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"Stop it!" She couldn't let him do this, and she charged after him across the marble. "You're being a sadistic ass! Just let me look at it."
"Why?"
"Because I might have left something inside."
"Such as?"
She hesitated. "An old love letter from Dwayne."
He regarded her with disgust and turned back toward the stairs.
"Stop!"
He kept going.
"Wait!" She grabbed his arm, then wished she hadn't touched him, and quickly let go. "Okay, maybe Dwayne might have left something in it."
He paused with one foot on the bottom step. "Like what?"
"Like—" Her mind raced. "A lock of Edward's baby hair."
"You're going to have to do a lot better than that." He began to climb.
"All right! I'll tell you." She struggled to come up with another lie, but couldn't think of anything that would be even mildly convincing. She would either have to tell him the truth or let him take the chest away. It was no choice. She couldn't let the chest disappear again until she'd looked inside it, and she'd have to take the risk.
"Like the secret behind where he hid five million dollars."
That brought him up short. "Now we're getting somewhere."
She gazed up at him and worked hard to swallow. "The money's mine, Bonner. It's Edward's legacy. There are still some debts left, but the rest belongs to him. I earned every penny!"
"How do you figure?"
She got ready to give it to him—her smartest, sassiest, most wiseassed response. But then, just as the words were coining out, something happened inside her throat, and her voice broke. "Because I sold my soul for it," she whispered.
For a moment he didn't say anything. Then he tilted his head toward the top of the stairs. "I'll get you a robe. Your teeth are chattering."
Half an hour later, she sat across from him in the kitchen wearing nothing but her panties and his maroon terry-cloth robe as she stared down at the Kennedy chest. Her eyes were dry—she'd never cry in front of him again—but inside, she felt desolate.
"I was so sure." She shook her head, still unable to believe the chest held no clues. They had examined every microscopic inch of it and found nothing: no secret compartment holding a safe-deposit key, no Swiss bank-account number etched into the wood beneath the lining, no map or microfilm or computer password.
She wanted to slam her fists against the table, but instead, she forced herself to think. "The county sheriff was there along with the Salvation police, so there was a lot of law enforcement. One of them must have looked in the chest when he confiscated it and found something. One of them must have it."
"That doesn't make sense." Gabe picked up her coffee mug and carried it to the sink, where he refilled it from the pot on the counter. "You told me you checked the box before you got into the car. You looked and didn't find anything, so why would they? Besides, if the sheriff or one of our local police had stumbled on that kind of cash, we'd have seen some evidence of it by now, and the only person in the community who's spent any big money has been Cal."
"Maybe he—"
"Forget it. Cal made millions while he was in the NFL. Besides, if he or Jane had found anything in that box, they wouldn't have kept it a secret."
He was right. She slumped back into the red-velvet banquette in the kitchen's eating alcove. In her day the alcove had been wallpapered with gruesome full-blown metallic roses on the verge of decay, but they were gone now, replaced with small yellow rosebuds. The wallpaper was so completely out of place that it could only be some kind of private joke on the part of the current owners.
Gabe set the fresh mug of coffee in front of her and brushed her shoulder in a surprisingly gentle gesture. She wanted to tilt her cheek against the back of his hand, but he removed it before she could give in to the impulse. "Rachel, the odds are the money's at the bottom of the ocean."
She shook her head. "Dwayne had to leave the country too fast to handle any kind of complicated transaction. He couldn't possibly have taken that much money with him on such short notice."
Gabe sat across from her and set his arms on the table. Her eyes lingered there. His forearms were strong and deeply tanned, sprinkled with dark hair. "Tell me again everything he said that day."
She repeated the story, leaving out nothing. When she was done, she twisted her hands on the table. "I wanted to believe him when he told me he had to say good-bye to Edward, but I knew something was wrong. I suppose Dwayne loved Edward in an abstract way, but not in any way that counted. He was too self-centered."
