“Holy shit,” Auggie whispered, stumbling back. Theo caught him again, and a part of Auggie recognized the mirrored moment; it made him feel awful.
Theo didn’t laugh. He didn’t say anything. He just held Auggie until the initial shock passed, and then he squeezed Auggie’s arm, and they moved forward again.
The door to Cal’s childhood bedroom was still open, and it looked exactly how they had left it all those months before: the photos, the tennis whites, the trophies. A quick search yielded nothing. They went to the second door from the landing. Auggie opened it, saw the twin bed with the blue polyester comforter and the wrestling trophies, and shook his head.
“Orlando’s.”
Theo nodded.
The third door held a home office: an L-shaped desk, a computer, a scanner, a printer, a banker’s lamp with a green shade. A cedar humidor stood on top of a mini-fridge-sized wine cooler. The room smelled like toner and freshly vacuumed carpet. Auggie looked over his shoulder at Theo, and Theo shrugged.
“Maybe there’s something here.”
“I didn’t say no, Auggie. I shrugged because I don’t know.”
“Well, can you try to help instead of being mad at me?”
“Fine,” Theo said, pushing past Auggie into the room. “Let’s look.”
They divided the room in half without speaking—Theo seemed like he might kill Auggie if Auggie got too close, and Auggie was too busy replaying those moments on the driveway—the heat of Theo’s densely muscled thigh, inches from his crotch—to make sense of his own welter of emotions. The closet doors rattled open on their track, and the sound of hangers sliding on metal accompanied Theo’s portion of the search. Auggie dedicated himself to the office furniture. The wine cooler and the humidor were easy to search and then dismiss. The desk, however, was more complicated. It had several drawers, and all but the top one was locked.
A quiet tapping made Auggie look up. Theo was pointing to something written on the back of the closet wall.
“He wrote his name. It says Wayne. Guess Ma and Pa Reese didn’t leave everybody’s bedrooms as shrines.”
Nodding, Auggie returned his attention to the locked drawers. He rattled one, but the lock seemed solid.
“Check the bottom,” Theo suggested. “Some of those desks have the same locking mechanism as a filing cabinet. If it does, you might be able to force the locking rod up, and the drawer will open.”
Blind, dark minutes passed as Auggie felt along the underside of the desk. He even lay on his back, his phone as a flashlight, and still couldn’t see anything. When he sat up, Theo was waiting, and Auggie shook his head.
“Does he have a letter opener?” Theo turned to pull down what looked like hat boxes from the closet shelf. “Usually those desk locks pop right open if you apply some force.”
Crowing with triumph, Auggie grabbed a letter opener from the unlocked drawer. He knelt and inserted the blade between the top of the first locked drawer and the desk.
“Be careful not to—”
Auggie bore down on the blade, and with the sound of splintering wood, the drawer—lock and all—ripped free from the desk.
“Oh shit.”
Theo froze in the act of returning a hat box.
“Oh fuck,” Auggie whispered, staring at the broken drawer. “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.”
Theo came around the desk, hunkered down, and examined the scene.
Auggie’s face was hot, flushed with pins and needles, and he wanted to squeeze his eyes shut. The humiliation was worse than the fear. He could already imagine what Theo would think if he cried. He fought against the knot in his throat.
Theo’s hand was dry, the calluses rough, as he took the letter opener. With an easy movement, he forced open the remaining drawers, splintering the wood each time. When he spoke, his voice was calm. “Go downstairs and get some kitchen towels. Remember what you touch and wipe it down. Then come back up here.”
“Theo, I’m sorry. Oh my God, I’m such a fuckup, I’m—”
“It’s fine. Go get the towels, please.”
Auggie sprinted downstairs. He opened drawers one by one, touching only the pulls, until he found the towels. Then he grabbed an armful and worked his way backward, wiping down every surface he had touched. When he got back to the office, he had to stop in the doorway to stare. The desk lay on its side. The computer monitor was trapped underneath and obviously broken. In one corner, the humidor was upside down, and cigars poked their way out of Theo’s pockets. Somehow he’d ripped the door off the wine cooler—kicked it loose, a dryly observant part of Auggie’s brain suggested.
“Wipe everything down in the closet,” Theo said. “Drawers, hang rod, those damn hat boxes. We can’t pretend nobody was in here, so we might as well make them think it was a burglary.”
“You’ve done this before.” Auggie tried to swallow, but whatever was in his throat was too tight. “You did this for Luke.”
“Auggie, if you can’t do this, that’s ok. I’ll handle it. But I need you to tell me the truth.”
In the dishwasher, silverware clinked and rattled.
“I can do this,” Auggie said.
“Then do it.”
So Auggie wiped down surfaces. Theo accepted one of the towels and used it to search the documents in the drawers that they had forced open. They finished at roughly the same time, and Theo shook out the contents of the drawers, snowing them across the office floor to expand the illusion that the place had been pillaged.
“No cash,” Theo said. “No safety-deposit box keys. Nothing even close to what we were looking for.”
“Let’s go,” Auggie said, bouncing on his toes.
“Grab some of the wine. With the towel,” Theo added when Auggie reached for a bottle. “We’ve got to do a few more rooms to make it look real. Even then, a good cop will know something isn’t right, but it’ll be the best we can do.”
Without waiting for an answer, Theo left the room, and Auggie heard the next door open. Adjusting the towel so it covered his hand, Auggie considered the bottles. He grabbed four that he thought Theo might like, based on what he’d tried at parties and what Fer had taught him in bits and pieces. Then he left the bottles on the landing and went into Orlando’s bedroom.
Theo was already busy in the closet, knocking things onto the floor, duplicating the appearance of a hasty search. Auggie went to the bed, got his fingers under the mattress, and flipped it. It crashed against the window; the aluminum blinds crinkled.
“Good idea,” Theo said.
Auggie repeated the movement with the box spring. Then he said, “Theo?”
Dumping an armful of clothes onto the floor, Theo glanced over. “What?”
“Take a look at this.”
When Theo joined him, he swore.
Some of it was athletic gear—team apparel from high-end brands. Some of it was jewelry, mostly watches, but a few rings and one necklace. At least one of the watches, Auggie knew from too many hours of listening to Fer talk about the doctors he worked with, was worth upwards of twenty thousand dollars. But what really made Auggie pause was the cash, all of it in bricks tightly wrapped with plastic. Enough cash to get him through college. Enough cash that he’d never have to ask Fer for money again. Enough for Theo, too. Enough that Theo could take care of Lana the way he wanted to.