“What is in the letters?”
“The letters are everything. The letters are your why. But I don’t know how he’s stopping them from sending. I don’t even know how he could know what’s in them.”
I knew. I didn’t want to let the memories back in, but I knew how. “Mom.”
Alice stabbed a finger toward the table as she said, “She’d never do that. Ever. She didn’t trust anyone.”
I closed my eyes and covered them with my palms. I suddenly felt exhausted, like I’d been at this for days and days rather than a few hours. “She was drugged out of her mind in the end.” I dropped my hands to the table but kept my eyes shut. Remembering what I most longed to forget. “She’d call for us, but he wouldn’t let us in with her unless she was sleeping. He said she was talking madness, and he didn’t want us to remember her like that.” I spent so much of my focus trying to keep the tears away, I wasn’t able to soften the bitterness from my voice when I added, “As if we couldn’t hear.”
As if she wasn’t ours, too.
Alice’s hand fell across mine, and I twitched away from her touch again. “Sorry,” I mumbled.
“Did he do that, too?” I didn’t have to look up at her to see her gesturing vaguely at my face.
I nodded and then shrugged. But Alice reached across to lay her hand over mine once more, her voice soft but urgent. “She didn’t want this for you. She would never have left you with him like this if she had a choice. You need to know that.”
I shrugged again. Because it wouldn’t be for long. I would get the boys and me out somehow. But figuring out how required focusing on my mother right now, on these -people my father had murdered, on what I needed to know and scraping away the rest of it. “What is in the letters?”
“Locations. To the stockpiles.”
Like a park planter that might have had more hidden than Mom’s getaway identity, or a dug-up square just six paces from a clover carving in the tree, which could definitely have once held a box of money. Had they all died next to their locations? Yes. I was almost sure they had.
“Why Regent’s Park?” I asked. “They all died in different places in the park.”
Alice stared at the table, her eyes glazed in memory as she spoke. “We all kept ten thousand there.”
“Pounds?”
She seemed to snap free of her trance. “After our last job we all met there to split the money. It’s where we all said good-bye. A sentimental place, I guess. It was also the only place we all knew about, not that it was much money, really.”
“Ten thousand pounds?”
She grinned, though it felt like she was studying me again. “Sorte Juntos was your mother’s idea. She always was the mastermind, and this was Ems at her most brilliant.” Alice smiled in memory. “Damn. The way her mind worked. It was so simple, so perfect. Her greatest con.”
“Con? My mother was a con artist married to a copper?”
Alice’s smile widened. “Right? Exhibit A of the ‘you can’t choose who you love’ cliché. But Emily Ferris wasn’t just a con artist. She was a master thief. The best I’d ever met. And Sorte Juntos made it so all of us could have retired forever.”
I winced away from Mum’s name, too quickly realizing the last time I’d heard it spoken aloud was at her memorial. I saw it next to my bed every morning, but hearing it said aloud was different. I wondered what that meant, to have your name go unsaid for so long. “Not everyone retired, though.”
Alice shook her head. “Every artist has her own muse. Money, even filthy amounts of money, is almost never the cure—not for a true con artist. It’s that moment you know you have them, that’s what keeps most of us going.”
I held back a laugh. “We’ve never had filthy amounts of money.”
“No?” Alice asked, meeting my gaze with a confidence she hadn’t shown me all afternoon. “But you’ve always had enough—all those years living downtown in London, on a cop’s salary?”
I’d never thought about the house, or how we’d come to live there. Never thought about bills and how they got paid—how all of us had gone to private schools.
“That’s part of it. You can’t go living high and mighty when you pull off a con as big as we did. You have to stash the money and draw on it slowly. ‘Live your best life, not the misery of the wealthy.’ That’s what your mom used to say. She was the preacher, and we were her choir.”
“What was the con?”
Alice shook her head like she wasn’t going to tell me, then sighed. “We took down four of the largest targets in London—a bank, a jeweler, a museum, and an airport warehouse. We did them all in teams of three, all in one month, and then we were done. Always the same MO, but always different teams of three, so the eyewitness accounts were always different heights and voices and colorings. And best of all? We were all each other’s alibi—well, us and the fifty or so your mom invited to the parties she’d throw on the nights of the heists.”