Chapter 4

The morning came grey out of the east, a sky the color of old tin, and Dana Whitfield drove the lake house road at six-forty exactly. She was alone this time, in her own truck, the scuffed canvas duffel on the seat beside her. She hadn't slept in the vehicle; she'd slept at a motel eight miles up the highway, a place with a sign that flickered and a bed that smelled like bleach, and she'd showered and put on clean clothes — the same navy jacket, the same grey sweatshirt, the same boots — and driven back with a thermos of coffee she didn't finish.

The gravel crunched under her tires as she pulled into the circle. The great room was dark, curtains drawn. The relatives' cars were still parked in a loose row along the fence — the relatives had slept where they'd landed, on couches and air mattresses, the way you sleep in a house when you know you'll be asked to leave in the morning.

Dana killed the engine. For a moment she sat in the cab, hands on the wheel, looking at the house she'd grown up in. The porch where Uncle Pete had found her the night before. The windows where fifteen faces had watched her leave. The workshop behind the house, a small wooden building with a tin roof, the door padlocked and the padlock looking new.

She got out of the truck.

She didn't open the duffel. She didn't call out. She walked around the side of the house, past the rain gutter that had been leaking since before Marcus died, past the stacked firewood that no one had split, and stopped at the workshop door. The padlock was new. She examined it for a moment, then reached up to the top of the doorframe and ran her fingers along the wood until they found what they were looking for — a small brass key, tarnished with age, hidden in a notch where the frame met the siding.

Marcus had always kept a spare there. Marcus had always said that a lock that keeps out strangers shouldn't keep out family.

The key turned. The lock clicked open. She pushed the door in.

The workshop smelled of sawdust and motor oil and the ghost of her brother's pipe tobacco. Tools hung on a pegboard above a workbench. A tarp covered something bulky in the corner. The floor was concrete, swept clean — someone, probably Carla, had made the place respectable.

Dana crossed to the back of the building, where a square patch of concrete was a slightly different shade of grey — a pour that had been added years after the rest. She knelt down, ran her fingers along the edge, and found the seam. It took her a while, but she got her fingers under it and lifted the section — cut, as it turned out, into a rectangle that fit snug against the slab — and beneath it, in a recess lined with plastic sheeting, sat a green steel strongbox.

She lifted it out. It was heavy. The key she carried on her keychain, the one that had been on the same ring as her truck keys for eleven years, fit the lock on the box as easily as if it had been oiled yesterday.

Inside, wrapped in plastic, was everything.