He was still mulling his options a month later, and had almost come to the conclusion that trying to sell even one of the notebooks would be too much risk for too little reward. If it went to a private collector – like the ones he had sometimes read about, who bought valuable paintings to hang in secret rooms where only they could look at them – it would be okay. But he couldn’t be sure that would happen. He was leaning more and more to the idea of donating them anonymously, maybe mailing them to the New York University Library. The curator of a place like that would understand the value of them, no doubt. But doing that would be a little more public than Pete liked to think about, not at all like dropping the letters with the money inside them into anonymous streetcorner mailboxes. What if someone remembered him at the post office?
Then, on a rainy night in late April of 2014, Tina came to his room again. Mrs Beasley was long gone, and the footy pajamas had been replaced by an oversized Cleveland Browns football jersey, but to Pete she looked very much like the worried girl who had asked, during the Era of Bad Feelings, if their mother and father were going to get divorced. Her hair was in pigtails, and with her face cleansed of the little makeup Mom let her wear (Pete had an idea she put on fresh layers when she got to school), she looked closer to ten than going on thirteen. He thought, Teens is almost a teen. It was hard to believe.
‘Can I come in for a minute?’
‘Sure.’
He was lying on his bed, reading a novel by Philip Roth called When She Was Good. Tina sat on his desk chair, pulling her jersey nightshirt down over her shins and blowing a few errant hairs from her forehead, where a faint scattering of acne had appeared.
‘Something on your mind?’ Pete asked.
‘Um … yeah.’ But she didn’t go on.
He wrinkled his nose at her. ‘Go on, spill it. Some boy you’ve been crushing on told you to buzz off?’
‘You sent that money,’ she said. ‘Didn’t you?’
Pete stared at her, flabbergasted. He tried to speak and couldn’t. He tried to persuade himself she hadn’t said what she’d said, and couldn’t do that, either.
She nodded as if he had admitted it. ‘Yeah, you did. It’s all over your face.’
‘It didn’t come from me, Teens, you just took me by surprise. Where would I get money like that?’
‘I don’t know, but I remember the night you asked me what I’d do if I found a buried treasure.’
‘I did?’ Thinking, You were half-asleep. You can’t remember that.
‘Doubloons, you said. Coins from olden days. I said I’d give it to Dad and Mom so they wouldn’t fight anymore, and that’s just what you did. Only it wasn’t pirate treasure, it was regular money.’
Pete put his book aside. ‘Don’t you go telling them that. They might actually believe you.’
She looked at him solemnly. ‘I never would. But I need to ask you … is it really all gone?’
‘The note in the last envelope said it was,’ Pete replied cautiously, ‘and there hasn’t been any more since, so I guess so.’
She sighed. ‘Yeah. What I figured. But I had to ask.’ She got up to go.
‘Tina?’
‘What?’
‘I’m really sorry about Chapel Ridge and all. I wish the money wasn’t gone.’
She sat down again. ‘I’ll keep your secret if you keep one Mom and I have. Okay?’
‘Okay.’
‘Last November she took me to Chap – that’s what the girls call it – for one of their tour days. She didn’t want Dad to know, because she thought he’d be mad, but back then she thought they maybe could afford it, especially if I got a need scholarship. Do you know what that is?’
Pete nodded.
‘Only the money hadn’t stopped coming then, and it was before all the snow and weird cold weather in December and January. We saw some of the classrooms, and the science labs. There’s like a jillion computers. We also saw the gym, which is humongous, and the showers. They have private changing booths, too, not just cattle stalls like at Northfield. At least they do for the girls. Guess who my tour group had for a guide?’
‘Barbara Robinson?’
She smiled. ‘It was great to see her again.’ Then the smile faded. ‘She said hello and gave me a hug and asked how everyone was, but I could tell she hardly remembered me. Why would she, right? Did you know her and Hilda and Betsy and a couple of other girls from back then were at the ’Round Here concert? The one the guy who ran over Dad tried to blow up?’
‘Yeah.’ Pete also knew that Barbara Robinson’s big brother had played a part in saving Barbara and Barbara’s friends and maybe thousands of others. He had gotten a medal or a key to the city, or something. That was real heroism, not sneaking around and mailing stolen money to your parents.
‘Did you know I was invited to go with them that night?’
‘What? No!’
Tina nodded. ‘I said I couldn’t because I was sick, but I wasn’t. It was because Mom said they couldn’t afford to buy me a ticket. We moved a couple of months later.’
‘Jesus, how about that, huh?’
‘Yeah, I missed all the excitement.’
‘So how was the school tour?’
‘Good, but not great, or anything. I’ll be fine at Northfield. Hey, once they find out I’m your sister, they’ll probably give me a free ride, Honor Roll Boy.’
Pete suddenly felt sad, almost like crying. It was the sweetness that had always been part of Tina’s nature combined with that ugly scatter of pimples on her forehead. He wondered if she got teased about those. If she didn’t yet, she would.