Something Wilder(87)

Inside, Leo was a mess, too, but he had decades of experience keeping his emotions hidden from the surface. Each of them had a mountain of therapy in their future, but right then, this tendency was serving him well. Did he want to climb out of his own skin? Of course. Was he losing it at the possibility that the treasure was still there? Absolutely. Was he worried about facing another devastating letdown? Hell yes. So he focused on Lily instead—on reassuring her that he didn’t care what her house looked like, reassuring her that even if the money wasn’t there, he was still all in on her.

But when they pulled up, they stared out the windshield, wordless, for several quiet ticks of her engine.

“See?” She studied his reaction so closely he had to carefully school his expression.

Because, in fact, the cabin was as bad as she had described.

From a distance, it had looked like a sweet log cabin nestled in a cluster of cottonwoods. Knee-high desert grass rolled up all the way to the foundation. A little creek babbled nearby. The fencing and small stable were old but lovingly maintained.

The house, however… well, it leaned—a lot—settling unevenly into the earth. The roof needed to be patched at least, probably replaced entirely. One of her porch steps had caved in, rotten and crumbling. Screens were missing from windows. The front door was water damaged and had to be hit with a determined shoulder in order to open.

But inside, it was clean, tiny, and surprisingly sweet. Her furniture was a simple navy blue sofa, two chairs, a battered but carefully polished coffee table. What looked like a hand-crocheted rug made out of strips of fabric decorated the scratched hardwood floor in front of the fireplace, giving the room a homey feeling. The dining room was small; the four-seater pine table looked handmade. Her kitchen was tidy and bright, appliances old but clean, fridge whirring loudly.

“It’s nice, Lil.”

She huffed out a quiet laugh. “I’m sure it’s nothing compared to your Manhattan bachelor pad.”

“This is at least twice as big.”

“It’s seven hundred square feet,” she replied flatly.

“Two and a half times as big, then,” he joked.

She rolled her eyes, but a smile pulled at the corners of her mouth.

“What’s with the walls?” he asked, hoping the question wasn’t rude.

That the house had been built by someone who was not employed in construction seemed almost comically apparent. The walls were dotted with round, flat nail heads, haphazardly hammered at random intervals as if they alone were holding the entire structure together.

“Hell if I know,” she said with a tiny edge in her voice. “I stopped trying to understand him a long time ago. He built this place for my mom, who didn’t want to stay in an old trailer during the winter months. It ended up being a waste of time, since in the end, she left anyway.”

“And you took care of him here, too? After the stroke?”

“Yeah. It’s not a lot of space, but it was just the two of us, and a nurse when I had to work. He spent a lot of time in his chair by the window, looking out at the mountains.”

As much as he hated to imagine Lily left to care for Duke by herself, he hated the idea of her living in this crumbling cabin alone even more.

Lily left him to look around, but she immediately got to work. And in what he assumed was one of the two tiny bedrooms, he heard Lily pulling things out of her closet, opening and closing drawers, banging on the walls to feel where something might be hollow or full of something other than wood. She stomped along the floors, checking every surface, every wall, every floorboard to see if it wiggled. He joined in, peeling back rugs, looking for false backs in her kitchen cabinets.

“Where do you think he would hide something?” he asked.

She paused her work tapping every brick in the fireplace to give him a dramatically excited expression. “Oh shit, do you think I should be considering that?”

He ignored her tone. This was Lily on defense; she was trying not to hope.

“I mean,” Leo said patiently, “let’s brainstorm what he might have thought would be a location nobody would ever think to look in. He was actually brilliant, Lily. He’d have known that anybody who suspected he kept the money here would have looked in the closet. They would think he hid it in the floor somewhere. They would look in the cabinets. So, if Duke thought there was a chance you would be the one to make it to the cave and left you that note, and he sent you right back here to your own house, what is the place where he would think you had never looked before and only you would look?”

She sat down on the couch, pinning her hands between her knees. “I don’t know.”

“Let’s just let it sit,” he said. “Look around. Think about the space, if there were any meaningful places in here.”

“Leo, there’s only so much space to consider.”

“Exactly,” he said. “That makes it easier and harder. Duke would have to be really creative to hide something here.”

She sat back, looking around as if with new eyes. As usual, her fingers tapped against her thighs, and by now, he’d heard the rhythm so many times he found himself tapping along with her. They sat together—quick tap, slow tap, quick, quick, quick, quick. Quick tap, slow tap, quick, quick, quick, quick… and then everything seemed to come to a stop inside him.

“Lily.”