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He’d lost his job a few weeks earlier and his unemployment hadn’t kicked in and, the real problem, he hadn’t found anything of value at the Beaumont estate. Just those dead girls. Their thin skeletons dressed in fraying girls’ clothes from an earlier decade still haunted his dreams. The locket, the tennis shoes, the ring and hairband.
His insides went cold and he took a long swallow.
He thought about driving to his regular haunt, down to the Red Knuckle, where he would drink a few more beers and watch the Braves play.
But he didn’t.
He was too spooked.
And the word had gotten out that he’d found the bodies.
More than one reporter had called.
He walked to the living room and peered through the window to the night beyond. The TV was tuned into the station that had aired the Braves game but right now there was a newscaster on the screen with yet another “breaking story.” Of course it was about the Duval girls. He watched. As he always did. As the nightmare continued. The police were looking for people who might know something about the crime of course, and the report focused on two teenagers who’d never come forward at the time, boys captured on tape. He squinted at the grainy image of kids at the refreshment stand in the theater. Two guys who looked like every other teenager twenty years ago. No one he remembered. He frowned, took a pull from his longneck.
The next shot was of two men, computer-enhanced images of what those teenagers from two decades ago might look like, and he paused the screen shot. Had he seen either of them? He didn’t think so, but . . . maybe?
Even if he did know them, he was out of it. He’d done enough, discovering the bodies and calling the damned cops, reporting what he’d stumbled upon. And now his name was being leaked.
Shit.
So far no one had shown up on his doorstep, not that the NO TRESPASSING and TRESPASSERS WILL BE PROSECUTED signs he’d nailed to the fence posts at the end of the lane would stop any member of the press.
Fender was whining at the back door, so Bronco made his way through the kitchen again and opened the door before unlatching the screen. “Go on now. Git out there and do yer business,” he said, as the heeler shot out of the house and into the night, where crickets were singing and frogs croaking. Bronco stepped onto the porch and stared at the line of trees separating the house from the river and from the old Beaumont place. This whole area had been owned by the Beaumonts. All the way up the river to the Marianne Inn, which had been named for Arthur Beaumont’s first wife, Marianne, the one before crazy Beulah, and then the land on both sides of the river, including this place, which his grandfather had managed to buy from the old lady before she died, before Arthur’s son, Baxter, had inherited it and made it into another one of his damned subdivisions.
Another swallow of beer as a gust of wind rattled some of the new-fallen leaves, scattering them across the dirt and patchy grass of the yard.
He lit a cigarette and wondered where the hell the damned jewels and money and whatever the hell else Beulah Beaumont had hidden were. Had he missed them, not seen a hiding spot because he got the shit scared out of him? What was it his grandfather had said? What were the old man’s words?
“I tell ya, boy, I’ve never seen the likes of it. Never in all my born days. A fortune, right there in that velvet bag of hers.”
That was it. Talk of a velvet bag.
Bronco took a long drag from his Winston, the tip glowing red.
He was certain Gramps had said he’d helped Beulah hide it in the basement, in a niche of some kind. Could he have missed it? Maybe. When he was scared out of his mind, he could have run away before finding the treasure, but the cops, with all their man power and technology, they would have located anything of value. They wouldn’t have missed it.
Would they?
Could it have been found?
Moved?
But by whom?
And when?
His eyes narrowed through the cloud of smoke he exhaled. That was his big chance and he’d blown it. He whistled to the dog, his thoughts returning to the basement of that huge monster of a house. Damn it all to hell. Gazing up at the stars, he cursed his luck—all of it bad.
He heard a rustle to the side of the house.
Fender.
Nosing around for a raccoon or possum or squirrel. “Come on in, then,” he said, and dropped the butt of his cigarette and stubbed it out, grinding it beneath the heel of his boot.
But the dog didn’t appear.
“Fender?” he yelled, a little louder, with more authority. “Come!” Peering into the darkness, he saw nothing. And the rustling at the corner of the house had silenced. The wind had died. Even the frogs and crickets had stilled.
