Page 61 of Resisting the Boss (Dirty Hot Resistance 4)

Jace purses his lips. “This paper is years old and the scandals that broke out were after this. Look.” He points towards the scribbling besides each name and the date stamp on the papers. “The date is more than a decade old and the scandals that broke out happened a few years later.”

I feel uncomfortable. “So, what does that mean?”

Jace puts the paper back on the floor. “It means that your mother was a very dangerous person. She might have had some information people wanted that made her go on the run, initially.”

Till she got caught.

I know about information brokers. They usually have a handler and not all of them have their hands in the dirt. Some are even contracted by the government.

But my mother being one of them is something I never imagined. The news is startling and it takes me a few minutes to absorb it.

This time, I look around the room with a new pair of eyes, saying slowly, “So someone was looking for something in here.”

Jace runs his hands along the furniture and his voice is thoughtful as he replies, “Yeah, but this happened quite a while ago. There’s dust everywhere, even on the papers on the ground.” He looks over his shoulder at the doorway. “The lower portion of the house looks like it’s been cleaned on a weekly basis, so why leave this room unattended?”

“And mine,” I add, telling him about the state of my childhood room, as well as that of my mother’s. “I’ll have to talk to Uncle Raymond and tell him. Whoever he hired, if he did, to keep the house maintained is doing a strange job of it.”

Jace looks uneasy. “Raymond doesn’t come down here, does he?”

I shake my head. “Losing Mom shook him so much that he never returned. He said he couldn’t bear to.”

“Then he should know that someone might be squatting here.” He looks at me. “It’s about to rain and unless you want to spend the night here, let’s find what you’re looking for and go back to the hotel.”

I nod and make my way to the electricity socket behind where the desk used to be. I feel Jace’s eyes on me as I put my hands around it and twist. You need to know the right way to turn it, and sure enough, the socket neatly comes out in my hand, revealing the gaping hole behind it.

The socket is an exceptionally large one, and I stick my hand in, searching for the small lever that helps me remove a portion of the fake wall.

“Be careful,” Jace warns me. “There might be rats in the wall.”

“It’s not a wall.” I grin at him. “Mom tore up this section and put in a safe here. This is just a false wall. Wait…” I press the lever and sure enough a small portion, the size of an oven door, separates from the smooth wall, neatly. I open the door. “Mom built this herself. Well, the safe she bought, but she hid it inside the wall and we covered it with a different portion of the same wallpaper to hide it.”

Jace blinks. “That is some over-the-top precaution.”

I still for a heartbeat.

He’s right.

As a child, this had been a fascinating secret only me and my mom knew of, but I had never thought about how odd it was. What could she have to hide that she couldn’t in a safety deposit box or in a normal safe?

However, asking questions at this point is useless because there is no one to answer them. So, I just reach in and take out the large box inside. It’s a heavy wooden box and I have some difficulty dragging it out, prompting Jace to help me.

It’s been so long since the box was opened that it seems to be stuck and it takes some heroic pulling from Jace’s side to get it to unstick.

When I see the contents, my brain goes numb.

When the letter had said that there was some money, I assumed a few hundred dollars, but the entire box is filled with packets of hundred-dollar bills.

Even as Jace’s face grows pale, as he takes out the money, and once everything is out, he’s silent for a few minutes before saying, hoarsely, “This is roughly around three quarters of a million dollars, Halley!”

My mouth is dry and I can’t think.

I’ve never seen such a large sum of money in my life.

“What do I do with this?” I mumble, reeling from this staggering shock. “Where did Mom get all this money from?”

Jace stares at the money. “If she was an information broker, this must have been chump change to her. But why hide money in the house? Why not take it with her when she ran?”

Suddenly, the contents of the letter start to make a little sense. “Because she knew someone was watching her and that she might not get away. This was her insurance, for me.”

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