Page 60 of The Bitter Heir and the Beauty

“So are you going to tell me?” he asks, eyes dipping slightly in the direction of my mouth as if he’s waiting to hear me speak the words ... or is it for something else?

“How good are you at keeping secrets?” I ask, feeling dangerously close to revealing mine.

Chapter 14

Secret Treasure

It’s no surprise that Honey has secrets. They’re hidden in the depths of her eyes. But it is a bit of a shock when she takes my hand in hers. I glance down as if worried the crocogator got ahold of me.

But it’s just her calloused fingers in mine. She doesn’t wear any jewelry ... maybe I’d like to change that even though I’m as far from admitting this as I will be from her come tomorrow.

But I don’t want to think about distance with our hands linked.

Instead, I tighten my grip as if to tell Honey that I trust her to lead me wherever we’re going.

We pass through the gathering room with the vandalized family tree and reach a narrow hall that dead ends. We pause in front of a painting of three men on horseback, disappearing into the sunset. It evokes a certain nostalgia for the old west and pioneer days, so I left it there. Honey reaches for it like she’s going to tear it off the wall with one hand, but instead, I hear a click.

My eyebrows bounce as the painting opens on a hinge. Wispy cobwebs fill half the opening, but it’s big enough for someone my size to step through, so I follow Honey.

“You knew this was here?” I ask, my voice a dull echo.

“Of course.” There are those words again. I wonder what else I’m going to learn tonight.

I cough from the dank, dusty air and would very much like my respirator and maybe my helmet just to be safe.

We turn right and the passage curves slightly.

“Are we behind the fireplace in the gathering room?”

“The office.”

I picture the chateau’s layout in my head, placing our location. “I thought I’d combed the house from top to bottom, but I didn’t find this.”

“You’ve hardly scratched the surface. Remember, Tickle ran with the Boot Beer Boys. He was a gambler too. That man kept no shortage of secrets, stashes, and stories that most would say are Hogwash.”

“But not all,” I say, picking up her meaning.

We stop again and without the aid of light, Honey manages to manipulate some levers into rotating the floor like the lazy Susan in my mother’s spice cabinet. It opens to the dining room and we’re standing where the China cabinet should be.

“Because all the fine China was gone, we didn’t have to worry about making any noise,” Honey says.

“Who’s we?”

“Les Trois Tasses,” she says in her Cajun French accent.

“My translation is a bit rusty, buttroismeans three in French, right?”

“Oui.” She nods.

“What about the rest?”

“It means The Three Cups. It was my cousin’s idea. Like those shell games where something is hidden under one cup orshell, and the trickster shuffles them around, and then the player has to guess where the hidden object, usually their cash, went.”

“Right into the trickster’s pocket.” Was the trickster Honey?

“Exactly.” She crosses the room and gently taps the bar rail. The wainscotting pops open and she crouches down like she’s done this dozens of times.

I drop to a squat. “Trois, three, so you, your cousin, and who was the third member?”

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