The trees are runty, choking each other in their struggle for space and sun, but they are tall enough to filter the moonlight. Two or three times Morris loses the path and blunders around, trying to find it again. This actually pleases him. He has the sound of the stream to guide him if he really does lose his way, and the path’s faintness confirms that fewer kids use it now than back in his day. Morris just hopes he’s not walking through poison ivy.
The sound of the stream is very close when he finds the path for the last time, and less than five minutes later, he’s standing on the bank opposite the landmark tree. He stops there for a bit in the moon-dappled shade, looking for any sign of human habitation: blankets, a sleeping bag, a shopping cart, a piece of plastic draped over branches to create a makeshift tent. There’s nothing. Just the water purling along in its stony bed, and the tree tilting over the far side of the stream. The tree that has faithfully guarded his treasure all these years.
‘Good old tree,’ Morris whispers, and steps his way across the stream.
He kneels and puts aside the tools and the duffel bags for a moment of meditation. ‘Here I am,’ he whispers, and places his palms on the ground, as if feeling for a heartbeat.
And it seems that he does feel one. It’s the heartbeat of John Rothstein’s genius. The old man turned Jimmy Gold into a sellout joke, but who can say Rothstein didn’t redeem Jimmy during his years of solitary composition? If he did that … if … then everything Morris has gone through has been worthwhile.
‘Here I am, Jimmy. Here I finally am.’
He grabs the spade and begins digging. It doesn’t take long to get to the trunk again, but the roots have embraced it, all right, and it’s almost an hour before Morris can chop through enough of them to pull it out. It’s been years since he did hard manual labor, and he’s exhausted. He thinks of all the cons he knew – Charlie Roberson, for example – who worked out constantly, and how he sneered at them for what he considered obsessive-compulsive behavior (in his mind, at least; never on his face). He’s not sneering now. His thighs ache, his back aches, and worst of all, his head is throbbing like an infected tooth. A little breeze has sprung up, which cools the sweat sliming his skin, but it also causes the branches to sway, creating moving shadows that make him afraid. They make him think of McFarland again. McFarland making his way up the path, moving with the eerie quiet some big men, soldiers and ex-athletes, mostly, are able to manage.
When he’s got his breath and his heartbeat has slowed a little, Morris reaches for the handle at the end of the trunk and finds it’s no longer there. He leans forward on his splayed palms, peering into the hole, wishing he’d remembered to bring a flashlight.
The handle is still there, only it’s hanging in two pieces.
That’s not right, Morris thinks. Is it?
He casts his mind back across all those years, trying to remember if either trunk handle was broken. He doesn’t think so. In fact, he’s almost sure. But then he remembers tipping the trunk endwise in the garage, and exhales a sigh of relief strong enough to puff out his cheeks. It must have broken when he put the trunk on the dolly. Or maybe while he was bumping and thumping his way along the path to this very location. He had dug the hole in a hurry and muscled the trunk in as fast as he could. Wanting to get out of there and much too busy to notice a little thing like a broken handle. That was it. Had to be. After all, the trunk hadn’t been new when he bought it.
He grasps the sides, and the trunk slides out of its hole so easily that Morris overbalances and flops on his back. He lies there, staring up at the bright bowl of the moon, and tries to tell himself nothing is wrong. Only he knows better. He might be able to talk himself out of the broken handle, but not out of this new thing.
The trunk is too light.
Morris scrambles back to a sitting position with smears of dirt now sticking to his damp skin. He brushes his hair off his forehead with a shaking hand, leaving a fresh streak.
The trunk is too light.
He reaches for it, then draws back.
I can’t, he thinks. I can’t. If I open it and the notebooks aren’t there, I’ll just … snap.
But why would anyone take a bunch of notebooks? The money, yes, but the notebooks? There wasn’t even any space left to write in most of them; in most, Rothstein had used it all.
What if someone took the money and then burned the notebooks? Not understanding their incalculable value, just wanting to get rid of something a thief might see as evidence?
‘No,’ Morris whispers. ‘No one would do that. They’re still in there. They have to be.’