Hearts of Sand(98)

“But she didn’t kill him,” Gregor said. “You did.”

“I just grabbed the wheel,” Hope said. “We were driving, and we were going faster and faster, and Tim was completely furious about it, telling Marty to stop and slow down and all that kind of thing. But Marty wasn’t slowing down, and we came around Clapboard Ridge on the curve there and I thought if I could just make myself do it, if I could just make myself move for once, we’d all be dead and it wouldn’t matter anymore.”

“You did expect you’d all be dead?” Gregor asked.

“It seemed like the most likely thing,” Hope said. “We were going very, very fast—crazy fast—and I was right there on the seat next to him and I leaned over and grabbed the wheel and just pulled at it. I pulled and the car just spun off the road. We did a complete circle, like some kind of carnival ride. And we spun and we spun and then we hit a tree, but we did it kind of sideways, not head-on. And then I heard the smash and I looked up and for one second Marty was just there, and then his head exploded. It did. It just blew up.”

“Jesus Christ,” Jason Battlesea said.

“I think I must have passed out,” Hope said. “I thought we were all going to be dead. And then we weren’t. Then only Marty was dead, and Kyle and I had bruises, and I think Kyle had minor broken bones in his arm, and everybody in the back was all right. And there we were. And everybody was saying it was an accident, and blaming it all on Marty, and I didn’t see any reason not to let them.”

“But other people had seen what you’d done,” Gregor said.

Hope nodded. “Kyle had seen it but he didn’t say anything then,” she said. “He was on the other side of me, so I knew he had to have seen it. I didn’t realize Chapin had seen it until later. After Marty’s funeral, I mean. Just before she ran away. She came here after the funeral, really late at night, and my mother—you would have to have known my mother. This was Chapin Waring coming to the house. My mother would never have believed that a Waring could do something really wrong. Chapin came and we went upstairs to my room to talk and then she just sort of laid it all out. She said she’d been sitting in the middle in the back and she’d seen everything I’d done, even if Tim and Virginia hadn’t, and she could call the police right that second and I’d go to jail for murder. My whole life would be ruined. I wouldn’t be able to go back to college. I wouldn’t even be able to stay in Alwych, because everybody would know I’d killed him and they’d hate me for it. And I thought that that was true. Almost everybody liked Marty more than they liked me.”

“And that,” Gregor said, “is when she asked you to hide the money.”

“This house was searched,” Jason Battlesea said. “It was searched by the local police and it was searched by Federal agents. Granted, it was before my time, but are you really trying to tell me that two sets of law enforcement officers couldn’t find a stash of over two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash in a house this size?”

Hope looked contemptuous. “They came in and searched,” she said, “but they searched like it was an ordinary house. I was afraid when they first came, because I thought they’d find it, too, but they never got near it. I don’t think it ever even occurred to them.”

“What didn’t occur to them?” Jason Battlesea said. “How isn’t this an ordinary house?”

“In the seventeenth century, most people here didn’t have access to banks as we know them,” Gregor said. “A lot of people didn’t think the banks they did have access to were safe. It wasn’t unusual for people to build into their houses some kind of hiding place to keep money and other valuables in.”

“They’d have found it,” Jason Battlesea said.

Hope got up off her chair and went to the fireplace. The mantel was made of a thick plank. The surround was made of what seemed like the same wood, but polished.

Hope fiddled with a space just to the left of the surround itself. A big hunk of wood came off all at once. She put the hunk of wood on the floor and reached into the opening. Her arm went in all the way up to her shoulder, and when it came out she was holding a bound stack of one-hundred-dollar bills.

She put them on the floor in front of her and looked around, at nothing. Then she went back to her chair and sat down again.

“It never even occurred to them,” she said again. “They didn’t even ask. Maybe they didn’t really take me seriously. By then everybody knew it was Marty and Chapin who had done the robberies anyway.”