Page 59 of Crash and Burn

He wasn't going to go there. “Then what did you remember?”

“Old houses have secrets.” She said it almost cryptically.

She was right, but it didn't actually mean anything. It didn't tell him why she was on her knees, pushing at bricks already covered in spots of black dust, the fingerprints standing out as stark reminders of her home being invaded again … “I don’t understand.”

“Aunt Abbie told me that when the house was built, there were soldiers in this area and they liked to leave secret messages. She said every hearth had a loose brick.”

Interesting. Maggie was looking for a hidey hole.

“Did Sabbie show you which one?”

“Of course not. That would be too easy.” She was still on her knees, still examining the bricks for something he didn’t see and then pushing on each one.

She waved her now blackened fingers in an arc around the open fireplace. “Looking at the fingerprints here, I can tell you that she toldhim.”

Sebastian felt his eyes fly wide open. This time, he looked past Maggie. There were distinct patterns to the collections of fingerprints. There were a handful above the mantle, where Maggie had set pictures and a mirror—all of which had been moved in the FBI search, so he couldn’t tell what those prints meant now. There were some at the side of the opening to the fireplace. And still others clustered on one or several bricks in a few different spots. But right next to them, whole swaths of brick were clean, with no dust or prints at all.

“Holy shit, you’re right.” Whether or not it was here, Sebastian didn't know. “Step back with me.”

He put his hand on her shoulder and in a fluid motion, Maggie rose to her feet. Taking a few steps back, they examined the whole fireplace with a new plan.

Sebastian watched as she almost wiped her fingers on her pants, but then managed to lace them together and keep the fingerprint powder off her clothes.

“Do you see a pattern to it?” he asked.

“I don't know. My guess is that he was looking for a singular brick that comes out if jiggled the right way.”

She took a breath and said, “The problem is that I can’t tell which prints are me touching the wall to close the fireplace, or the FBI moving the pictures, or someone trying to find a loose brick.”

“So, we start with the ones that have a lot of fingerprints.”

“There's a few clusters on the lower left, and most of them are on the upper right. It looks like he didn't remember which brick, but he knew where to look.”

The two of them now dove into it together. They pushed and pried and tried to budge individual bricks. The fireplace had been painted white at some point. The question was, was it before or after whoever-he-was had hidden information there?

“How did the crime scene techs even find all these prints? Who would look at a fireplace for clues?” Maggie eventually asked.

At least this was something he could answer. “They probably didn't. They look everywhere using special lights. Then they dust and collect every print they find.”

“I thought the technique lifted the print … so why are they all still here?”

“The tape they use lifts the top layer of dust. They don’t need the actual print—the oils left behind—unless they’re after DNA. And these days, sometimes they just photograph it.”

They were still pushing on bricks when he had a thought. “Do you have Sabbie’s prints on file somewhere? Does the city?”

“Why?”

“Do you think maybe her fingerprints are still in the house? Maybe some of these are hers.” Nostalgia struck him. The techs might have revealed traces of Maggie’s aunt still here.

“Her prints are on the documents, probably, but not on the walls or anything.” She motioned to the windows where more black powder covered the edge as though tiny little dark snowfalls had simply deposited around her house. “I had a professional cleaning company come through. They cleaned every nook and cranny. It was so expensive.”

“This place is so big and so full of nooks and crannies,” Sebastian mused. It was no modern home, where the walls could just be wiped down. There was wainscoting in the dining room and a chair rail and crown molding in every room. He couldn’t imagine being responsible for keeping it clean. “It's beautiful. And Sabbie loved this place.”

“Then why didn’t she take better care of it?” Maggie asked. “She didn’t fix a lot of what needed it. The roof is old, and the floors have to be refinished. That wallpaper should have been replaced about three decades ago …”

He heard the sigh in her voice, but he also remembered Sabbie. “She just loved it exactly as it was, at least that's how I understood it. I don't know, maybe she didn't have enough money.”

But he guessed Maggie knew that and he probably shouldn't have said it. Sebastian tried again. “Despite wearing those old jeans that had completely lost their color and those workman shirts, I always got the impression she chose that cabbage rose wallpaper and the fancy antique sofa.”

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