Lies I Told(70)

I heard Parker’s voice on the phone: Everything is in place. You have to move. Make sure Cormac and Renee save my share.

My mom was right. We had to finish the job.

“What can I do?” I asked.

“Pull back the mat,” my dad said, standing with the bolt cutters in one hand.

My mom held the flashlight as I slid the gray mat off the bunker door. The light bounced around the room as she bent to help, and I caught sight of something on my dad’s shirt. I squinted through the darkness, a large wine-colored stain coming into focus on his chest.

“What is . . .” I swallowed hard, my gaze riveted to his shirt. “Is that blood?”

His gaze turned cold. “Don’t worry about it, Gracie. Just keep moving.”

I took an involuntary step backward. “What did you do?”

“We did what had to be done,” my mom said softly. “Your safety depends on it. Parker’s safety depends on it. We were in too deep to call it off. You’d already given Logan the Valium. The buyers are waiting. We won’t have another chance, and without the gold, we can’t make a run for it. We’d be stuck here, sitting ducks while the police put together everything that was in process. And that’s doubly true if they pick up Parker. At least this way, we’ll have the resources to help him.”

I was flailing around in my mind, on overload as I weighed the merit of her argument. Something bad had happened at Allied, but my brain was shutting down, focusing on the fact that my dad had the bolt cutters out, wondering how long it would take us to load the gold so we could find Parker.

“We took care of the monitors at Allied,” Cormac said, grunting a little as he snapped the first lock with the bolt cutter. “The cameras are looped. Parker knows how to handle himself. Everything’s fine.”

Everything wasn’t fine. Even I knew that, despite the layer of cotton in my head, the void that was opening up between my panic and the reality of the situation. I was on autopilot by the time my dad snipped the last lock, and I bent down, heaving open one of the double doors with my mom’s help while my dad grabbed the other one.

The doors weren’t even open all the way when a wave of cold, damp air hit my face. It smelled like concrete and metal and, somewhere underneath it all, wet earth.

We folded the doors back against the carriage house floor. My mom shone the flashlight into the hole in the ground, illuminating a staircase and rows of metal shelving far below us.

“Moment of truth.” Cormac pulled a headlamp out of the bag and turned on the light. Then he looked at my mom and me. “You coming?”

I looked around. “Someone needs to cover.”

“Come take a look first,” he said. “You were a big part of this. You deserve to be there when we find the gold.”

I hesitated.

“Go ahead, Grace,” my mom said. “I’ll keep watch. Your dad’s right; this one’s yours.”

I started down the stairs, her words ringing in my ears.

This one’s yours.

I didn’t want it. Didn’t want to acknowledge how big a part I’d played in this moment. But they were right. It wouldn’t have been possible without all the snooping I’d done at Logan’s, without my access to the Fairchild estate.

It was my fault. All of it.

The stairs were metal. They rang under our footsteps as we descended into the darkness below, Cormac’s headlamp the only source of light. It was a lot farther down than I’d expected. I wondered how long it had taken Warren to complete the bunker. Had he hired someone to build it? Or was doing it himself part of his obsession? His paranoia?

Finally, my dad stepped onto the concrete floor. I looked up, trying to gauge how far down we were by the distant shine of my mom’s flashlight at the bunker’s entrance above us.

My dad whistled softly. “Jesus . . .”

I turned around. “What is it?”

“This is crazy.” I walked over to where he stood. He lifted a thick length of metal tubing hanging from one of the cement walls. “Looks like Warren’s planning some kind of ventilation system.”

I looked around, shocked by the size of the place. It was huge. At least one hundred feet by one hundred feet. Way bigger than I’d imagined. My gaze came to rest on the rows of metal shelving. One entire wall was stacked with five-gallon bottles of water. Another was lined with packaged food, canned vegetables and beans, cases of energy bars, dried fruit, rice, cornmeal, flour, sugar, powdered milk. I could make out partitions at the far end of the room and, beyond them, a set of bunk beds.

“I can’t believe this,” I said. I had a sudden flash of Warren Fairchild, manning the grill with his Kiss the Cook apron, smiling and greeting his guests. And all the while, he was scared enough of some unknown future to have a massive bunker under his property.

Cormac was moving around on one side of the room. “Help me look, Grace.”

I took the other wall, shifting and lifting, looking under the tarps that covered medicine and first-aid supplies, a shortwave radio, a rack of fishing poles. I was beginning to give up, beginning to think we were wrong, when I came to a large metal cabinet. A heavy padlock identical to the ones on the bunker doors was threaded through its two handles.

“There’s something here,” I called out. “I think it might be a gun cabinet.”