Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (21 page)

“You did fine.” I turned to Trey. “Slow, but don’t pull in.” He eased past Jut Road. We saw no sign of a vehicle. Trey drove a quarter mile while I looked at the river to my left. Finally I said stop, pointed. “See that clump? Three dead birches? Keep watch for us here, just in case things turn to shit.”

“Good call,” Randall said. “It wouldn’t take but two minutes to float down here, and there are plenty of branches to grab for.”

Trey nodded, turned the Dodge around, idled back to Jut Road, stopped.

While Randall cleared the trunk, I recapped Trey’s job. I watched him close while I did it, making sure he wasn’t jittery. We’d figured it wasn’t safe to have a car here: The lady who called the cops yesterday when she saw an SUV had proved that. So Trey would cruise up and down the road, staying nearby and we’d call when we needed him. He would buzz my cell if he saw anything sketchy.

I climbed out, thumped the roof, watched the Dodge pull off. Randall asked if Trey was okay. I said yes, then led the way.

The Souhegan was running high and fast, runoff jacked up a notch by the warm spell.

In two minutes, we dumped gear at the riverbank and I pulled on the fisherman’s waders we’d bought. Randall took off his shoe and his ankle—I never got used to that—and began working his way into a royal-blue wet suit. The sporting-goods place hadn’t had one big enough for me, so I was stuck with the waders.

I hate fishing in general. I especially hate waders.

After Randall zipped the wet suit, he tied a knot in its right ankle—to keep it out of the way, I guessed. I eyeballed it. “You sure that’ll work?”

“It has to,” he said, shrugging. “I’m not larking around in some freezing river wearing my hundred-thousand-dollar prosthetic.” He sat, pulled an air pump and a pack of D batteries from a bag, and installed the batteries. Then, from the same bag, he pulled the smallest inflatable boat the sporting-goods shop had. It was more of a heavy-duty pool toy, really—circular, three feet across. The guy at the store said kids climb in them and get pulled around by boats—water-skiing for people who can’t water-ski.

The pump made a racket, but in three minutes the boat was inflated. While Randall loaded it with tools, I took my cordless drill and fifty feet of climbing rope to the waterline.

I was clumsy in the boots. Just wearing them on land felt like walking through Jell-O. I worked my way west until I was beneath the shack, in a spot where the drop-off wasn’t as sudden. Trying not to think about what happened here yesterday, I stepped into the river.

Once I stopped worrying about falling in, it was easy to move around in two and a half feet of water. Funny feeling, wading boots: You’re not cold, exactly, but you never forget how near the cold is.

Yesterday I hadn’t looked hard at the underside of the shack. Now I did. It had been built on two-by-ten ribs that ran perpendicular to the river. The five ribs were stout, the kind of lumber you can’t get anymore. Along with the rebuilt piers, they explained why the shack still stood.

The important thing right now was that the strong ribs would hold the rigging I wanted to set up. I used a half-inch bit to drill a bunch of holes, ran rope through the holes, then tied off the rope.

Randall said, “Catch.”

I looked up the slope and saw he was getting set to release our little rubber boat. I nodded. He let go. The boat slipped down the steep bank. Top-heavy with gear, it wanted to overturn when I stopped it, but I managed to keep everything dry. Randall ass-slid down behind the boat and looked over the rope rigging. “’T’will serve,” he said.

“Fucking A it t’will.”

Randall looked at the piers eight feet away. “You sure those things have been fixed up? They look grungy to me.”

“That just means whoever rebuilt them did his work well. Get closer.” I realized it was kind of nice down here if you weren’t drowning. It was cooled by shade and river water, and there was enough of a breeze to keep bugs away.

Randall grabbed a handful of rope as a safety line and hopped into the Souhegan, just like that. I saw the current hit him, saw him counterbalance. Two hops later he was swimming. He made it to the northwest pier, the same one I’d about died at, in maybe six seconds. He was a natural athlete. Must’ve been something when he had two feet.

He turned and looked at me, silently rubbing it in.

Then he turned again to check out the pier. He looked it over and nodded. “Okay, from here I see it,” he said, raising his voice above the river rush. He pushed off the pier with one leg, swam a few strokes, and was sitting on the riverbank a few seconds later.

By then I was checking out the underside of the shack.

“What are you looking for?” Randall said.

“Not sure.” But I kept looking.

The shack had been built long before plywood existed. The flooring, six-inch-wide planks set across the supporting ribs, ran the same direction as the river. The age-gray planks had tiny flakes of paint—orange or brick red, hard to tell—clinging here and there. When I stuck a thumbnail in them, they were a little mushy but basically sound.

I froze, thought, looked again. I stepped back, made a sloppy measurement with my hand-span, stepped back under, and measured again.

“If I had a dictionary with me and I looked up
shit-eating grin,
” Randall said, “I do believe I would find a picture of you as you look right now.”

“Wait here.”

I pistoned up the slope, walking in slow-motion due to the waders. Stepped across the clay drive and into the woods, looking for the remains of the main house. When they started Phigg’s dream house, the contractors had regraded heavily to fight flooding, so it took me a while to find what I was looking for. I bashed through the woods until I found remnants of a brick foundation, then hit my knees and cleared leaves, moss, dirt.

Finally I found it: a plank, six inches wide. I rubbed dirt from it, held it up, squinted.

And saw paint flakes. Burnt orange, maybe brick red.

I ran back and butt-slid down the slope so fast I was up to my knees in water before I got myself stopped.

Randall said, “What?”

I pointed. First at the plank in my hand, then at the shack floorboard.

Randall tried. He looked back and forth. Then again. Then he gave up, looked his question at me.

“You don’t paint the underside of a pump house floor,” I said, and pointed again—at paint flakes this time.

Randall said, “False floor.”

“Want to hand me that pry bar?” I said.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Two and a half hours later we were hot, waders and wet suit long removed, shirts peeled off. Trey had backed the Dodge to the edge of the drop; he stood next to the car’s open trunk. “You want me to come down there and help?”

I craned my neck to look at him. “Stay. We’ll do a bucket brigade.”

I pulled out my multi-tool, cut down the climbing rope, and gathered gear. Randall was wedging bogus floorboards back in place. He wrist-wiped sweat from his forehead and looked over his work to make sure he hadn’t missed anything. “What an absolutely ingenious setup,” he said.

It was. The southernmost section of floorboards, the downriver side, had been cut where they rested on a rib, so you couldn’t see the cut from below. We’d poked around fifteen minutes before we figured out the rib had been rigged to pivot. To make that happen, we had to pound out a couple of dowels way over on the outboard side of the shack, where the fast water was over my head. Phigg must’ve figured nobody would ever get to those dowels without scaffolding. He was almost right: Randall had barely reached them by setting his good foot in our rope rigging and stretching. I’d worried he’d fall backward and whip downriver.

He hadn’t. When he’d popped the second dowel out, the far end of the rib had pivoted eight inches, enough for us to see where the bogus planks had been added. A four-foot-square section had been glued and screwed together. It fit so well Randall and I both had to lean on a cat’s paw to pop it out.

Once it was out, you could see why Phigg had rigged it this way: The false floor was low enough so that the real one sagged and squeaked the way a hundred-year-old floor should.

It was a hell of a hidey-hole.

And a well-packed one.

We hadn’t told Trey yet. I wanted to eyeball his reaction. He stood next to his trunk, trying to be cool but knowing something was up. Finally, as Randall and I stacked gear, he said, “Anything?”

We pretended we didn’t hear. I tossed one rope end up to Trey, tied the other to the boat, put most of the gear in it, and told him to pull. He did, then dumped the gear and sent the boat back down the slope. We filled it with the rest of the gear and sent it up again.

Randall began whistling while we loaded the rubber boat a third time. It took me a few seconds to recognize the tune: “Money,” by Pink Floyd.

I said to Trey, “That’ll do it. Haul away.” While he pulled, Randall and I scrambled up the bank. We made it as the boat crested the rise. Trey looked inside. Came to a dead stop. Did a double take. Grabbed a packet to triple-check.

Randall and I eye-locked, both thinking the same thing: No matter what anybody’s timeline said, Trey Phigg hadn’t known about any pile of money, hadn’t killed his father.

Finally he said, “What the
hell
?”

The rubber boat held four packs of money, each pack sixteen inches by sixteen by the width of a dollar bill. They were machine-wrapped in industrial plastic. Everything was vacuum sealed, professional quality—the way you’d protect money if you planned to store it four feet above a river.

Trey looked at me, then at Randall, then at me. “What is this?”

“Hard to tell until we count it,” I said. “We were hoping it was all hundreds, but if you look close you can see everything from fives on up.”

“Which is good news,” Randall said. “It means your father already laundered it. The only thing better than money is money Uncle Sam doesn’t know about.”

Trey’s mouth made an O as his head swiveled from me to Randall and back again. “But what
is
it?”

“It’s
yours
is what it is,” I said, glancing at the main road. “We’re vulnerable here. Let’s finish loading and split.”

*   *   *

Two hours later in Framingham, I sat on a couch with Tuan and watched a TV show about sharing and the letter
P
. Trey and Randall had taken the money upstairs to count it. I was lookout.

On TV, something purple said sharing only works if everybody does it.

I pulled my cell and dialed Charlene’s house. She picked up.

I said, “How is he?”

“Hang on a sec,” Charlene said. I heard footsteps and pictured her moving from the great room into the living room, wanting a little privacy.

“Shaky,” she said. “Grand and expansive one minute, then dead quiet. He … he goes away, inside his head, and when he comes back it takes him a few seconds to remember who we are. Then he goes in his room—Jesse’s room—with the phone and calls that guy. That seems to calm him down.”

“What guy?”

“I was going to ask you,” Charlene said as the purple thing on TV shared an ice cream sandwich with an orange thing. “Fred says you know the guy. I assumed you’d hooked him up with a sponsor.”

Huh. “No. What’s the number he’s dialing?”

“I’m embarrassed to say I checked, or tried to. He’s masking that somehow.”

Huh. Fred barely knew his shoe size; no way had he figured out how to erase call logs without instruction. Who the hell was he talking to? Mental note: Find out.

“He have any more accidents?” I said.

“No, but he’s paranoid about that. Strictly saltines and ginger ale so far. I’m trying to get some lunch into him. How was your little adventure?”

“Phigg had a big pile of money stashed in his shack,” I said. “We found it.”

“I’ll be damned. How much?”

“Randall and Trey are counting it right now.”

“Trey’s in on the count? You trust him with that?”

“He didn’t kill anybody.”

Long pause. “The thing about you,” Charlene finally said, “is that you don’t trust anybody until you trust them. And then you trust them too much.”

I told her if she’d watched Trey the way I had, fired questions at him the way I had, she’d understand.

She didn’t sound convinced.

I was relieved when Randall and Trey clomped down the stairs. Said I had to go.

The three of us hit the kitchen, where Kieu was cleaning the countertop like it was the president’s shoes. Trey shot some Vietnamese at her and she went to watch TV with Tuan.

“Seventy-five K,” Randall said as we sat. “Ratty old bills, everything from fives to hundreds. Fully laundered money.”

I whistled and clapped Trey on the back. “Nice score.”

“Like hell it is,” he said, slapping the table.

The room went quiet.

Trey looked at my face, then at Randall’s, then around the kitchen. His face turned red as he realized how his comment had come across. “I’m sorry, guys,” he said. “It
is
a lot of money, I guess. It all depends on your expectations.”