Chapter 21

21

Mobile, Alabama

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 6:05 A.M.

SAGE'S MOTHER DIDN'T ANSWER WHEN he knocked on the front door, but her car was here, so he figured that she was home. He hadn't been here since he was eighteen. When they'd fought about him working for Alan. She'd wanted Sage to move away. To move in with her.

Sage didn't know why she'd tried to get him to leave his grandfather. He'd never asked. He'd just…avoided her. For years. He'd been happy with Alan then. Useful. Valued.

Or so he'd thought.

But she'd been right. Working for Alan had been the worst thing he'd ever done.

Sage had dreamed of Sanjay and the old librarian last night. He'd woken shaking, unable to go back to sleep. So he'd gotten dressed and made the drive to Mobile.

Maybe his mother had some of the answers he needed. That she and his father had divorced twenty-three years ago was not a coincidence. He was certain of it.

Sage only knew that Alan hated his mother, and that the feeling was quite mutual. Lisa Tupper had never divulged the source of their feud, but it went deep.

Hearing music playing faintly, he followed the sound, walking around her house to the screened patio. She was in the heated pool, cutting through the water in quick, even strokes. Letting himself in through the screen door, he took a seat at the patio table, waiting until she finally surfaced.

She startled, gasping. "Sage. What are you doing here?"

"Came to visit you, Mother. Is that a crime?"

She emerged from the water, grabbing a towel to dry herself off before dropping into the seat beside him and turning off the music coming from her phone. "Not a crime, but definitely unexpected. Are you sick?"

"No. Nothing like that. I have some questions, and I hope you'll have some answers."

"Ask whatever you like, son. If I can answer, I will."

He thought again of Ashley, of the dimple in her cheek that so matched his own. Who is she and why is she living in Merrydale, Louisiana?

But what came out of his mouth was "Why didn't you fight Grandfather for custody?"

She flinched, taken aback. "Oh. Well." She refilled her coffee cup, clearly stalling. Finally, she sighed. "It's a difficult story to tell. And when I tried to approach the subject, you cut me off. It's been seven years since we've talked. I figured you didn't want me in your life."

That had been true then. They'd argued about Alan. She'd said his grandfather was dangerous and he'd scoffed, calling her a liar. Then he'd ghosted her.

That had clearly been a mistake. "So Grandfather is the reason?"

"Yes. Your grandfather threatened me," she said baldly. "He said that if I fought for custody, he'd ‘bury me.' I wasn't sure if that was hyperbole or not. He said he had photos of me with other men." Her gaze was sharp. "He did not, Sage. I was totally faithful to your father during our whole marriage. But the photos Alan had looked real. Even to me. He wanted me to go away and relinquish all my parental rights. I couldn't do that. So I bargained with him. Got a few weekends with you, a few Christmases. Until you were old enough to decide you didn't want to see me."

He frowned again. "Bargained with him? How?"

"I knew something he didn't want getting out. I threatened him with exposure. I wanted full custody, but I knew that wasn't going to happen. He was already too powerful and he had a lot more money than I did. His lawyers were sharks." She sighed. "So I was grateful to get what I got."

Sage knew his grandfather was capable of doing whatever he needed to do to get what he wanted, but that Alan had threatened to bury his mother? Knowing what he knew now, that Alan had killed Medford Hughes, maybe Lisa was being literal.

"Can you please just tell me what happened? I need to know."

"Why?" she asked, her fear obvious.

Sage pulled out his phone and found the graduation photo of Ashley that he'd snapped after finding it in his grandfather's safe. "Who is she?"

Lisa's eyes widened. "I don't know. How do you know her?"

"She looks like me."

Lisa nodded. "She does. Where did you get this picture?"

"I found it among Grandfather's things. He's done something. Something bad."

"Are you in danger, Sage?"

"Not at the moment." It was a prevarication and he knew it.

From the look on her face, so did she. "I have friends in Spain. Or Singapore or Australia. You can go any of those places to hide. Alan won't find you."

"I appreciate that." He put his phone away. If she didn't know who Ashley was, he'd have to come at this from a different angle. "What did you know twenty-three years ago when you bargained for visitation with me?"

Lisa sighed. "You know your father has a younger sister, right?"

Sage nodded slowly. "Right. Aunt Jenny. There's another brother, Uncle Walton."

"You don't really know either of them."

"Uncle Walton is never stationed near us, and Aunt Jenny is in a mental hospital."

"She got pregnant when she was fifteen," his mother said, as if merely saying the words were painful.

"Oh," Sage said quietly, a few pieces falling into place. "That wouldn't have been good for Grandfather."

"No, it wouldn't have been. It would have ruined his reputation. His career."

"His ability to fundraise," Sage added cynically.

"I hate that you know that. I hate that it's true."

"What happened to Aunt Jenny?"

"He sent her away."

"To the mental health hospital or to a home for unwed mothers?"

Lisa shook her head. "Neither. It was someone's actual home. Someone who owed him a favor, I guess."

"What happened?"

His mother suddenly looked twenty years older than she had when he'd arrived. "I found the address. Alan had it written on a scrap of paper in his wallet."

"You went through his wallet?"

"I sure as hell did. I loved Jenny. She was a sweet girl and needed her family. She'd told me that she was pregnant before she was sent away, and I asked if she knew who the father was. She…shut down. Said it didn't matter, that she didn't want the father of her baby in her life."

"How did Grandfather find out she was pregnant?"

"It wasn't difficult to figure out. I never said a word to your grandparents because I promised I wouldn't, and Jenny trusted me. But she was throwing up every morning. Her mother made her take a pregnancy test. The next day, Jenny was sent away."

"When was this?" he asked, already knowing the answer.

"Twenty-three years ago."

Sage thought he'd feel elated to have his suspicions about Ashley Caulfield confirmed, but all he felt was dread. "Did you visit her? At the address you found in the wallet?"

"I did. Jenny was still a child herself. She was miserable, lonely and sad and…traumatized. I asked her point-blank if she'd been raped and she nodded. I was…sick. Just sick."

"She never told you who'd done it?"

"No, never. I told her that I'd help her get an abortion. She just started to cry. She wanted the baby. Wanted someone who'd love her back, and that broke my damn heart. She was just a child herself and her parents had sent her away, like she was nothing. Just an embarrassment, an obstacle to their success."

"And then?"

"And then the owner of the house burst into her room and said she'd overheard our conversation. I should have known we wouldn't have privacy, but I was so taken aback by how distraught Jenny looked. The woman threw me out of her house and by the time I got home, both your father and grandfather were waiting for me. My marriage was over."

" That's why Dad divorced you?"

"Yes. He and your grandfather were so angry with me. For visiting Jenny, for offering her an abortion. I wasn't surprised by Alan's reaction, but your father's stunned me. I was just numb after that. That he'd throw me away for trying to help his sister? He didn't see it that way. Alan especially didn't see it that way."

"So you bargained with him. Told him you'd tell the world about Jenny's pregnancy."

"I did. He tried to buy me off with cash, but my divorce lawyer told me that I'd already get half of your father's money. I knew I'd be okay there. I bargained with him for you."

She said "you" so fiercely that Sage could actually see his mother as she'd been all those years ago. "Thank you."

Her eyes grew shiny. "I wish I could have done more, but like I said, Alan came prepared. If he'd taken those doctored photos of me to court, I would have lost you entirely."

"He's a bastard," Sage murmured. Alan had been using him to further his own business needs for years. But he hadn't realized how truly ruthless his grandfather could be with family. "He told me that you didn't want me."

"Never true," she said with heat and finality. "Never."

He smiled at her sadly. "I believe you, Mother. I've seen his manipulations firsthand. I thought he'd just gotten worse recently, but it seems that he's been a bastard for a long time. I wish I'd listened to you when I turned eighteen."

"What did he do to you?" she asked, each word laced with fury.

"Nothing." Sage had done enough on his own and he felt…shame. It wasn't an emotion he was accustomed to feeling. "What happened to the baby?"

Lisa lifted her brows, her stubborn expression telling him that she wouldn't let him get away with keeping secrets from her. "She was stillborn. Or so Alan said. It appears that he lied." She pointed to Sage's phone. "Who is she?"

"Her name is Ashley Caulfield and she's twenty-three years old."

Lisa's expression darkened, her cheeks flushing with unhidden rage. "He told Jenny that she had a stillborn child. He told his wife that. What kind of man does that?"

A selfish, cruel bastard. "He didn't want his daughter to fight him over the baby," Sage murmured. "So he told her it was dead. But that in and of itself doesn't seem enough to have sent her to a mental health hospital. Not for all these years."

"I personally think it was more the rape than the supposed stillbirth, but I'm sure both were intertwined. Plus Jenny was never…stable. She had mood swings and depression. I didn't know it for what it was then. I just thought it was normal teenage stuff."

"How long has she been in a psychiatric facility?"

"Since shortly after the birth, so twenty-three years. Your grandfather had her committed after she took some pills. Quite a few pills. She was in a coma for a while and wasn't quite right when she woke up. Duller, was how I thought of her then. She'd always been depressed, but at that point, there didn't seem to be anyone home, if you know what I mean. Her eyes were dead. The last time I saw her, she was so doped up, she didn't even know me."

"You went to see her in the psych hospital?"

"I did, a few times. Until the front desk told me I'd been put on a no-visit list, which made me so angry. It wasn't like I could do anything by then. She didn't even know me. Your grandfather actually filed papers to have my visitation with you revoked, too. I threatened to go to the press with Jenny's whereabouts. He very smugly told me that he'd already released a statement—that Jenny had experimented with drugs and was now basically a walking vegetable. His words, not mine. He'd used it as an impassioned plea for parents to keep their kids away from drugs. He was fundraising off his daughter's suicide attempt. I told him that I knew she'd been raped, and that got a reaction."

Sage went still. "What did he do?"

"He hit me so hard that I fell down. He had to leave the room because it looked like he wanted to hit me again. Your grandmother came in, helped me up. Told me that I shouldn't make him so angry, that he wasn't nice when he was angry."

Sage's mouth fell open. "He hit her, too?"

"I don't know. I'd never seen evidence of it, but it sure seemed like he had. Your grandmother said I should feel lucky that he'd only hit me. After all the cheating I'd done on your dad, I deserved worse. She said she'd seen the pictures and I was a harlot. I…broke. I told her everything, about my visit to see Jenny, about how she said she'd been raped. About how her husband had threatened me with those fake photos. Everything. I hoped she'd at least help her daughter, even if she didn't believe me about the cheating, but that's not what happened. At least I don't think so."

"She had a car accident and died."

Lisa's chuckle was mirthless. "That's what they told everyone. Again, had to keep up that reputation of his. Your grandmother killed herself. Your father blamed me for that, too. Alan had told him that I'd continued to harass Jenny to get back at the family. He said your grandmother was so broken up about Jenny's stillbirth, attempted suicide, and commitment to the psych hospital that she couldn't go on. So she shot herself in the head. Alan called your father and together they covered it up. They put her body in her car and wrecked it. Set it on fire. Bribed an ME to ignore the bullet hole in her head. Your father got drunk one night when he came to pick you up after one of my visitations and he told me everything. But I had no hard proof. If I had, I would have filed for full custody of you."

Sage flinched, thinking of Medford Hughes, of the gun found in his hand after he'd been murdered. He wondered if his grandmother really had killed herself or if Alan had killed her because she'd known about Jenny's rape.

And there was still the question of Cora Winslow's involvement. And the ominous-sounding meeting with his grandfather back in New Orleans. Sage needed to be getting back.

"I have to go, Mother. I have a meeting with Alan."

"My offer to send you to Spain still stands."

"Or Singapore or Australia." He'd meant his words to sound light, but they came out far too serious. "Thank you. I'll call you soon."

The Garden District, New Orleans, Louisiana

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 16, 9:00 A.M.

Cora stretched, sore in all the right places. She'd been right. Phin definitely knew what he was doing in bed.

But he hadn't stayed in her bed after his nightmare. She'd slept, but only fitfully. Every time she'd woken, he'd been sitting in the chair next to her bed, SodaPop at his feet.

He was gone now, the blanket he'd used neatly folded on the chair. She wished she could have woken with him, but she understood.

She checked her phone for any messages, hoping to see one from Tandy, but was unsurprised when there was nothing. She didn't expect Tandy to apologize for her anger. Cora knew what her friend was feeling.

Patrick had been like a father to Cora, too, and she still didn't believe he could have killed her father or hurt children. Not deep down.

But there were an awful lot of facts that pointed to the suspicions being true.

The pleasant buzz with which she'd woken was gone. Dammit.

She paged through her notifications. She'd missed a call from Harry late last night, right about the time they'd found the necklace, and she hadn't been interested in her phone after that. She'd call him back after breakfast.

She also had an email from the head of the regional libraries, expressing condolences for the loss of Minnie.

Cora didn't want think about her old boss right now. She hoped Minnie hadn't felt any pain.

She blinked tears away, determined to think about something else. Something productive. Something to keep herself busy.

Phin was right. Keeping oneself busy helped.

She thought about Phin and some of the tightness in her chest eased, making it possible to breathe again. He was one of the good things to have come of this whole fiasco. Phin and all the people he came with—Burke and Molly, Antoine and Val. Stone and Delores.

So get busy. She opened a browser window and typed how to start a group home for homeless vets . Her eyes gravitated to a link that explained how to provide transitional housing for military veterans.

This was exactly what she needed to know. Number one: choose a property. Check. Number two: permits and licenses.

This was the paperwork phase. Chasing down permits would certainly be one way to keep herself busy.

The aroma of coffee got her attention and she swung her legs over the side of the bed. She'd bookmark this website and work on it in between searching the attic and whatever else Burke had planned for the day.

She found Phin at her stove, frying eggs. SodaPop sat to one side, watching Phin work. Cora couldn't blame the pup. She liked to watch Phin work, too.

Molly sat at the kitchen table, looking at her phone. Blue lay on his bed by the kitchen door. Having people in the house again was nice.

"Good morning," Molly said, giving her a quick up-and-down appraisal. "You look rested."

Cora felt her cheeks heat even though Molly hadn't said the words with any hint of double meaning. Of course she knows. That she and Phin had kept their activities secret was too much to hope for when there were alert bodyguards in the house.

Cora went straight to the coffeepot, bumping her shoulder into Phin's biceps. "Thank you for making breakfast."

His smile was easy. "It won't hold a candle to what you cooked yesterday, but it's food."

She was smiling up at him when her cell phone buzzed with an incoming call. She checked her screen and went still. "It's Harry."

Phin frowned. "What does he want?"

"I won't know if I don't answer it."

Molly patted the table. "Put it on speaker. We'll be quiet."

Cora obeyed, sitting next to Phin, who'd taken the eggs off the stove. "Good morning, Harry," she answered.

"Cora, I'm so glad to hear your voice. I've been worried."

Phin scowled. "Not enough to check on you sooner," he mouthed.

"I'm okay, Harry. I told you that on Tuesday. I have to say that I figured you'd be hovering over me, though." He hadn't called back and that was odd.

"I had to go to Shreveport. My sister took a fall and I just got home late last night."

"Is Henrietta okay?" Cora asked.

"She will be. She has a broken ankle. I brought her to my house and she's resting. I'm sorry I didn't call sooner. I drove by your house last night on my way home to check on you. I noticed a number of cars parked at your house and lights on in the attic. I called you but you didn't answer, so I called that detective we spoke with on Tuesday and he said that there was nothing to worry about. But I woke up with a bad feeling. What's happening, Cora? Are you all right? Say ‘pralines' if you need me to call 911."

Molly smirked.

Phin rolled his eyes.

Cora just smiled. "I'm fine, Harry. I hired a PI firm to help me find out what happened with my father."

"That same PI firm you were visiting on Tuesday morning?"

"The same. They're good people, Harry."

"Why were you in the attic?" Harry persisted, sounding suspicious.

Molly turned her tablet around. She'd written Ask him to come over. One hour.

Cora nodded. "It's a long story. Can you come over this morning? Say in an hour? I'll tell you everything."

"Now I'm too curious to say no," Harry grumbled. "I'll be there in an hour."

"Do you have someone to stay with Henrietta?" Cora asked.

"My neighbor is here."

Cora grinned. "Miss Barbara?"

Harry cleared his throat. "Yes, Cora. Miss Barbara is here. She made breakfast for us."

"And dinner last night?" Cora teased.

"Cora Jane."

"Well, did she?"

Harry sighed. "Yes. She did. Are you happy now?"

Cora grinned. "You sly dog, Harry." This man was not guilty of anything. She was sure of it.

"Yes, well. I'll see you in one hour, Cora Jane."

She ended the call and looked at Molly. "Burke and Antoine are coming, I take it?"

"No. Burke's on his way to Houma to check out the shops around the Damper Building to see who was there back in the day. Antoine's back in the office. Said to record our conversation with Harry so he could hear it later."

Cora thought about Antoine, working with his headphones. Falling asleep wearing them, like he had on Tuesday when Joy had been shot.

"Will he be safe there?"

Molly nodded. "Lucien is back from a job. He's one of our other guys you haven't met yet, so Antoine won't be completely alone."

Phin put their breakfast plates in front of them. "Who is Miss Barbara?"

"Harry's neighbor. They've been doing a courting dance since I was in college at least."

"After your mother died," Phin said.

Getting his meaning, Cora nodded as she dug into her breakfast. "A few years after, yes. I guess he went on with his life. I'm glad. He shouldn't have been pining for Mama forever. Not like Mama did for my father."

"I brought down that box of your mother's things from the attic. The gifts from your father that she kept. I thought you might want to put them on one of the knickknack shelves in the living room, now that you know he didn't just leave you."

What a sweet man. "I'm still angry with him, but I suppose I won't be forever. When I'm not, I'll put them up where I can look at them and remember my parents."

Phin pointed to a box on one of the other kitchen chairs. "There's the box of photo albums you asked me to bring down."

Cora leaned over to kiss his cheek, smiling when he blushed. "Thank you."

"You two are making me ill," Molly groused, but she was smiling, too. "So tell me about these pearls you found."

"Burke took them with him last night," Cora said. "He put them in his home safe since I don't have one and people seem to keep breaking in."

"We let Vincent Ray break in," Phin said defensively.

Cora patted his hand. "I know. But I don't have a safe and if we all leave the house unattended, someone might get in that we don't want to let in."

"Fine, fine, whatever," Molly said. "What about the pearls?"

"They're pearls," Phin said with a shrug. "Pretty ones."

Cora laughed. "They're natural South Sea pearls set in a five-strand necklace with a diamond and emerald clasp and well over a hundred years old. I'm going to have them appraised and then I'll know more."

"Sounds like you know your pearls," Molly commented, pushing her empty plate aside. "But I figured you would since you wear those all the time."

Cora ran a finger over the pearls she wore. "They were my grandmother's. She wore them every day of her life, a wedding gift from my grandfather. They're probably worth a set of new kitchen appliances. I've tried to sell them a few times, but I've never been able to go through with it."

"I get that," Molly said. "Now I'm wondering what other treasure is just lying around this house."

"You can come help me hunt for fun when all of this is over," Cora offered.

Molly refilled their coffee cups. "I just might."

"You and Delores," Phin said. He gathered their plates and put them in the sink. "She was so excited about those pearls last night. Stone said she chattered about them all the way back to my house. He wants me to make a piece of furniture for their house and put a hidden compartment in it so he can hide things for her to find."

"They are a cute couple," Cora said. "I'm glad you've had them."

Phin lifted the box of photo albums onto the table. "Me too. We've got some time before Harry gets here. Let's take a crack at these albums."

Cora sighed. "Okay."

Phin tilted his head. "You don't want to?"

"It's just…seeing pictures of my parents together is hard. But I need to do it." She pulled a stack of the albums from the box. "Some of these are newer, after my father disappeared, so I'll look at them last." She frowned at the album with the photo of her parents inset on the cover. They smiled indulgently at something not in camera range.

"I wonder what they're looking at," Molly said.

"Me. That's what my father said, anyway. I remember sitting on his lap and looking at this album. It was his favorite, just photos of me and Mama and John Robert. ‘Just us,' he'd say."

"Just us?" Phin asked.

Just us. She'd nearly forgotten the words her father had said so often. "This house is a Winslow house. It's filled with portraits and furniture and things that are Winslow things. My father loved this album because it was just us. Me and Mama and John Robert. No Winslows. He used to say that. ‘Just us. No Winslows.'?"

"He didn't like being part of the family?" Phin asked.

Cora ran a finger over the album. "I don't know. He loved us. I remember that. That's why him leaving was so hard to accept. I remember Grandmother telling Mama that she should throw these albums away. Mama promised she would when she was ready." Cora looked at the photo of her parents looking so happy together. "I guess she never was ready."

She opened the album to the first two pages, covered in pictures of her as a newborn with a lot of red hair. Her mother was in about half of the pictures, holding her with a big smile.

"You were a pretty baby," Phin said quietly, and she smiled at him.

"Thank you." She flipped to the next page and the next, a thought entering her mind as she noted that so many of the photos had been taken somewhere other than this house. "I don't think that he liked it here. In the house, I mean. Not New Orleans. He loved New Orleans."

"Why don't you think that he liked this house?" Molly asked.

"He loved to go other places, stay in hotels with us. I remember having Christmas morning at the Roosevelt Hotel in the Quarter when I was four. It was the last Christmas before he disappeared."

"Why?" Phin asked.

"They do such beautiful decorations there. That's what my mama said when I looked through the albums after he was gone, before she put them away. My grandmother…she didn't agree. She said that he was too proud for his own good and that she hoped his new wife would support him in the same fashion that my mama had." Cora winced at the memory, adulthood giving her a different perspective. "My father worked. But he hadn't come from money. Not that we had a lot by then, but we did have the house. And the Winslow name. That still meant something when I was younger. My grandmother was a good woman, but a little preoccupied with position. She'd always tell Mama that she dodged a bullet with ‘that Jack Elliot.' That she'd known he'd be a bad fit. That was when Mama would get depressed and cry. I think that he didn't take any of these photos of us when he left really hurt her. It was like he left and never looked back."

Because he'd been dead. All this time.

"Your father didn't feel like he belonged here," Phin murmured. "Do you think he had plans to leave and take you all away from here?"

"Maybe. Maybe that was the purpose of the Swiss bank account. We might never know."

"Harry might know," Molly said.

"I'll ask him when he gets here."

Cora went back to the first page and flipped through the photos again. Her father had loved this album. If he'd left behind any message for her mother, it could be here.

The photos were held in place by corner mounts, not glued to the paper, thank goodness. Glue would seep through, destroying the pictures. These photos were still crisp.

I wonder…

Using her phone, she snapped a photo of the first page, aware that both Phin and Molly watched her curiously.

"I want to put them back in the right order," Cora explained before removing the first photo on the page and turning it over. "It's an archivist thing."

Sigh. There was nothing written on the back other than the date, written on a carefully cut piece of paper, the top attached to the photo with a small piece of tape. She wondered why he hadn't just written on the photo itself. "My father's handwriting."

"He made the album?" Phin asked.

"He did." Cora removed the other three photos on the page. They were the same—dates written on those carefully cut pieces of paper. Disappointed, she replaced the pictures, making sure they went back in the right places.

Molly and Phin continued to watch, saying nothing as Cora snapped a photo of the second page and removed those four photos.

She put them face down on the album page, looking at their backs. Again, all four had dates written on them in her father's scrawl. But one of the photos—the one of her mother holding her as a newborn—had something else written below it, the characters a brown color versus the black ink used to write the dates.

Cora leaned in to look more closely and gasped. "Oh my God. I think I found it." She turned the photo around so that they could see. "All those Nancy Drew books came in handy. Lemon juice. Look."

"Holy shit, Cora," Molly crowed. "You found it!"

"Mama used to write us notes in lemon juice. Looking back, she probably shouldn't have let us play with matches to read the secret messages. Luckily, we had the sprinklers. For John Robert and me, it was like a secret adventure. She once told me that my father had written her secret notes in lemon juice. I wonder if she kept them."

Phin was grinning. "Over time, and in the attic during the summer, it was warm enough to activate the lemon juice. What does it say?"

"It's numbers. A string of eight numbers. No letters." She read them aloud, and Molly wrote them down. "What does it mean, though?"

Phin shrugged. "Your dad used a code so that your mother could open the Word document on his computer to find the Swiss bank account number. Maybe this is a code, too."

Molly was frowning. "Seems a little subtle to me. Even if she thought he hadn't left her, would she have thought to look for clues or codes?"

"I don't know. Maybe he left her a letter telling her to look. Maybe we just haven't found it yet."

"Let's come back to that once we know if we have anything," Phin said wisely. "Do any of the other photos have secret messages on the back?"

Cora's heart raced at the very thought. "Let's find out."

"I'm texting the others," Molly said. "Burke can't get back, but Antoine and Val need to get over here."

"I'm texting Stone and Delores, too," Phin said. "If this is a real thing, it's going to make their day."

Cora wanted to rip all the photos from the album, but she forced herself to be methodical, taking pictures of each page before removing the photos and examining their backs.

Not every page had a photo with a string of numbers. And not every photo had only numbers. Two had combinations of letters and numbers.

"Twenty," she said finally, when they'd looked through the entire album. "Eighteen with single letters or numbers and two with letter/number combos."

She looked at the people sitting around her table. Time had flown by as she'd worked, the others joining them one by one. By then Antoine, Val, Stone, and Delores had joined them. Burke had been halfway to Houma by the time Molly had texted him, but he listened in by cell phone.

"What do we do with this?" Cora asked.

Antoine was frowning at the list. "The two with letter and number combos are some kind of password."

Hope surged and Cora barely kept her voice level. "To get into the hard drive?"

"Maybe." Antoine still frowned. "I can use it to get into the drive, but I probably won't be able to decrypt whatever's stored there without the encryption password. That could be what the eighteen single characters are—an encryption password. The problem is, we don't know what order the characters go in. They're all mixed together. There are too many combinations."

Delores waved to Antoine's three laptops. "You can't just set them up and make your computers…y'know, figure it out?"

Antoine made a face. "I can, but it will take a while. I don't know how long. Could be hours or even days. I won't know until I get there."

Cora understood the dilemma and it was daunting. "I helped a kid with a problem like this once. It's a statistical thing. Eighteen combinations of individual characters? It would be a lot. Trillions."

"Six quadrillion," Val corrected, looking up from her phone. She turned it around and there were so many numbers that Cora's eyes crossed.

"Shit," Burke drawled through the speakerphone. "There has to be a way to know the correct order."

Phin made a humming noise as he studied the photos on the table. "Twenty pictures."

Cora turned to him. "What are you thinking?"

His eyes were dark and intense, sending a shiver down her spine. "I'm thinking about that bag of twenty-sided dice you keep in your nightstand drawer," he said.

"Nightstand drawer?" Stone asked, brows high. "Why were you in her nightstand drawer?"

Cora blushed as Delores elbowed her husband. "Hush, Stone. Cora, why do you keep a bag of twenty-sided dice in your drawer?"

"They were my mother's. She and my father played D&D in college and she taught John Robert and me how to play. It was our Friday night family thing. We played games and did puzzles."

Phin was nodding. "And each side of a D&D die is numbered one through twenty."

Cora assessed the photos on the table. Each one was familiar. Each one she'd loved to look at, once upon a time when she'd sat on her father's knee at his desk. But not in this album.

She looked up at Phin, her heart beginning to race. "The custom-made twenty-sided photo cube up in the attic."

"It's not a cube if it's twenty sides," Antoine said.

"Antoine," Molly hissed at him.

"What do you mean?" Phin asked, ignoring Antoine and Molly.

"All of these photos are on that cube. If my father marked even one of the photos on the cube with a number, we can figure the rest of the order from the dice."

Phin grinned. "I think you found the key, Cora."

"Where is the photo cube, Cora?" Stone asked, not even bothering to hide his impatience.

"In the attic. Hold on." Cora ran up the stairs, Val and Phin close behind her.

"Dammit, Cora," Val gritted out. "I'm on duty. Let me go in first."

"Sorry," Cora said as she made it to the top floor and burst into the attic. She exhaled with relief, half expecting the room to have been ransacked or burned. But it was just as they'd left it.

She went to the box by the window seat that had the special photo…thing. "Found it. It's an icosahedron," she muttered, the word suddenly coming to mind. "I know it's not a cube, Antoine."

Phin laughed. "I'm not sure if I want to know how you knew that, but good for you. Come on. Let's see what Antoine can do with this."

Then the doorbell rang.

Phin looked down from the window to the front porch and muttered a curse. "Harry's here."

"Dammit." Cora had forgotten all about him. "Val, can Molly and Antoine clean off the table? You and Phin and I can keep him busy in the foyer until it's safe to bring him into the kitchen. See, I know that I need to have you with me to do your bodyguard stuff."

Patting her shoulder, Val took possession of the photo icosahedron before heading down the stairs. "I'll give this to Antoine."

Phin made an unhappy sound. "Looks like we'll need to wait a little longer to explore what your father hid on that hard drive."

She was impatient, too, but Harry might have more answers. "Be nice to Harry, okay?"

"I reserve the right to continue disliking him for leaving you alone on the street on Tuesday."

She pulled his face down for a light peck on his lips. "I wasn't alone. You were there."

He smiled down at her. "Yes, I was."