Page 31 of Thicker Than Water
We navigate to the back left corner, where Maeve told us the boneyard would be, and it’s exactly as she described it. Clunky desks sit under ancient desktop computers. Aluminum ladders are wedged against file cabinets. A printer squats beside machines I can’t even identify, each of them tagged with “Out of service, do not use.”
“This must be it,” Sienna says, pointing to a particularly large piece of equipment. “Long metal box: check. Giant spool: check.” Sienna crouches in front of it, trying to remove the lid as if it were the top of a sarcophagus. And it is like a coffin, the size of the box. I brace myself for the moment it opens, as if something dead lies inside.
“It’s screwed on,” Sienna says. She looks up at me. “Do you have a screwdriver in your purse?”
“Is that a real question?”
“I don’t know, you’re a mom. You have all kinds of things in there.”
“Yeah, like tissues and Tylenol. Nottools.”
“Ugh, so unprepared. Fine. I’ll try to do it with my keys, but can you see if there’s one lying around?”
I spin from the boneyard, examining the floor as if loose tools will be littered there. Then I circle the rows of supplies until my eyes latch onto a rusty toolbox on a metal shelf. I pull out the first Phillips-head I find.
“Here,” I say when I thrust it at Sienna.
“Thanks.” She drops her keys, and as she works at the screws with the correct tool, I wander far enough away so I can watch all the doors at once—the one we came through, the one that connects to the office, and the loading door where trucks pull up. Even though Maeve assured us we’d be alone here, my heart rate spikes as I imagine tires on gravel, the beep of a truck reversing, the pop and slide of a door suddenly opening. I focus on breathing to steady myself, the warehouse’s air sharp in my nose.
I’ve never been here before, but the smell is so familiar. It transports me to my early days with Jason, back when he had just joined the crew and I was still getting used to it all—loving him, caring for Aiden, being a wife and mother at only twenty-three. Every evening, Jason would come home with this same warehouse scent on his clothes, a strange mixture of mustiness and burnt cookies. As I hugged him hello, my own clothes stained with Aiden’s spit-up, I’d make a show of holding my nose, and Jason would tear off his T-shirt, then chase me around the room, as if the dirty cotton were a net he would catch me with. Inevitably, I’d melt into laughter, and Jason would wrap his shirt around me, roaring with delight.
It’s been a while since Jason and I greeted each other playfully. Over time, he’s taken to squeezing my shoulder as he passes me in the kitchen, my hands busy with whatever I’m cooking, and in return, I mime a kiss in his direction. These last few months, it’s been even less. When he isn’t talking up the promotion, he’s cautious around me. He walks through the door and only waves hello, as if I’m on a phone call he shouldn’t interrupt. I could ask for more, set aside the vegetables I’m chopping and wrap my arms around his waist, but I haven’t known how to be close to him, his betrayal still a phantom space between us I can’t bring myself to cross.
“Jules, come here!” Sienna calls, and I return to her at the gutter machine, where she’s cupping a palmful of screws. She sets them down, then attempts to lift the lid again. This time, it actually budges. “Here, help me,” she urges, and I hold back a sigh before grabbing the opposite end. Together, we place it on the floor, then step forward to stare into the cavity we’ve exposed.
“Shoeboxes?” I ask. There are seven in total, and as Sienna reaches in and opens one up, I think at first that there’s really going to be shoes inside. Beige paper conceals the contents, just like they do in stores. Sienna peels back the paper, and even though Maeve mentioned this on the phone, we both gasp.
Bundles of cash, held together with rubber bands.
It looks like a shot from a movie, one Sienna and I might stumble upon as we scroll through our options on TV, one where nefarious people do nefarious deeds and the pile of cash is the first damning clue. I blink at the shoebox, as if doing so might switch the channel, but the scene remains unchanged.
Sienna opens the other boxes, too, careless with the lids. It’s all the same, down to the color of the bands that keep the stacks neatly in place—and Ben Franklin’s face, over and over and over. There must be tens of thousands of dollars here.
“I—I don’t get it,” I say. “Why is thishere, in this… defunct machine of all places?”
Sienna sits back on her heels, forehead scrunched in thought. “Well,” she says, “he’s obviously doing something illegal. Maybe he’s… pulling aBreaking Bad? Selling drugs? Using Integrity Plus as a front? I don’t know. But this is a pretty brilliant hiding spot.”
“Brilliant?” It’s an odd word forsomething illegal.
“Think about it: if the cops ever caught wind of what he was up to, they’d search his home, his office, maybe even the warehouse, but they wouldn’t think to unscrew a broken machine, sitting among all these heaps of junk, and check for mounds of cash inside it. They’d look for safes, right? False panels in the wall, that kind of thing. But he’s been hiding it under everyone’s noses.”
“You sound impressed,” I say.
“Not impressed. Excited.” Sienna picks up a stack, flicks through it with her thumb. “Someone might have killed Gavin for this money. Someone who’snotJason, obviously.”
A chill curls around my spine, but before I can even shiver, I notice something else in the gutter machine, standing flush against one of its sides.
“What’s that?” I ask, pointing.
“Ooh, good catch.” Sienna reaches in and extracts the object—a leather notebook.
She holds it out with flattened palms, expression almost reverent. “How great would it be,” she says, “if this was, like, a journal confessing to all his dirty secrets? And somewhere in here it’s like:hey, if I’m ever murdered, look into Dick Dickerson, or whatever.”
Her laughter bounces around the warehouse, and I fight the urge to clamp a hand over her mouth. I shush her instead, then listen for footsteps or doors.
“No one’s here,” she insists.
As she opens the notebook to its first page, I hover over her, struggling to read the bulky handwriting. It’s not a journal. Not in the traditional sense, anyway; there’s nothing narrative about it at all. There are four columns: one for dates, one for names, and two for dollar amounts—one labeledPrice, the otherCash.
