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“Yeah, but that’s a big one. How is your mom, by the way?”
“I got her into a facility near here, at least temporarily. Dougie is with her right now. He’s decided to cremate Rochelle’s remains and sprinkle them at a lake where they lived for a while and were happy.”
“So they came here looking for Beckett and your father, too?”
“They wanted revenge, but they also wanted the money, like I did.” She looked at Gibson’s twin computer screens. “NFTs. It just doesn’t strike me as something that Harry would dump money into. And it was only fivemillion bucks.”
“I’ve looked at everything a dozen times.”
“So the dig deeper clue. The ‘twenty-first century’ clue. That’s it, right? No other clues left behind?”
“Yeah, that’s…” Gibson looked at her screens. “That’s actuallynotright.”
“What do you mean?” asked Francine.
“I forgot to tell you. I tracked down a bunch of companies that Langhorne had. If you incorporate you have to have a registered agent in the state of incorporation, so if you get sued, there’s someone in the state to accept service.”
“And the point?” asked Francine impatiently.
“There was one agent I reached out to who got back to me immediately.” She started clicking keys on her computer and pointed at the screen. “Dexter Tremayne from South Dakota. He’s the registered agent for DPE. That’s Daniel Pottinger Enterprises, obviously.”
“What did he say when he got back to you?”
“That Pottinger aka Harry had called him and left a message for Tremayne to give to anyone who contacted him after he was dead. DPE was pretty well buried behind some other shells. It took me some time to dig through.”
“What was the message?”
“‘Now you see it, but then you don’t.’”
“That’s it?”
“No. He also said to take away the eight. And then to use the leftovers for Sesame Street.”
“That makes no sense at all.”
“Agreed. Now, the usual phrase is slightly different. ‘Now you see it,nowyou don’t.’”
“So Harry had changed ‘now’ to ‘but then’?”
“That’s right. I was going to dig down deeper, but then I got sidetracked with everything else and forgot all about it.”
Francine took a notebook from her purse and flitted through the pages.
“What’s that?” asked Gibson.
“MyTREASUREnotebook.”
Gibson gave her a funny look.
“I actually have a half dozen devoted just to you. A record for me.”
“Well, I guess I should feel honored somehow. Do you think he just got the phrase wrong?”
“No. He was the most detailed person I’ve ever met.”
Gibson glanced at the notebook and the precise writing on the page she was reading. “You mean sort of like you?”
“I do it so I can have some control over my life. He did it to screw people over.”
