However Many More

by Bo Thunboe

  “Silver bars?” Martin shook his head, then his eyes widened with a memory. “I do remember Lawrence telling me a story about a silver treasure one time. I… all I remember of it is the, watchamacallit… punch line. He said, ‘Silver is heavier than gold because a hundred dollars of silver weighs more than a hundred dollars of gold.’ He surprised us sometimes with clever catchy phrases and such. He liked words.”

  Lawrence Bristol talking about the weight of silver. The man had touched the bars. “Was he talking about a real treasure?”

  “Of course not.” Martin laughed. “Boy had a great imagination from playing by himself his whole darn life.”

  “Mr. Martin,” Jake said. “I really app—”

  “It was Mr. Fox,” Martin said. “Henry. He’s the one asked me about the Bristols and the Bunkers.”

  “Henry.” Jake couldn’t help repeating it, excitement coursing through him at the idea of following in Henry’s footsteps.

  Henry would lead him where he needed to go.

  * * *

  Lynn’s stomach twisted. She didn’t know if it was from the coffee she’d been drinking all day or April’s betrayal. Just thinking the word made her stomach heave, but what else should she call it? April had had that big silver bar under her bed all this time and never said a word about it.

  She jumped up from the kitchen table so quickly the chair chirped against the floor.

  “April?” Lynn heard the accusation in her own voice and brought it down. “Honey?”

  She pressed her cheek to her daughter’s bedroom door. “April?”

  “What, Mom?”

  “I want to understand about the big silver bars.”

  The door swept open. April wore gray sweatpants and the purple Northwestern hoodie. “What about them?”

  Angry heat came to Lynn’s face, but she pushed it down. “Why you didn’t tell me you’d seen one? Or that you had one right here in our house? Everything.” And where are the rest of them?

  “Dad didn’t…” April shook her head and pulled her mom into her room. They sat on the bed, holding hands. “Conner found out about them, like I told that cop. I figured Dad was waiting to surprise me. You know how he liked to do that. And that’s what happened. Last Saturday. He told me about them, but he didn’t want me to tell anyone else because he found them on city land, so he wasn’t sure if there was a way he could keep them. Which isn’t even a fair question, because no one else even knows the silver exists, so what’s it to them?”

  “Of course he should have gotten the silver,” Lynn said. “He found it. Without him—like you said—no one would even know it was there.”

  “Right.”

  “But he told you where he found them? On the city land?” Lynn licked her lips, her heart fluttering with excitement.

  April looked away, then back. “Dad said he found them buried behind the Bristol Yard.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “That place at the end of Jackson—the street Dad lives off of? Where it dead ends? That’s the Bristol Yard.”

  “Five hundred big silver bars. Right there?”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, Mom, but… well, Dad told me not to, and you’re really bad at keeping secrets and really bad at lying, so…”

  “I understand,” Lynn said. She was bad at keeping secrets—but she was a better liar than most. “But why did you tell that detective about it?”

  “To get her off you and your lie about the alibi. She’ll go after Mr. Bowen now. The little bars weren’t enough… what’s it called. Motive.”

  That was for sure. “If she arrests him we may never get a chance at the silver.”

  “I had to tell her, Mom. She wanted to pin it on you. Maybe just to prove that Mr. Houser had made a mistake. Cops are crooked, Mom. We see it on TV all the time.”

  “I didn’t…” Lynn couldn’t finish the sentence. She’d been too embarrassed at getting caught in the lie about the affair to see it. Too embarrassed to admit she cared more about the money than catching Henry’s killer.

  Thank God April had been there to save her.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Jake sat in Martin’s driveway, piecing what the old man had told him together with what he’d already learned. Trane was interested in the Bristol Yard, where Lawrence Bristol had lived, who was related to the Bunkers, who took possession of thousands of tons of silver back in the seventies.

  The picture was coming together.

  Jake drove to the end of the street and parked in front of the pole gate spanning the driveway into the yard, then stepped over the gate and walked down the gravel drive. A dozen yards in the drive opened into a wide gravel expanse fronting a pair of dilapidated garages. The faint odor of motor oil rode along the cold breeze, and the branches of the bare trees circling the area clattered together in the wind.

  “Hey! You can’t be back here!” A heavyset man in brown overalls appeared in the open garage door, his arms raised. “No trespassing. It’s posted.” He pointed back at the gate and started toward Jake.

  Jake flashed his badge. “Police business. What’s your name?”

  The man stopped a few steps away. “George. I work here.”

  “George, tell me about the guy you ran off the property.”

  George wiped his hands on a rag he pulled from his back pocket. “I didn’t call you.”

  “What was he doing here?”

  “I keep telling them we need a proper fence around here. Anyone can step over that gate. And people keep stealing the no trespassing sign.”

  “The man.”

  “He was poking around the place. Looking for who knows what. Maybe the owls.”

  “What owls?”

  “Some bird watcher told me there’s a rare kind of owl in here that lives underground. Burrowing owl, he called it.” George’s hand went to his jaw line.

  “Guy with a birthmark on his face?”

  “That’s right.”

  Cole and Trane had both been snooping through here. “When did you last see the birder?”

  “It’s been a while. Last week or the week before.”

  “And the guy today?”

  “He was looking around mostly over where the house used to be.”

  “Take me there.”

  George led the way behind the garages and through the thick underbrush. Branches and thistles snagged Jake’s pant legs. George stopped in a wide space about fifty feet from the edge of the bluff, lumpy with settling ground.

  “It was here,” he said.

  Light filtered through the bare trees to the thick layers of fallen leaves. Jake kicked his way across the space, back and forth, the smells of decay and mold filling the air. The ground was spongy in the dips where it had settled, squelching under his feet, but he didn’t find any fresh digging.

  “Did you talk to the guy this morning?”

  “Just told him to get out.”

  “Has anyone been digging in here?”

  George’s face turned red and his eyes slipped away.

  “Where?”

  “You gonna jam me up here?”

  “I’m investigating a murder.” Jake waited until George’s eyes came back to his. “That’s all I’m interested in.”

  “I let a guy dig out a pair of outhouse pits. He gave me a couple old glass bottles he found in them. They’re pretty cool.”

  “And?”

  “A hundred bucks.”

  “Show me.”

  George led Jake to a smaller clearing a bit farther back from the bluff. “The holes are right here.” He pointed at an area of undisturbed leaf clutter. “The guy put all the dirt back when he was done. Packed it down and everything.”

  “When was this?”

  “Months ago. May, maybe early June.”

  Which
was exactly when Henry had found the little bars. And Henry was famous for his clean-up. He wanted to be sure the owner at each potential new location only heard good things about how he treated the property at previous projects.

  “So the digger and the birder and the guy today have all been poking around the Yard?”

  “I guess.” George shrugged.

  “Anyone else?”

  George shook his head.

  “Where were the owls burrowing?”

  “The bird guy never found their burrows. He walked through the whole place.” George waved his hands. “No burrows and no owls.”

  Jake’s phone buzzed with a message. Callie: Bowen bit on the alibi! She would tear him apart, and Hallagan couldn’t save him.

  “George, did anyone else do any digging here after the outhouse pits?”

  “Well…” George’s face reddened again.

  “Spill it, George.”

  “A couple weeks ago the digger came back. Said he did some research and there should be another outhouse hole.” George pointed northwest. “Over closer to the church. Gave me another hundred.”

  “Did he find it?”

  “Must have. He was back and forth on his little machine.”

  “I’m going to look.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  George headed back toward the garage, and Jake cut through the trees in the direction George had pointed. It was cold here, damp, and dense with underbrush and fallen logs. Jake ran into a chain-link fence suddenly, the metal covered by vines and weeds growing up through it. Beyond, Jake could see a black asphalt expanse holding a scatter of cars and then a brick building. The church on Jefferson.

  He turned away from the river and cut back and forth across the property. Finally he found a trail of flattened weeds that were already springing back up. He followed it to a small clearing back from the bluff and kicked through the leaf cover until he found some dead vegetation. He bent and looked closer. The surface vegetation had been removed in squares and then replaced, the plants now struggling to recover.

  Henry had dug here.

  * * *

  Back in the car Jake warmed his hands over the vents. The story Henry had told April was the truth. He’d found the twenty smaller silver bars in an outhouse pit. But in order to sell them, he needed proof of ownership—which was why he claimed they came from the storage unit. Unfortunately for Henry, that story caused Bowen to believe he was entitled to half of the income. Henry was stuck with the story at that point, and had to split the profits.

  Then somehow, Henry found his way to another hole—with the big bars. At least one, and maybe five hundred of them. He definitely wouldn’t have wanted to give Bowen half of those. But when Bowen found out about them he might have had the same thought that Callie had: that the big bars had to be part of the same find. Because there was no way there were two hidden silver hoards in Weston. Bowen would have thought Henry had held out on him a second time—that Henry’s reveal about the twenty little bars had been a smoke screen to hide that he’d also found five hundred big ones.

  And Bowen didn’t have an alibi.

  Maybe it hadn’t been one of the Texans after all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Jake’s enthusiasm for talking to Lawrence Bristol rose as he drove east along Jackson. Lawrence Bristol had told Martin a story about a silver treasure… and then silver was found on the old Bunker property—where Lawrence had lived. That wasn’t a coincidence.

  Jake pulled to the curb by Centennial Beach and called Levi to see if he’d come across a connection between the Bunkers and Weston in his research.

  “No, but their silver came close.”

  “Explain.”

  “I told you that they took physical possession of a bunch of silver. Well half of the 1973 load—twenty million ounces—came from the COMEX’s Midwest region storehouse in Kirwin. They picked it up in a convoy of armored cars and transported it to O’Hare, where a fleet of chartered jets took it to Switzerland. And get this. To pick the men who would escort it, the brothers had shooting contests on the Fourth of July among their security guards in Texas. The winners got to ride along to Switzerland the following week.”

  And Weston is directly between Kirwin and the airport. “Can you look for a Bunker connection to Weston? And to the Bristol family?”

  “Will do!” Levi said. “But why do I have the feeling you already know what I’m going to find?”

  “You never know.”

  Jake was about to put his phone in his pocket when he stopped to check his text messages. He wanted to know where Trane had gone after their confrontation. The man had been pumped up. Energy led to action. Action revealed truth.

  He scrolled through his text history and found the thread with Grady. Nothing new. He dialed Grady’s number, but he didn’t answer. So he sent him a text asking for a phone call. He considered swinging by the B&B to see if Grady was there, but the officer could handle himself, and the case was accelerating too fast for a detour. Jake needed to stay on task—and that meant talking to Lawrence Bristol.

  The phone buzzed with a text alert while it was still in Jake’s hand. He hoped it was Grady, but it was Beck. He’d received Griffin’s documentation on sending the other bars to COMEX. It was consistent with Griffin’s story.

  Jake got moving.

  * * *

  Conner backed into the corner of the dining room as far away from the cops as he could get. There were at least six of them, all answering to the black lady cop who’d been talking to the neighbors. Two were in his bedroom right now.

  He hugged himself to fight the tremble running through him. His stash was in a pocket of his backpack—and if he got busted for the weed he’d probably lose his scholarship. There was no way his parents could afford to send him to Northwestern without it. His student loans only covered room and board.

  But the silver would solve that problem. It would solve all their problems.

  If he and April got to it first.

  As soon as the cop in the dining room finished pawing through the china cabinet and left, Conner pulled out his phone and called April. “Come on,” he whispered. He needed to hear her voice.

  “Hey, baby,” she answered.

  “That lady cop’s back here with like ten cops. They’re tearing the house apart. They’re going to find my stash.”

  “Does she have a search warrant?”

  “No! My dad told them they could search. His lawyer’s here and he said not to let them, but Dad always thinks he knows better than everybody. Why’d he even hire a lawyer if he’s not going to listen to the guy?”

  “She was already over here when you texted me about her,” April said. “I should have called you, but Mom’s been a wreck.”

  “What did she want?”

  “She had figured out the affair with your dad was a lie and made Mom admit it.”

  A sudden flurry of voices from Conner’s room. He stepped over until he could see up the stairs. A cop leaned out of his room, looked up and down the hallway, then yelled, “Detective?”

  The black lady cop ran up the stairs from the lower level. “What do you got?”

  “There’s something you need to see in the kid’s bedroom.”

  Conner started to shake again. “I’m screwed. I gotta go.”

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Jake crossed over the Paget River at Mill Street then circled around the Weston Settlement outdoor history museum and south to Osler Drive. Weston Oaks was a mental health facility on the Edgar Hospital campus. It occupied a rambling building close to the Little League fields. Jake was familiar with the facility; it wasn’t the first time he’d been there to interview someone.

  He headed up the front walk, pulling his blazer around him against the stiff wind blowing from the west. He’d always tried to deny the start of winter
by using mind over body, but maybe he should follow Ursulina’s lead, break out the heavy coat first thing, and never feel the cold at all.

  He spun through the revolving door and into the lobby. It was a large space with a high ceiling and a glass wall looking out over the grounds. The expanse was peppered with low tables circled by club chairs. Several seating clusters held small groups that looked to be families visiting a loved one. Piped-in classical music provided a peaceful background for their quiet conversations.

  He followed the tile path winding through the carpeted room to the counter guarding the entrance into the facility itself. He flapped his blazer as if he could shake the cold out of it. It didn’t work.

  The woman behind the counter greeted him with a smile. “Getting chilly out there?”

  “Starting to.” He smiled back. “I’m here to see Lawrence Bristol.”

  “Friend or family?”

  If Jake announced himself as a police officer, the facility would probably contact the public guardian and ask for permission to allow the visit. The PG would draft a long-winded motion and put the question in front of a judge, thereby avoiding any blowback for an unpopular decision. All of which would take at least a week.

  “I’m a friend of Mr. Martin’s—Larry’s old neighbor—and he told me Larry could help me with a bit of Weston history.” Jake held up his notebook to show her he was a serious scholar.

  “How’s Mr. Martin doing?” She handed Jake a clipboard with a sign-in sheet.

  “He’s doing well. I just came from his house. Ursulina will be bringing him for a visit over Thanksgiving.” He took the clipboard and filled in his name and the time and checked the box for friend.

  “I’m sure Lawrence will be happy to see him.” She looked at what he’d written. “Please have a seat and I’ll have a nurse ask Larry if he’ll accept your visit.”

  He thanked her, then walked over to a table near the windows and stood gazing out at the meticulously maintained plantings now going dormant for the winter. It was a pleasant view, but it couldn’t hold his attention. Something in the Bristols’ storage unit had led Henry to the silver. First the little bars, then the big ones. And with the elder Bristols having passed away, if anyone alive knew the truth about what Henry had found, it was Lawrence Bristol.