U Is for Undertow

might have seemed like a fortune.”
    “Not that the money did them any good. Patrick photocopied the bills and then marked them . . .”
    Henry frowned. “How?”
    “Some kind of fluorescent pen he used in the export side of his clothing business. Deborah says the marks would have popped out under a black light, which a lot of kids had back then. She also says none of the money ever surfaced, at least as far as she’s heard.”
    “They must have figured it out.”
    “That’d be my guess.”
    “Which is probably why they tried again,” he said. “If they discovered the bills were marked, they couldn’t risk putting the cash in circulation so they got rid of what they had and tried again. Only this time they snatched Mary Claire instead of Rain.”
    “Oh, shit. I hope that’s not true. That would mean Patrick set the second kidnap in motion. If the money had been clean, they might have been satisfied with what they netted the first time and let it go at that.”
    Henry said, “I’ll tell you something else that just occurred to me. Suppose when Sutton stumbled into the clearing, the two weren’t digging the hole to bury a child. What if their intent was to bury the tainted money?”
    I stared at him. “And they buried the dog instead? How’d they manage that?”
    “Simple. One stays in the woods to keep an eye on the site. The other goes off, steals the dog’s corpse, and brings it back. They drop the mutt in that hole and hide the money somewhere else.”
    “How’d they know about the dead dog?”
    “Beats me,” he said. “You told me yourself that a couple of hundred people could have known about the shed and the pickup routine.”
    “All this because they were worried the little kid would blab?”
    “Why not? I’m just brainstorming here, but it makes sense to me.
    Didn’t you tell me Patrick packed the money in a gym bag he tossed on the side of the road?”
    “Right.”
    “So picture this. They leave Rain asleep in the park. They’ve counted the money so they know it’s all there. Once they get home they discover the bills are lighting up like neon. Either they meant to dump the cash or their intention was to get it out of sight until they felt it was safe to spend. Once the little kid appeared, they decided it was too dangerous to leave the money in that spot.”
    “The dead dog’s a bit melodramatic, don’t you think? Why not just fill in the hole?”
    “They were setting up a cover story to explain what they were doing in the first place. Sure enough, the police exhume the dog and that’s the end of it. No big mystery. Someone’s buried a pet. Might have taken twenty-one years, but it shows you how wily these guys were.”
    “ ‘Were’? Nice idea. Like maybe they’re dead or in prison.”
    “One can only hope,” he said.

    When I got home I decided to let Henry’s suggestions percolate overnight. I’d been overthinking the whole subject and it had only served to confuse instead of enlighten me. Meanwhile, something else had occurred to me. I realized I might have a way to find out if Hale Brandenberg was being honest about Aunt Gin’s sexual orientation. It didn’t matter one way or the other, but I’m a stickler for the truth (unless I’m busy lying to someone at any given moment). There might be evidence at hand.
    I went up the spiral stairs to the loft. I have an old trunk at the foot of the bed that I use for storage. I cleared the top and opened the lid, removing neatly folded piles of winter clothing I’d packed away in mothballs. From the bottom I hauled out a shoe box of old photographs that I dumped on the bed. If Aunt Gin had a “special friend” whose existence Hale was trying to conceal, I might find glimpses of her in pictures taken at the time. Aunt Gin had socialized with a number of married couples, but she also had gal pals.
    Snapshots tell a story, not always in obvious ways but taken as a whole. Faces appear and disappear. Relationships form and fall apart. Our social history is recorded in photographic images. Maybe someone had captured a moment that would speak to the issue. I sat on the bed and picked through the pictures, smiling at the photos of people I recognized. Some I could still name. Stanley, Edgar, and Mildred. I blanked on Stanley’s wife’s name, but I knew the five of them played card games—canasta and pinochle. The kitchen table would be littered with ashtrays and highball glasses, and they’d all be laughing