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“Gone.” Lila shrugged. “With him, I’d guess.”
They both stared at her after that answer. Lila reran the sentences in her head but didn’t find a problem.
Ginny nodded in the direction of the coffee table. “Do you and Aaron share that laptop?”
“We each have one, plus we share a desktop.” She had their attention now. “I need them for work.”
“All three?” Pete asked.
“Yes.”
Ginny cleared her throat before talking again. “We’ll discuss that later. For now, does your husband’s car have GPS?”
“He said it was a waste of money. He uses the one on his phone, but even that is unusual. He’s one of those people who goes to a place one time and remembers the directions forever, unlike me.”
“And his cell phone is gone as well, I take it.” Pete glanced at Ginny after he delivered that statement. “That’s inconvenient.”
Lila gave them a push in another direction. “While you’re checking, you should talk with Aaron’s brother, Jared. He has access to the one bank account that I don’t.”
Ginny’s eyes narrowed. “What are you talking about?”
“Jared and Aaron inherited money, though I don’t think that’s the right word for what happened. Either way, it’s in trust.”
“How much money are we talking about?” Pete asked.
“A few million each.”
Ginny didn’t show any outward reaction to the amount. Pete wasn’t quite as careful. His eyes widened. “If anything happens to Aaron, then that money goes to...?”
“Jared. It’s not mine.” Lila almost smiled as she watched the excitement on Pete’s face vanish.
He looked doubtful. “Your husband has millions of dollars and yet he works as a high school teacher?”
“He likes the students.” And she left it at that.
Ginny took over. “Who did he inherit the money from?”
“Freak accident. A group of hunters shot his mother. She was outside, they didn’t see her when they fired, and they killed her.” Lila recited the version she’d heard almost verbatim from both brothers. “The hunters were drunk and rich, and Aaron was only eleven, so Jared would have been not quite thirteen. Part of the settlement—the one their father signed to buy the entire Payne family’s silence and the court signed off on—included sizable accounts for Jared and Aaron.”
“What about their father?”
“The money he received? I have no idea. I never met him.” From what she’d heard about him, that was not a loss. According to family lore, he’d grown up in a minimalist environment with a father who didn’t believe in government or electricity or any comforts.
Even as Aaron’s father grew up and moved out of the charged environment, the drumbeat of disillusionment and violence didn’t leave him. He preached his antisociety beliefs to Aaron and Jared. On those rare occasions when Aaron talked about his father at all, he credited Jared with gettingthem out of childhood intact and surviving a father he described as practical but brutally mean. The man ruled the house and his wife as a despot and used his hand and belt to drive home lessons.
Lila rarely spared a thought for her father-in-law, except to curse him now and then for being poison and passing a portion of hisI’m in chargeway of thinking on to his son.
When it came to paternity, neither she nor Aaron had won the jackpot.
“Why haven’t you met you husband’s father?” Ginny asked.
“Seven or eight years after losing his wife, he was walking on the side of the road and got hit by a car. Died after spending days in a coma.”
Pete whistled. “That’s a lot of tragic accidents for one family.”
Exactly.“Yeah, you’re not the first one to think so.”
“Who else did?” Ginny asked.
