big. Too big for her to take home and hide, and she didn't trust Wally with it.'
'Wally?'
'Wake up, Jimmy. He's who she left you for. He was a lot closer to Frank than you were, and that's what she wanted.'
'Yeah,' I said. 'Anyhow, she needed someplace safe to store this stuff for a while.'
Light dawned in his eyes. 'Here?'
'She had your keys. She must have known about Tony's basement. She probably figured no one would ever notice.'
Jimmy flushed. 'I told her. About downstairs. I was, like, goofing on Tony one day.'
'So she hid it there. And she showed it to Frank Monday night. She’d already told him about it, and he was already figuring the angles. At the very least, he could frame you for the burglary and shake down Tony. That's what the fight was about.
'But when Ginny and Wally took him down here and showed him what they had, he acted cool. He wasn't impressed. Ginny was just a stupid kid, an amateur, he said. He told her to go home, back to daddy.'
'She must've hated that, being treated like a kid. Like she wasn't tough.'
'She did hate it. She hated it so much she showed how tough she really was by killing Wally, on the spot.'
'Yeah,' Jimmy muttered. 'Yeah, that's what Lydia said. Jesus.'
I didn't say anything. After a moment Jimmy asked, 'Mr. S.? Why did Frank kill her?'
'She was in his way. She had just gotten to be too much trouble.'
Jimmy rubbed his hand along his forehead.
Neither of us spoke for a long time. The jukebox moved from Charlie Daniels to Crystal Gayle. Finally Jimmy said, 'Where is this—this stuff?'
'In the basement. Come help me with it.'
We went down the creaking stairs. The basement still had the same dank smell, the same decades of dust covering things that once mattered to someone. The disturbances made by the finding of Wally Gould were already aging, rounding, fading.
Jimmy found his way to the middle of the room with an unconscious familiarity. He pulled the chain hanging from the bare bulb and in the light I searched the room from where I stood.
I found it immediately, a plywood crate about six by six, partially hidden behind other boxes. It was carefully made, fastened with screws at the corners, and it was practically dust free.
Jimmy and I carried it up, maneuvering carefully through the basement door, past the tables and barstools, out into the lot. I let down the back gate of Eve's truck and we hefted the crate onto the metal bed. My sore shoulders ached, my arms trembled a little as I closed the gate again.
Jimmy had been silent since we'd entered the basement. Now he turned to me, asked, 'What's in it?'
'Eve asked me not to tell anyone, Jimmy. I'm sorry.'
'No, it's okay. I sort of—I don't want to know, you know?'
I started around to the cab. As I put my hand on the door handle Jimmy said, 'Mr. S., I don't get it.' He frowned, rubbed his hand over the back of his neck, Tony's gesture.
'Don't get what?' I asked, but as I said it, I knew.
'Frank was framing me for killing Wally, right? And Ginny too? That's what Lydia said.'
'That's right.'
'But you told that trooper Ginny's body was in the quarry. Why would he, like, ditch her body, if he was setting me up? Is that who came up that night in the rain? To drop her there?' We looked at each other in the dull afternoon light. 'Mr. S., that wasn't Frank, was it?'
I looked around me, the gravel lot, the tin sign swinging against the graying sky. The air had gotten colder since I left the cabin; there was a bite to the wind.
And suddenly I thought, tell him. Maybe something can be salvaged out of what happened here, if he knows. And so I told Jimmy what I had kept from everybody else. 'No,' I said. 'That wasn't Frank. That was Tony.'
It took him a minute to answer, and when he did his voice was shaky. 'What the hell are you talking about?'
'Tony'd heard what Frank had to say about you. When I found Gould's body, Tony came down to the basement. He knows every inch of it, every broken piece of trash there. He must've spotted the crate right away, knew it didn't belong. Then your keys, the whole frame. He bought it all.
'Wednesday night he went looking for you. Marie would probably tell us, if we asked. Maybe he closed up early, maybe he just left her in charge. He was on his way to the quarry, I think. I'd told him you were there; I wanted him to know you were safe.
'But he saw your truck, on the road. He followed it. He didn't know it was Frank and Ginny; how would he know that? He thought it was you.
'He followed them to Eve Colgate's shed. He stayed back, to see what was going on. He's lucky he did that; Frank would have killed him. But what he saw was two people going into the shed, one coming out. Remember how dark it was that night, Jimmy, right before it rained.
