‘That’s interesting, because Miriam claimed to be your wife.’
Shit. ‘What did she look like?’
‘Tall, dark hair. Green eyes.’
Fucking hell. ‘She was with a woman? Not a big blond guy?’
‘No, it was a woman. I talked to the nurse’s aide when I got there. She called me when the women showed up. Which is what I pay her for.’
‘Was my mother . . . lucid?’
‘I don’t know. She wasn’t when I got there, but who knows? Like I said, she has good and bad days. She was rocking and saying that her baby was gone and that she hadn’t used a key. Do you know what that means?’
Yes. Of course he did. The key was to their safe-deposit box. It contained a handwritten statement detailing the guilt of all the Founding Elders. If any of the founders died unexpectedly, whoever they’d entrusted with a key was to give the documents to the police. They’d all prepared a similar package, and they’d all stored the documents in individual safe-deposit boxes, except for Ephraim and Edward, who shared a box.
All of the founders had given their key to someone on the outside. It was a fail-safe mechanism. A way to keep them all honest. Or at least honest with one another. It kept them from killing one another at first. But with Waylon and Edward gone? Only Ephraim and Pastor still had files. DJ might have had Waylon’s, but he hadn’t used it after Waylon’s death, and Pastor claimed he’d taken Waylon’s key.
Of course, both Pastor and DJ were liars, so who knew what the real truth was? His plan to kill DJ dimmed a little. He’d forgotten that DJ might have access to Waylon’s safe-deposit box.
‘No,’ he lied. ‘I have no idea what that means. Probably nothing. My mother hasn’t made sense in years.’
Still, he relaxed. If all his mother had said to Mercy was that she hadn’t used the key, there was no real harm done. His mother didn’t even have a key anymore. He’d taken Aubrey’s key back after his brother’s murder and retrieved his own key when his mother had started to show signs of dementia.
Ephraim had made sure to tell her not to send the incriminating documents out after his brother’s death because none of the other Founding Elders had done it.
That would be Gideon’s sin. For which the bastard would pay.
‘Well . . .’ Burkett hesitated and Ephraim’s stomach twisted again.
‘Well, what?’
‘She told me that she gave Miriam the key.’
‘She doesn’t have a key,’ Ephraim said flatly. He had the only keys. They were in a pocket of his laptop bag. He’d kept the keys and the laptop in his locker at Regina’s place until Saturday night.
His gut took a sudden plunge. Regina had broken into his locker. She’d searched his laptop. He scrambled from the camper’s bed to grab the laptop bag and check the pocket. Then exhaled in relief. The keys were still there, right where he’d left them. ‘There is no key,’ he added with more conviction.
‘She seemed to think that she had one. She showed me a small wooden chest with a false bottom. Said she’d hidden the key there for Aubrey. Sometimes she thinks he’s still alive, you know. Or you would if you visited her more often.’
Shit, shit, shit. Ephraim knew the chest. It had been made by Amos, Eden’s resident woodworker. Ephraim hadn’t realized that it had held anything. His mother had assumed that Ephraim had made the chest himself, and he’d let her believe it. It had made her happy and he’d certainly told worse lies.
And worse truths. He thought about the contents of the safe-deposit box, swallowing hard at the sudden burn of bile in his throat. He’d written down everything he’d ever been told, everything he’d overheard or witnessed. He’d documented every sin the Founding Elders had ever committed, but those sins weren’t what had him sweating right now.
He’d kept a running tally of every penny the founders shared. Pastor showed them the earnings reports twice a year, and each time Ephraim made notes of the numbers as soon as he was out of Pastor’s sight. If Mercy gave that key to the cops, they’d know exactly what Eden was worth.
The money was safely hidden in offshore accounts for the moment, but if there was one thing he’d learned from DJ over the years, it was that the Feds were capable of tracking nearly anything with their fancy computers. And now the Feds knew where to look. If Mercy had gotten a key from Ephraim’s mother, she’d already given it to either her detective boyfriend or her brother.
Gideon. The Fed. He was behind this, Ephraim was certain.
If they’d visited his mother, they were probably already tracking how Ephraim paid for her care. They’d find the bank accounts and would inevitably recognize Frutuoso for an Eden account once they figured out that the company dealt in ‘olive oil and pomegranates’.
Stupid Pastor. The man thought he was so damn clever. Naming the company ‘fruitful’. It was bad enough that Pastor had chosen his name because ‘Ephraim’ meant ‘fruitful’. Ephraim had been only seventeen years old and full of himself, it was true. And yeah, he’d fucked the fourteen-year-old granddaughter of Doc, the oldest Founding Elder, but so what? The old man was long dead now, the first of all of them to die, so he didn’t care anymore. Plus, the girl had wanted it. And Ephraim had married her when she’d shown up pregnant.
Not like he’d had a choice. But marriage was his punishment, as was the name change to Ephraim. It was a taunt, a constant reminder that he’d gotten Doc’s granddaughter preggo. Because Pastor was a prick – a prick who thought he was too damn smart to ever get caught.
But Mercy was smart and so was Gideon. They’d figure out that the bank account was important, and who knew how long it would take them to trace the money back to the offshore Eden accounts?
I need to get that cash before the Feds do.
But the money wasn’t even the scariest thing. That would be the maps he’d added to the safe-deposit box every time Eden moved. He wasn’t sure what the other founders had included in their ‘fail-safe boxes,’ but Ephraim’s approach was scorched earth, all the way. If one of the fuckers had killed him, his mother would have opened his box and found every location Eden had ever settled.
She’d find the locations of their product stashes – pot, shrooms, opioids. And the cash that DJ collected every week that he took a drug shipment to his contacts. DJ would deposit it periodically into banks in either Santa Rosa, Sacramento, or San Francisco, but never often and never in the same bank. Then Pastor would move it into the main offshore account, which the man controlled with an iron fist.
But the most dangerous map in the safe-deposit box was the one he’d made showing the locations of future settlements, because they always had a few scouted out.