was wrapped in aluminum foil and in the fridge. He told me to never hook the house up to any kind of smart surveillance system. No Siri. No Alexa. No Google Home. No video cameras that could be hacked into from a third party and used against us. He didn’t even want the house alarm hooked up to the police.
“You can never be too paranoid,” Juan warned me.
You had to watch it with credit cards, too. Your last movements so easily traced. Any stranger could be watching from a distance. Waiting. Spying. So many things were falling into place, now making sense. Except the I am done with you note from that woman. That still remained an enigma. I wouldn’t bring it up now though.
One step at a time.
He’d stashed the money in several divers’ waterproof dry-bags, the type you can put expensive cameras in and still go underwater. At first Juan did all the lifting, all the digging. He didn’t want me to touch the bags, but I ended up helping him. If this hadn’t been possible blood money I would’ve felt a sort of thrill from tip to toe, knowing Juan was trusting me like this, letting me be his partner in crime. But I felt disgusted. Implicated. Guilty as hell. If any death was related to this money—which I suspected it most definitely was—it was cursed, even if Juan had earned it in earnest.
It was only later that I allowed myself to feel anger. My own husband had put my life in danger, involving me in something I never should have known about. Not giving me a choice. Like back in school, I was being made to break the rules. Except, no… I wasn’t being “made” to do anything. And I did have a choice. I had free will, didn’t I? I had let myself be manipulated.
I’d told myself I was doing it for love. And I was.
“It’s just temporary,” Juan assured me as he wiped the sweat from his brow with his gardening glove, making his hands loom larger than usual. “Till I get this lot invested, a year or two from now. We can buy a villa in Tuscany, or Lake Como, how about that? It’s easier to pay black in Europe.”
The hole was now dug. It had taken hours: hacking between the fused but paradoxically shallow redwood roots, intertwining with neighboring trees in a network that held each other up—the tallest species of tree on the planet, around since the time of dinosaurs.
I was exhausted, both emotionally and physically. Who knew how heavy money could be? The moon, perfectly full and round—the ring around it like a halo—glimmered. A witness to our deed.
We chucked a couple of the bags into the burial site. “What if we’re never able to find the money again?” I asked Juan. “What if we forget where we buried it?”
“I’ve marked the co-ordinates down, honey, don’t worry. We can put them in the wall safe tonight. Too risky to store on any phone.”
“Why don’t we set up a hidden camera so we know if someone gets too close?”
“Bad idea. There’s too much counter-surveillance equipment and bug detectors that can track cameras,” he whispered. “The last thing we want to do is draw attention to the site. Tomorrow we’ll come back and hide our tracks, smooth it all down and cover the earth with leaves and cones, smooth out the wheelbarrow marks. For tonight, I’m going to tie a string round this redwood. Mark the spot until the co-ordinates are written down and in the safe.”
He’d thought of everything. We each took an end of string and encircled the great tree, our bodies meeting in a bump, our fingers fumbling together in the moonlit dark. The girth was enormous—a good fifteen feet around. I tied the knot around the tree’s soft, furrowed and fluted bark. “Tying the knot” took on a whole new meaning to our marriage. I thought of the tree’s Latin name, Sequoia sempervirens, meaning everlasting, and hoped it was a good omen for our union. This redwood was our protector.
Or so I had hoped.
But this was two days before Juan flew off that cliff in a race to get to the airport.
If anything happens to me.
It was as if he knew. Had these people killed him? I wondered that all the time.
At first, I had been tempted. Tempted, after Juan’s death, to go to the authorities and let them know the full story. But then I raked through