
I had known she’d start there.
I drew a breath and gave her the short version. “Bob turned up at the homestead unannounced. Cassidy tore strips off him about the Henderson brothers lighting that fire. During that argument, Bob found out she and Xavier had been at the eastern outstation when it happened. He demanded she fly him out there. When he saw the stripped walls, he flipped his lid.”
She wrote something down. “And what was in the walls, Kayden?”
There it was.
I kept my eyes on the horizon. “I told you. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
She heard the lie. I heard it, too. And it damn well hurt. Yet she didn’t push. She just wrote something in her notebook, and I felt like the worst kind of coward.
I’d made my siblings promise not to tell a soul about the cash until we figured out whose it was and why it was there. That promise had been made before Sapphire walked into the kitchen and before Bob ordered her out to Koolaroo to find Frank.
But it wasn’t just about the promise. Whoever had hidden that money was dangerous. I wasn’t about to drop Sapphire into the middle of that until I understood what we were actually dealing with.
So, I kept my mouth shut and hated myself for it.
“What did Bob say when he got back to the homestead?” she asked.
“He told us to call him the moment Frank turned up. Then he got in his car and left.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
She frowned. “You think he knew what was in the walls?”
“Yep.”
“You think Frank did, too?”
I heaved a sigh. “Probably.”
“If you had to guess, what do you think was in the walls?”
“I thought we were into evidence, not guessing.”
She cocked her head. “Nice deflection.”
“Yeah, well. Right back at you.” I glanced at her. “What do you think was in the walls?”
She held my gaze for just a beat too long. Then looked back at her notebook. “How long have Frank and Bob known each other?”
“Decades. Long before any of us were born.”
“How did they meet?”
I searched back through everything I’d ever been told. Nothing. “No idea.”
“How often did Bob come out to Koolaroo?”
“Too often.” I shifted my grip on the cyclic. “Frank didn’t have friends. Bob was the closest thing, if you could even call it that.”
