the property, but Mark had a ten-minute lead.
That was enough.
By the time we reached the mountain road, smoke was rising above the trees.
“Jesus,” Daniel whispered.
The lodge was burning.
Flames climbed through the back windows.
Mark stood near the entrance carrying a metal box.
Jenna was screaming at him.
“You said nobody would get hurt!”
Mark shouted, “Get in the car!”
“No!”
“You’re already involved!”
“I didn’t agree to murder anyone!”
Daniel flinched.
I heard it too.
Murder.
Rebecca gripped my arm.
Police vehicles appeared behind us.
Mark saw the lights.
Then he did something desperate.
He threw the metal box into the fire.
Rebecca screamed.
“No!”
She ran.
I grabbed her coat.
“Rebecca!”
“That box has the ledgers!”
Daniel and I pulled her back as part of the roof collapsed.
Mark tried to reach his car.
Two officers tackled him.
Jenna dropped to her knees in
the mud.
And everything seemed over.
But it wasn’t.
Because the metal box Mark threw into the fire—
was empty.
Rebecca stared at it once firefighters recovered it.
Then she began laughing.
Mark, handcuffed beside the police car, looked confused.
She walked toward him.
“You never found them.”
Mark’s face changed.
“What?”
“The records.”
Her smile widened.
“I moved them twenty-seven years ago.”
Mark shouted, “Where?”
Rebecca turned toward me.
“I gave them to Dad.”
My father.
Of course.
He had hidden them somewhere Mark would never search.
Mr. Hale arrived nearly an hour later.
When Rebecca told him, he smiled.
“Frank always said there was one place Mark refused to visit.”
I knew instantly.
“The grave.”
Dad’s grave.
At sunrise, with police present, we returned to the cemetery.
Behind my father’s headstone was a stone bench he had commissioned before his death.
Underneath it, sealed in a waterproof compartment,
investigators found three notebooks, microfilm copies, bank records, photographs, and one recorded cassette.
