“This is at least twice as big.”
“It’s seven hundred square feet,” she replied flatly.
“Two and a half times as big, then,” he joked.
She rolled her eyes, but a smile pulled at the corners of her mouth.
“What’s with the walls?” he asked, hoping the question wasn’t rude.
That the house had been built by someone who was not employed in construction seemed almost comically apparent. The walls were dotted with round, flat nail heads, haphazardly hammered at random intervals as if they alone were holding the entire structure together.
“Hell if I know,” she said with a tiny edge in her voice. “I stopped trying to understand him a long time ago. He built this place for my mom, who didn’t want to stay in an old trailer during the winter months. It ended up being a waste of time, since in the end, she left anyway.”
“And you took care of him here, too? After the stroke?”
“Yeah. It’s not a lot of space, but it was just the two of us, and a nurse when I had to work. He spent a lot of time in his chair by the window, looking out at the mountains.”
As much as he hated to imagine Lily left to care for Duke by herself, he hated the idea of her living in this crumbling cabin alone even more.
Lily left him to look around, but she immediately got to work. And in what he assumed was one of the two tiny bedrooms, he heard Lily pulling things out of her closet, opening and closing drawers, banging on the walls to feel where something might be hollow or full of something other than wood. She stomped along the floors, checking every surface, every wall, every floorboard to see if it wiggled. He joined in, peeling back rugs, looking for false backs in her kitchen cabinets.
“Where do you think he would hide something?” he asked.
She paused her work tapping every brick in the fireplace to give him a dramatically excited expression. “Oh shit, do you think I should be considering that?”
He ignored her tone. This was Lily on defense; she was trying not to hope.
“I mean,” Leo said patiently, “let’s brainstorm what he might have thought would be a location nobody would ever think to look in. He was actually brilliant, Lily. He’d have known that anybody who suspected he kept the money here would have looked in the closet. They would think he hid it in the floor somewhere. They would look in the cabinets. So, if Duke thought there was a chance you would be the one to make it to the cave and left you that note, and he sent you right back here to your own house, what is the place where he would think you had never looked before and only you would look?”
She sat down on the couch, pinning her hands between her knees. “I don’t know.”
“Let’s just let it sit,” he said. “Look around. Think about the space, if there were any meaningful places in here.”
“Leo, there’s only so much space to consider.”
“Exactly,” he said. “That makes it easier and harder. Duke would have to be really creative to hide something here.”
She sat back, looking around as if with new eyes. As usual, her fingers tapped against her thighs, and by now, he’d heard the rhythm so many times he found himself tapping along with her. They sat together—quick tap, slow tap, quick, quick, quick, quick. Quick tap, slow tap, quick, quick, quick, quick… and then everything seemed to come to a stop inside him.
“Lily.”
She paused. “What?”
“What is that?” he asked, pointing to her hand. “What is that rhythm you always do? Is it a song?”
She looked down, almost like she didn’t realize she was doing it.
“No. It’s just my dad’s knock,” she said. “It was our secret knock. From when I was younger. He would be gone a lot, and I was alone here. It’s how I knew it was Duke at the door. Of course, he could have just used his key like a normal person, but he always did like to make an entrance.”
Leo stared at her, heart thundering in protective anger… and understanding. “Do it again.”
They did it together once, and then again, and he jogged to the desk, finding a piece of paper and a pen to write it down as she repeated it: short, long, short, short, short, short.
On a hunch, he opened his phone browser, typing in a search.
“It’s Morse code,” he said.
“What does it spell?” She came up beside him, staring down at the piece of paper.
L I L I L I L I… Lili.
“Lily,” he said. “But with an I, not a Y. Just a repeat of Lili over and over.”
“Do you think it’s important?”
“Maybe? It’s how Liliana is spelled… But maybe not. It’s not a location,” he said. “Not a spatial cue or direction.”