Chapter 35
35
Davis
Cooper and Waverly’s security detail wave us through as I steer Giselle’s SUV up the next driveway after Beck’s place. I left my motorcycle at the trailer with Giselle, who looked like she needed a long ride to work out some issues.
And who promised to not beat the shit out of Patrick Dixon before the authorities arrived to pick him up.
Vanessa didn’t promise the same.
She didn’t answer my text at all when I messaged to let her know that Patrick was currently hog-tied and secured to a beam under my camper.
Little bloody too.
Pretty sure that’s the only time in my life I’ll ever see Sloane look an injured man in the eye, tell him she hopes he gets a flesh-eating disease on his penis and scurvy and tetanus and that he has to spend the rest of his days shitting through his belly button, then walk away without treating his wounds.
Giselle knows first aid.
We don’t know if she’ll give him first aid either, but she knows it.
Sloane technically left him in capable hands.
When I hit the top of Cooper’s driveway, I roll my window down and tell the security woman there that I need to park in the garage.
She doesn’t blink, and five minutes later, I’m following Sloane through Cooper’s laundry room and into his open living area, a box of history and confessions and life-altering details in hand.
Cooper, Waverly, Annika, and Tillie Jean are all chilling in Cooper’s four massage chairs. Grady’s cutting what looks like grapes and cucumbers. Max is entertaining the two toddlers on a rug in front of the massage chairs.
Ah.
Toddler snack time.
For toddlers with normal appetites.
And probably also for the goat standing outside the back door, staring in forlornly.
It will never not amuse me that Grady has a one-horned pet goat. A male goat. Named Sue.
Truly, no wonder Sloane loves it here so much.
Never dull in Shipwreck.
Tillie Jean spots me first.
Or, rather, she spots the box first.
She tries to pop up out of the massage chair, but it must be in one of those cycles where it’s squeezing her legs because she trips and takes a header toward the kids on the rug, legs still attached to the chair.
“ Aack! ”
“No more head injuries!” Sloane shrieks.
It’s the first thing she’s said since we climbed into the SUV.
And that—even more than what I have to do right now—is what has my heart in a knot.
A knot that I’m refusing to acknowledge.
A knot that tells me she’s far more to me than just a partner in a treasure hunt who needs a fake groom tomorrow, and I have to let her go.
I don’t want to.
Even telling myself she’ll be okay—that she’s strong, she’s capable, she has all of these people here as family—it’s not enough.
I want to be her family.
And I don’t know if I’m brave enough to do what I need to do to prove it to her.
“What’s that?” Cooper says to me. “What the actual you-know-what is that?”
Waverly opens her eyes and glances at him, then at me.
She squeaks.
Tillie Jean straightens, pulls herself out of the massage chair, and she squeaks again too.
“You gonna live?” Max asks her.
“That very much depends on what’s inside that box,” she replies.
Annika’s giving me a one-eyed glare. “I swear on my bladder, if you’re about to drop news that’s going to make me have to pee?—”
“You should probably go pee,” Sloane says.
“ Dammit .”
Grady drops his knife and strolls in from the kitchen, leaning against a column holding up the high ceiling between the two rooms. “Tell me that’s not real.”
Can’t do it. “It’s real.”
“That’s not what I asked you to tell me.”
“It’s not real.” Cooper pulls himself out of his massage chair. “It can’t be real.”
“Real what?” Waverly asks. “Real treasure? Real treasure? No.”
“It’s real,” I repeat.
“It’s real,” Sloane says. “We found it.”
“But you can’t ,” Cooper says.
“Why not?” she asks.
“Because I found it.”
All of us—even the kids—gape at him.
“Excuse you, what ?” Tillie Jean says.
Sloane takes a step back.
I take a step back.
Grady takes a step back.
Max grins.
Cackles a little, even.
Waverly hits a button to stop the cycle on her massage chair, then she straightens. “You found a treasure and you didn’t tell your wife?”
Cooper winces. “I made myself forget. Because the more people who know a secret, the more people who know a secret. So that can’t be the treasure. Because the treasure’s been…safe…for about ten years now.”
Sloane leans against the nearest wall, then slides down it, ending with her legs splayed in front of her. “Oh my god, second treasure.”
“Second treasure when there is no treasure ?” Tillie Jean says. “Give me the chair back. I need to sit down. And then murder my brother for lying to all of us. And then sit down again.”
Sloane shakes her head. “No more murder. Today.”
“ Did you murder someone ?”
“Patrick. Almost. But I wasn’t looking where I was throwing so it wouldn’t be first-degree. Probably even count as self-defense, actually. And he’s still alive. And likely has a concussion. Serves the fucker right.”
“Fucker?” Tillie Jean’s daughter says.
Nobody blinks an eye.
At the kid cussing, anyway. They’re still alternating staring at me and Cooper.
“How is there a second treasure when there’s not even supposed to be a first?” Annika asks.
I study Cooper.
He stares back at me, and again—he’s not amused.
“You know, don’t you?” I say.
“How the fuck do you know?” he replies.
I set the treasure down and roll my right sleeve up.
Point to the pirate flag tattoo between the tattoo of Copper Valley’s famous fountain in Reynolds Park and the tiger I got in honor of a dream I had once. “You’re not the only family with pirate blood in the area.”
Tillie Jean squeaks again.
“Where’d you find yours?” I ask.
“Hidden in the walls of one of the cabins up here that I bought when I started buying everything on the mountain.”
Sloane pumps a fist in the air. “I told you it would be in the walls!”
I smile at her. “You did. And you were right.”
“Now I’m disappointed we didn’t find ours in a toilet.”
“Where’d you find yours?” Cooper asks.
“Root cellar on some property that belonged to my great-something-grandfather.”
Cooper winces.
I stay straight-faced.
The kind of straight-faced I’m very, very good at.
As Sloane has observed. And mocked me for. Hilariously.
Fuck , I’m going to miss her.
Grady’s frowning at me, but he’s sharing that frown with Cooper. “What’s going on here?”
Sloane sucks in a big breath and says what I should but haven’t been able to. “Thorny Rock and Walter Bombeck exchanged identities when they left Norfolk to come inland. The real Thorny founded Sarcasm. The real Walter founded Shipwreck. And if they both had part of the treasure, then the towns probably fight because they each spent their entire lives trying to steal back what they split with the other.”
“Yep.” Annika’s voice is a little hollow as she dances out of her chair and toward the kitchen. “I definitely have to pee. Quit talking until I’m back.”
Tillie Jean looks at Cooper. “Tell me that’s wrong.”
He winces again.
“Now that I’ve said that out loud, I’m forgetting I ever knew it and never repeating it again,” Sloane says.
“I’m peeing with the door open so I can hear all of you,” Annika calls from beyond the kitchen. “Don’t come back here unless you’re my husband.”
Tillie Jean’s still shaking her head. “That cannot be real. This isn’t real— oh my god, that’s real .”
She gapes at the chest that I’ve just opened.
Max grabs both toddlers, who’ve seen toys and want some.
Waverly gapes at all of us.
“It’s fucking real,” Grady mutters.
“Apparently the second fucking real one,” Sloane says.
“Where’d you find it again?” Waverly asks.
“How’d you find it?” Cooper asks.
“What are you going to do with it?” Tillie Jean asks.
“All yours,” I tell her. “Mayor of Shipwreck should have it. Do what you want with it.” I reach into my coat and pull out the journal that Uncle Guido gave us, and the journal that we reclaimed from Patrick before leaving him with Giselle—the journal that Pop’s been hiding—and offer them to her. “These too. And I’ll get you everything my family has. I don’t want it. I like Shipwreck as it is. Up to you to decide if you want the world to know what you know now.”
Annika returns from the bathroom and glances at Grady.
“Don’t hate each other now,” Sloane whispers to them.
Grady slips an arm around his wife and kisses her forehead. “Who needs gold when you have love?”
“Fuck the treasure bullshit,” Annika agrees.
“Fuck da booshee,” her son says. “I have tesh-shure??”
“I have tesh-sha!” Tillie Jean and Max’s little girl says.
“I can’t believe you’ve known it was real for ten years ,” Tillie Jean says to Cooper.
He holds his hands up. “Look, I can be a dumbass, but even I know the first rule of finding treasure and a diary that tells you your entire heritage is bullshit is that you don’t talk about finding a treasure and a diary that tells you your entire heritage is bullshit. I even went to a hypnotist and tried to have them erase my memory so I wouldn’t know. But I never thought there’d be two of them. I thought Davis knew I found the only one and he figured out where I hid it.”
“Where did you hide it?”
“Safe-deposit box in DC at first, but now it’s behind a secret door in Waverly’s secret second wine cellar in LA.”
Tillie Jean gasps and looks at Waverly. “ You have a secret second wine cellar? ”
Sloane giggles.
Fuck me, I love that giggle.
“Clearly the most important detail, TJ,” Grady mutters.
“Actually, she has a point,” Annika chimes in. “Or she will. When I’m not pregnant anymore. Waverly picks the best wine.”
“It’s a gift,” Waverly says. “Much like Cooper funding the Unicorn Festival since he knew his family benefited from everyone believing he was a descendant of the real Thorny Rock?”
Cooper Rock, the most shameless person I’ve ever met in my entire life—turns red.
Tillie Jean’s about to gasp herself out.
And Annika—Annika bursts into tears. “Dammit, Cooper, I hate it when I appreciate you.”
I glance at Max, who’s been quiet through all of this.
He just nods at me. “Like your thinking.”
“Are you sure you want to give the whole treasure to the family?” Waverly asks. “I mean, I know you’re giving it to Tillie Jean, but we all know when you give a treasure to one Rock, you’re kinda giving it to all of them.”
“It’s baggage,” I tell her. “Not interested in baggage.”
She looks at Sloane. “Do you want it?”
“My house was robbed, my ex-boyfriend attacked my favorite protection specialist, and I had to face some guy named Uncle Guido in the name of finding this treasure. I’ll go to therapy for the memories. You keep the gold.”
“Are they all bad memories?” Tillie Jean asks.
Sloane goes pink. “No.”
“Good.”
Cooper kneels in front of the chest and picks up one of the gold pieces under the third diary. “It’s identical. You’re right. They must’ve split it.”
Grady shakes his head and pulls Annika over with him to look at it too. “Two treasures. Pirate nutjobs.”
“We’ll announce it’s been found and put some on display in the museum,” Tillie Jean says.
“Tell people it was found at the waterfall,” Sloane says. “Don’t tell them where it was really found. If you can.”
“Will Patrick know the truth?”
“Patrick has a concussion,” Sloane reminds her.
Tillie Jean grins.
Sloane grins back. “Courtesy of me,” she whispers.
I hold out a hand.
She high-fives me, then looks at the room at large. “You didn’t see that.”
“This morning isn’t happening,” Max says. “It’s all a figment of everyone’s imaginations.”
We all look at the two toddlers.
Could be their first lasting memory.
More likely, they won’t remember any of it.
“I can’t tell my mama and Roger, can I?” Annika says.
Tillie Jean hugs her. “We’ll figure it out.”
“They already know,” Sloane says. “If not, they strongly suspect. They told me things while you were in the bathroom.”
“Freaking bathroom,” Annika mutters. “I miss everything when I’m in the bathroom.”
“We good?” I ask Cooper and Tillie Jean.
Cooper nods. “Always, man. Can’t be mad at someone who saved my lucky socks for me all those years ago.”
Shit.
Forgot I did that.
“That was gross,” I tell him.
“And they weren’t actually his real superstition,” Waverly says with a grin.
“I, unfortunately, am also now aware of that.” I look at Tillie Jean again. “Last chance to ask questions before I forget this ever happened.”
She slides a look at Sloane, then back to me. “Will it be the last time I ever see you?”
“No.”
“Okay then. Sloane? You okay?”
“She hasn’t had coffee,” I tell Tillie Jean.
“On it.” Cooper jumps back up. “I make the best coffee.”
“He really does,” Waverly agrees. “Maybe when we’re both retired, he’ll take over the Muted Parrot.”
“This looks worse than she hasn’t had coffee ,” Tillie Jean says.
Sloane pulls her knees to her chest and drops her head to them. “Adrenaline crash.”
“Been there. Usually after Long Beak Silver makes me fall off a roof.” Tillie Jean smiles at her. “You wanna hang out for a while? Official historical society secret business? Or we can take you back to Beck’s. Peggy’s still at the pool house, right?”
“I want—” Sloane pauses.
Her eyes go shiny.
She darts a look at me, then glances down again.
I want to go home .
That’s what she was about to say.
And now I’m feeling myself go ruddy in the cheeks. “I can take you. It’s…clean.”
She lifts her gaze to me again.
Does one slow blink.
“Your house.” Shit. My voice is getting husky. “It’s clean. I had a crew come in. They took inventory of everything broken. Replaced what they could. Probably put a few things back wrong in the kitchen, but it’s clean.”
“When did you have time to do that?”
“Doesn’t take much time when you know who to call.”
“My house is… It’s normal?”
“As normal as they could make it.”
“And Patrick’s behind bars?”
I check my phone, find a message from Giselle confirming the sheriff has pulled away with him, and I nod to her. “Yep.”
Her eyes get shinier. “Thank you.”
“Least I could do.”
She visibly swallows.
Glances at her friends, who are all watching us entirely too closely with smiles that are entirely too big.
Then back at me. “I’ll stay and answer any more questions the mayor has for us. You can…do what you need to do.”
Offer to stay. Offer to stay. Offer to stay .
I nod. “Okay. See you tomorrow then. I’ll bring rings. Let me know if you need anything else.”
She purses her lips together and nods back. “Thank you.”
“Anytime.”
Cooper interrupts the moment by grinding coffee beans.
Fucker.
I glance around again, and this time, no one’s smiling at me.
So I do what I always do.
I leave.
I’ll see her tomorrow. We can talk tomorrow.
When everything’s calm.
Without an audience.
If I can find my fucking balls and be brave.