Total pages in book: 99
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 93002 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 465(@200wpm)___ 372(@250wpm)___ 310(@300wpm)
“What if he wrote something, and they painted over it?” I asked.
“Then I guess we’re out of luck,” Forrest said, shutting yet another cabinet.
“That’s it?” I stared at him, but he refused to meet my eyes. “That’s all you have to say?”
He turned, his hazel eyes intense with emotion for a second before he blinked and looked away. “What do you want me to say, Sterling? I can’t find what’s not here.”
I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. He wasn’t wrong. If it wasn’t here, it wasn’t here. But we’d barely started to look. I wasn’t ready to give up. I didn’t think Forrest was either, but I had to remember to give him space. Alan’s ciphers were sending us down a memory road Forrest probably hadn’t been prepared for.
From that perspective, I couldn’t quite imagine how hard this must be for him. I couldn’t relate to losing a father I’d loved. At best, I’d been indifferent to Prentice. At my worst, I despised him. I didn’t remember anything of my mother except a faint memory of sweet perfume and a high-pitched laugh. But I’d lost Darcy when I’d been only seven, and the pain of it could still steal my breath. If Darcy had left these clues behind for me? A wave of grief hit me at the thought, followed by the desperate wish that I could feel her love once more from beyond the grave. So, I had to give Forrest the room he needed to work through this.
“What about—?” I stopped at the crunch of tires on gravel. “Shit.” A glance out the window told me Forrest had been wise not to park in the driveway.
A gray sedan pulled in, followed by a dark SUV. A woman with short, dark hair got out of the sedan, followed by a man on the other side. They both looked a few decades older than us. Another couple about the same age got out of the SUV carrying a bag that looked like it was from a grocery store. The neck of a wine bottle poked out from the top.
“I’ll set up a picnic on the dock,” I heard the first woman say, and my eyes flashed to Forrest in a panic. The dock was attached to the boathouse.
“Fuck, fuck, fuck. Come on, Forrest,” I grabbed his arm and pushed him away from the window.
“This way,” he said, pointing me to a wooden ladder built into the back wall that I hadn’t noticed. I skidded to a stop and looked into a dark square above.
“What’s up there?” I asked.
“Probably a lot of cobwebs and mice, but it’s big enough for us to hide in until they go away. Unless you want to go out there and explain what we’re doing here.”
I did not. I climbed the ladder, trying not to flinch at the thought of cobwebs and mice. I wasn’t a scaredy cat, but cobwebs and mice in a hot, dark attic did not sound like fun. Cobwebs meant spiders. I wasn’t a big lake girl, but I knew about dock spiders. And we were in a boathouse. My skin crawled. How much did I really want to find Alan Buckley’s treasure?
Enough that I was willing to face whatever lurked above. I climbed off the top of the ladder and crawled across the rough wooden planks that made up the floor. It wasn’t much of an attic. I saw life preservers so old the orange had faded to white, two mostly deflated, donut-shaped floaties, and a stack of ancient fishing poles. I scooted enough to make room for Forrest. He squeezed beside me, his head almost touching mine. It was hot, but not nightmarishly hot. A blessing, given it was a summer afternoon in Georgia.
The attic space ran the full length of the boathouse. It was long but low, and we could only sit upright in the very center. There were cobwebs, as promised, and probably some mouse droppings if I went looking for them, which I wasn’t going to. But otherwise, it wasn’t as gross as I’d feared.
Forrest shuffled on his hands and knees to the far end and peered out the dusty window overlooking the lake and the dock below. A few minutes later, he crawled back. “They set up a picnic on the dock. Sandwiches, salad, wine. They’ll be there a while. There’s no way for us to get out of here.”
“Then we might as well search up here while we’re stuck,” I said. And we did, spending a hot, sweaty hour searching every inch of the attic. The water lapping at the pontoon boat and the wind in the trees around us more than covered any noise we were making, and I grew less and less nervous as we searched. I found the promised mouse droppings, too many cobwebs, and two black, hairy spiders. I managed not to scream, always aware of the four people just below the window at the end of the boathouse, happily eating sandwiches and drinking chilled white wine. I’d peeked through that window myself. They were having a lovely afternoon. I wished I could say the same. I’d have killed for a whisper of the breeze ruffling the surface of the lake.