“Oh, he did. The only problem is that he didn’t keep it in the account. When he closed it out, he took one hundred and fifty thousand dollars out of the bank.”
“Where did he deposit it after that?” I asked. “I’m just asking for Maddy’s sake.”
“As far as we can tell, he didn’t stick it anywhere. For some odd reason, he took it all in cash. When he walked out of the bank, he had enough money on him to make some folks think of murder. It was a dangerous stunt to pull, no matter what his reasoning was, and it might just have been what ended up getting him killed.”
Chief Hurley yawned and then said, “Keep that under your hat until tomorrow, okay? Somehow a reporter from Charlotte found out about it, and it’s going to be in the paper tomorrow morning. Check that. It’s after midnight. It’ll be in today’s paper. Tell Maddy I’m sorry. I’m afraid she’s not getting anything out of Grant’s estate, but I heard that she was named in the mother’s will, so she won’t come away from all of this empty-handed, at least not unless Rebecca finds a way to cheat her out of her share. Tell her to keep an eye on that woman. I don’t know what it is about her, but I’m not sure that I trust her.”
I hung up and then turned to my sister. “Maddy, was Grant a hoarder?”
“You mean like those people I see on television sometimes?”
“No, I mean like someone who would take a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in cash out of the bank and hide it somewhere.”
She thought about it for a handful of seconds and then said, “You know, I can totally see that. He never completely trusted banks, and it was nothing to find him with five grand on him as walking-around money, like he used to call it.”
“Well, I don’t know how he got his hands on a hundred and fifty grand, but nobody knows where it is at the moment.”
“Does the chief think he might have been murdered for it?” Maddy asked.
“He thinks it’s a possibility, and so do I,” I said. “That kind of cash, being untraceable and all, would make him a pretty tempting target for an unscrupulous thief.”
“It hurts just thinking about him being killed for his cash,” Maddy said. “What if the chief is wrong, though?”
“It’s always a possibility. Why? What are you thinking?”
“Eleanor, what if the money is still out there somewhere, just waiting for someone to figure out where it is and take it?”
“What are you suggesting, Maddy? That we go off on some kind of scavenger hunt? I thought we were searching for Grant’s killer, not his cash.”
“Of course we are, but if we happen to stumble across the money while we’re hunting down a murderer, what are we going to do with it?”
“I’ve run into something like that before,” I said, “and I’ll do now what I did then. I’ll turn it over to Chief Hurley and let him sort it all out. I haven’t missed a night’s sleep because of it, and I’m not about to do anything stupid to risk that now. Are we agreed?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “It is a lot of money, though, isn’t it?”
“And that’s why there’s even more reason to turn it in,” I said. “We don’t want someone coming after us for it, do we?”
“No, thanks. The two of us have enough problems as it is without adding any more to the mix.” She gathered the papers up and then looked at me. “What should we do with these now that we’re finished with them? I doubt we’re going to get anything else out of them.”
“Let’s just store them here for now,” I said as I lifted up a cushion on the bench of the dining nook. The builders had installed storage areas all over the cottage, and I loved the stowing capacity my little Craftsman-style bungalow had. “When this mess is all over, we can safely get rid of them all, but for the moment, I’d feel better having them nearby, in case we missed something the first few times we looked at them.”
Maddy yawned and then said, “I hate to be a party pooper, but I’m really beat. Do you mind if I go on to bed?”
I couldn’t remember the last time my sister called it a night before I did, but I wasn’t about to crow about it. We’d both had a tough time during the last day and change, but she had the added emotional stress of having her ex-husband murdered near where she lived and worked. It would have been nearly too much for anyone to take, and though Maddy often put on a brave face for the world, I knew that my sister was still feeling the impact of Grant’s murder.
“I’m beat myself. I’ll see you in the morning, Sis,” I said as I double-checked every door and window to be certain we were safely locked in.