It had been a long, long time since I was out there.

After the business with the black van, we had the road to ourselves. And when we pulled up to my childhood home, that sense of being alone magnified. Dad’s house, where I grew up, was set on the outskirts of the outskirts of town. The cabin had seen better days. I mean that in both the physical sense, and the poetic sense.

With nobody left to keep it up, it looked like a dump. Especially with the junkyard beside it. That was Dad’s front for money. Dad took meticulous car of the junkyard when he was alive, keeping it neat and orderly behind the chain-link fence so it wouldn’t take away too much from the lush forest behind and around it. Now, the tire pile had fallen over, the fenders and chassis were collecting rust, stoves and fridges were caving in and forming homes for squirrels and owls. It was clear people had picked through the place for anything worth carrying away. I sighed. It was the only thing I could do.

Why hadn’t I been back here? When Dad first went away, I came around once a week to weed, garden, and keep the house from falling apart. And then a year went by, and another. Somewhere along the line the place started to depress me, and I knew my dad’s chances of getting parole were as good as zero. I closed up the door one day and never came back.

I always figured I’d go out the next weekend, or the next weekend, or the next. But I hadn’t, for three years of weekends. Even when he died, I was in no rush to go. His will was simple. His wake was a party at the Piper. Everything - his house and everything in it - was left to me. Just like my plans to come around and clean up the place while he was alive, my plans to come out and go through his things - our things - kept getting put on hold. Now, I regretted it.

“Let’s go, Misty,” Rev prodded, putting his hand on my lower back. I was naval gazing, and we didn’t have time for that. I took his hand and stomped across the overgrown lawn, past the birdbath with its dark rainwater deposit, around the corner of the house to the backyard.

I noted the kitchen window was busted open, and wondered what kind of kids could be out here throwing rocks. And then, of course, I realized it wouldn’t have been kids throwing rocks. Jackie would have sent men out here, too. Tramping all over my childhood home. Ripping pictures of me off the walls. Going through my dead father’s things. Their dirty hands were probably all over my memories, ripping up my childhood mattress, the photo albums, the Christmas ornaments.

“Wait,” I said. “One minute.”

I pulled away, but Rev squeezed my hand, sending me a look that said no time.

“There’s time for this,” I snapped, and ripped my hand away. The key to the back door was still under the heart-shaped rock. They could have looked a little bit and found it, lazy fucks. I slipped into the kitchen. It looked like a war zone.

I ignored the clenching in my chest and went straight to the cabinets; there, on the very top shelf, where even now I had to climb on the counter to reach it, was the false panel. Opening it, I found the cigar box, intact.

The box held my grandfather’s ring, a photograph of my mother, my father’s burnished gold pocket-watch, and a lock of my baby hair, among other sentimental treasures. I put it under my arm, headed back for the door, and stopped. The kitchen clock ticked. I knew it would only hurt to go into the living room. I knew what I wanted might not even be there. But I had to see. In case it was, I had to see.

Wouldn’t you know it, there it was. The glass was broken now, the frame useless, but it was there. The two pictures I wanted. In one, I was sitting on my father’s shoulders, we were both giving peace signs. We were in the Smokies. In the other, my father and I, with all his “friends”. The picture taken long before they became enemies. Before they betrayed him, and me. My stomach turned, I grabbed the pictures from the frame, slipped them into the cigar box, and went back outside.

“See? Just took a minute,” I said to Rev’s impatient glare. “Come on.”

The fairy house tree was thirty yards into the woods behind the house. There was still a hint of a trail leading there. These woods were my playground, growing up. I knew them by muscle memory. The jagged rock that gave me the scar on my shin, the log where I got sprayed by a skunk. The fairy house tree was still standing. And Dad’s squirrel barrier was intact. My heart pounded as I lifted its angry hinges, looking inside.

Everything was just as I remembered it. The pizza-table. The thimbles. The tiny, tiny tea set. The little stick-sided frame with my school photo inside. The miniature bear, and his cow friend. My throat was dry, tongue swelling. Where was the money? I didn’t see…

Oh. Taped to the “ceiling” of the fairy house was an envelope. A thin envelope. My brow furrowed as I looked at it; surely that couldn’t be the money that caused all this bullshit? A stick cracked behind me and I jumped, turning.

“Sorry,” Rev said; he was pacing a bit, looking back at the house, standing guard. I thought I heard something else in the distance, but chalked it up to my imagination. I grabbed the envelope and pulled.

“Jesus, Dad,” I sighed. Rev was torn between keeping his eyes on the house and the road beyond, and coming to my side to see what I’d found. “What did he think? This would be a fun little scavenger hunt for me?”

The envelope held a piece of paper, telling me to walk thirty paces east and look for “the dogwood.” He put that in quotes. The money was buried underneath it.

“We need a shovel,” I groaned. “There’s one in the shed.”

“Here,” Rev handed me the gun from the Bel Air; it’d been tucked away on his person ever since he saved Purrloin, a million years before.

“You need it more than me,” I said, confused.

“Baby, if I need it, and I don’t get to use it in time, it won’t do you any good,” he said. Before I could protest, he was trotting through the woods. And I was alone, listening to the birds and the creaking woods, all the sounds of the earth, dull and lively and ignorant of all this human pettiness. Ignorant of the tyranny of money. Rev disappeared. I played with the gun, shifted the cigar box from one arm to the other. Thought better of it, and leaned down to tuck it behind the tree. We could pick it up on the way out.

Rev came back into view, holding the shovel. He was trotting. No, he wasn’t, he was running. Shit. Shit. Shit!