heirlooms or knickknacks or furniture we wanted, and I found this.” Quin reached into his pocket, pulled out his phone, and began scrolling. He held it out to Dini, who saw a battered cardboard box, loosely tied with string. “It was at the back of the closet in the master bedroom. So far back that I had the feeling it was hidden.”
“Feeling.”
“Sixth sense, you know? And when I opened it…just this weird assortment of stuff. A couple of magazines, newspaper clippings, and”—he all but shuddered—“photographs.”
Everything within her sparked. So much so, she imagined tiny lightning bolts shooting from her curls as she forced her voice to remain calm. “So how did you know to connect it all to here?”
“The newspaper articles mostly. About the, um—”
“The robbery?”
“Yeah. I did some googling and learned more about the place. And since I had some time on my hands, I finally decided to come and check it out. See what I could learn. I came in here for dinner and told the guy behind the bar—”
“Gil.”
“—and he said he knew someone who could tell me the whole story inside and out. And that you’d be leading a tour. So I signed up. And here we are.”
“Here we are.” No doubt Gil was relieved that she had a new audience for her obsession.
“So, I’m here until Thursday morning. Maybe we could meet up again? And you could kind of …? Because I have to tell you, some of it’s pretty …”
He had that speech pattern that made statements sound like questions, allowing spoken thoughts to drift off into vague hand gestures. He was clearly a gregarious sort—instantly at ease with a stranger, a quality Dini never quite understood. She had no idea how much silence had elapsed since he stopped talking, but she knew her cue was to pick up the thread.
“You won’t be able to understand any of it if you don’t know the whole story.”
“So tell me the story. You’re an awesome storyteller. I listened to you out on the tour for, like, two hours. Excellent. Chills.”
She wanted to tell him that most of what he heard was a script, memorized and repeated. Despite his apparent lack of historical intuitiveness, he seemed harmless enough. Her week was pretty empty, save a birthday party tomorrow and an afternoon event on Wednesday. And she might get a free meal or two—call it her fee.
Plus, he was the in-flesh descendant of the man who had vicariously broken her heart a thousand times over.
“What do you know about your great-great-grandfather?”
“Not much. Not as much as I should. He worked for the FBI? Back in the day before it was, you know, the FBI.” He punctuated this with a duh-duh-duhn. “So much of my family followed him on that. My grandfather. And two of my sisters, but they’re forensic accountants. I took the wimp route and went into teaching. Not that I haven’t had my share of rough days there.”
Dini filed all of this away the way she filed everything—neatly and without effort.
“What do you know about Hedda Krause?”
“Again, not much,” he said. “There’s a couple of pictures and newspaper clippings. I did some online searching about her too and didn’t come up with any more than what you said on the tour. I mean, I don’t even know if all of the stuff in the box is related. So, like I said, I was coming to town anyway and thought I’d—”
“You said you had time on your hands and decided to come here. That’s not the same thing as coming here anyway.”
“Does it matter?”
Dini looked at him, thinking about the story of Hedda Krause and Irvin Carmichael. A story she knew by heart. A story that her mother had handed down, that they had spent hours telling and retelling each other on long bus rides and in cheap motels while her father slept in the next bed. She wasn’t about to recount this story to a stranger like it was one of her farfetched Alamo Haunting Spirits Ghost Tour tall tales, no matter how desperately she wanted to get her hands on what he tossed aside as a few photos and clippings.
“I suppose not. But when I say you need to know the whole story, I mean—I think you should learn it from Hedda herself.”
“I have no idea what that means, but I’m game. So we can…maybe tomorrow?”
“Not tomorrow, I’m working. Besides, that won’t give you enough time.”
“Time for what?”
Dini took a deep, patience-affirming sigh. “Time to