Cleaning the Gold Read online

  “It could be a wedding present.” Cathy smiled sweetly as she

  sat down at the table. “Wouldn’t that be lovely?”

  Sara shook her head, but not at her mother. What was wrong with her? Why was she worrying about Will’s reaction? She had no idea how much money he had. He paid cash for everything. Whether this was because he didn’t believe in credit cards or because his credit was screwed up was another conversation that they were not having.

  “What was that?” Bella had her head tilted to the side. “Did y’all hear something? Like firecrackers? Or something?”

  Cathy ignored her. “You and Will can make this your home.

  And your sister can take the apartment over the garage.”

  Sara saw the hammer make its final blow. Her mother wasn’t merely trying to control Sara’s life. She wanted to throw in Tessa for good measure.

  Sara said, “I don’t think Tess wants to live over another garage.” Bella asked, “Isn’t she living in a mud hut now?”

  “Sissy, hush.” Cathy asked Sara, “Have you talked to Tessa about moving home?”

  “Not really,” Sara lied. Her baby sister’s marriage was falling apart. She Skyped with her at least twice a day, even though Tessa was living in South Africa. “Mama, you have to let this go. This isn’t the 1950s. I can pay my own bills. My retirement is taken care of. I don’t need to be legally bound to a man. I can take care of myself.”

  Cathy’s expression lowered the temperature in the room. “If that’s what you think marriage is, then I have nothing else to say on the matter.” She pushed herself up from the table and returned to the stove. “Tell Will to wash up for dinner.”

  Sara closed her eyes so that she wouldn’t roll them. She stood up and left the kitchen.

  Her footsteps echoed through the cavernous living room as she skirted the periphery of the ancient Oriental rug. She stopped at the first set of French doors. She pressed her forehead against the glass. Will was happily pushing the lawnmower into the shed. The yard looked spectacular. He had even trimmed the boxwoods into neat rectangles. The edging showed a surgical precision.

  What would he say to a 2.5 million-dollar fixer-upper?

  Sara wasn’t even sure she wanted such a huge responsibility. She had spent the first few years of her marriage remodeling her tiny craftsman bungalow with Jeffrey. Sara keenly recalled the physical exhaustion from stripping wallpaper and painting stair spindles, and the excruciating agony of knowing that she could just write a check and let someone else do it, but her husband was a stubborn, stubborn man.

  Her husband.

  That was the third rail her mother had been reaching for in the kitchen: Did Sara love Will the same way she had loved Jeffrey, and if she did, why wasn’t she marrying him, and if she didn’t, why was she wasting her time?

  All good questions, but Sara found herself caught in a Scarlett O’Hara loop of promising herself that she would think about it tomorrow.

  She shouldered open the door and was met by a wall of heat. Thick humidity made the air feel like it was sweating. Still, she reached up and took the band out of her hair. The added layer on the back of her neck was like a heated oven mitt. Except for the smell of fresh grass, she might as well be walking into a steam room. She trudged up the hill. Her sneakers slipped on some loose rocks. Bugs swarmed around her face. She swatted at them as she walked toward what Bella called the shed but was actually a converted barn with a blue stone floor and space for two horses and a carriage.

  The door was open. Will stood in the middle of the room. His palms were pressed to the top of the workbench as he stared out the window. There was a stillness to him that made Sara wonder if she should interrupt. Something had been bothering him for the last two months. She could feel it edging into almost every part of their lives. She had asked him about it. She had given him space to think about it. She had tried to fuck it out of him. He kept insisting that he was fine, but then she’d catch him doing what he was doing now: staring out a window with a pained expression on his face.

  Sara cleared her throat.

  Will turned around. He’d changed shirts, but the heat had already plastered the material to his chest. Pieces of grass were stuck to his muscular legs. He was long and lean and the smile that he gave Sara momentarily made her forget every single problem she had with him.

  He asked, “Is it time for lunch?”

  She looked at her watch. “It’s one forty-six. We have exactly fourteen minutes of calm before the storm.”

  His smile turned into a grin. “Have you seen the shed? I mean, really seen it?”

  Sara thought it was pretty much a shed, but Will was clearly excited.

  He pointed to a partitioned area in the corner. “There’s a urinal over there. An actual, working urinal. How cool is that?”

  “Awesome,” she muttered in a non-awesome way.

  “Look how sturdy these beams are.” Will was six-four, tall enough to grab the beam and do a few pull-ups. “And look over here. This TV is old, but it still works. And there’s a full refrig- erator and microwave over here where I guess the horses used to live.”

  She felt her lips curve into a smile. He was such a city boy he didn’t know that it was called a stall.

  “And the couch is kind of musty, but it’s really comfortable.” He bounced onto the torn leather couch, pulling her down beside him. “It’s great in here, right?”

  Sara coughed at the swirling dust. She tried not to connect the stack of her uncle’s old Playboys to the creaking couch.

  Will asked, “Can we move in? I’m only halfway kidding.”

  Sara bit her lip. She didn’t want him to be kidding. She wanted him to tell her what he wanted.

  “Look, a guitar.” He picked up the instrument and adjusted the tension on the strings. A few strums later and he was making recognizable sounds. And then he turned it into a song.

  Sara felt the quick thrill of surprise that always came with finding out something new about him.

  Will hummed the opening lines of Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire”.

  He stopped playing. “That’s kind of gross, right? ‘Hey little girl is your daddy home?’”

  “How about ‘Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon’? Or ‘Don’t Stand So Close to Me’? Or the opening line to ‘Sara Smile’?”

  “Damn.” He plucked at the guitar strings. “Hall and Oates, too?”

  “Panic! At the Disco has a better version.” Sara watched his long fingers work the strings. She loved his hands. “When did you learn to play?”

  “High school. Self-taught.” Will gave her a sheepish look. “Think of every stupid thing a sixteen-year-old boy would do to impress a sixteen-year-old girl and I know how to do it.”

  She laughed, because it wasn’t hard to imagine. “Did you have a fade?”

  “Duh.” He kept strumming the guitar. “I did the Pee-wee Herman voice. I could flip a skateboard. Knew all the words to ‘Thriller’. You should’ve seen me in my acid-washed jeans and Nember’s Only jacket.”

  “Nember?”

  “Dollar Store brand. I didn’t say I was a millionaire.” He looked up from the guitar, clearly enjoying her amusement. But then he nodded toward her head, asking, “What’s going on up there?”

  Sara felt her earlier weepiness return. Love overwhelmed her. He was so tuned into her feelings. She so desperately wanted him to accept that it was natural for her to be tuned into his.

  Will put down the guitar. He reached up to her face, used his thumb to rub the worry out of her brow. “That’s better.”

  Sara kissed him. Really kissed him. This part was always easy. She ran her fingers through his sweaty hair. Will kissed her neck, then lower. Sara arched into him. She closed her eyes and let his mouth and hands smooth away all of her doubts.

  They only stopped because the couch gave a sudden, violent shudder.

  Sara asked, “What the hell was that?”

  Will didn’t trot out the obvious joke ab
out his ability to make the earth move. He looked under the couch. He stood up, checking the beams overhead, rapping his knuckles on the petrified wood. “Remember that earthquake in Alabama a few years back? That felt the same, but stronger.”

  Sara straightened her clothes. “The country club does fireworks displays. Maybe they’re testing out a new show?”

  “In broad daylight?” Will looked dubious. He found his phone on the workbench. “There aren’t any alerts.” He scrolled through his messages, then made a call. Then another. Then he tried a third number. Sara waited, expectant, but Will ended up shaking his head. He held up the phone so she could hear the recorded message saying that all circuits were busy.

  She noted the time in the corner of the screen.

  1:51 p.m.

  She told Will, “Emory has an emergency siren. It goes off when there’s a natural disast—”

  Boom!

  The earth gave another violent shake. Sara had to steady herself against the couch before she could follow Will into the backyard.

  He was looking up at the sky. A plume of dark smoke curled up behind the tree line. Sara was intimately familiar with the Emory University campus.

  Fifteen thousand students.

  Six thousand faculty and staff members.

  Two ground-shaking explosions.

  “Let’s go.” Will jogged toward the car. He was a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. Sara was a doctor. There was no need to have a discussion about what they should do.

  “Sara!” Cathy called from the back door. “Did you hear that?”

  “It’s coming from Emory.” Sara ran into the house to find her car keys. She felt her thoughts spinning into dread. The urban campus sprawled over six hundred acres. The Emory University Hospital. Egleston Children’s Hospital. The Centers for Disease Control. The National Public Health Institute. The Yerkes National Primate Research Center. The Winship Cancer Institute. Government labs. Pathogens. Viruses. Terrorist attack? School shooter? Lone gunman?

  “Could it be the bank?” Cathy asked. “There were those bank robbers who tried to blow up the jail.”

  Martin Novak. Sara knew there was an important meeting taking place downtown, but the prisoner was stashed in a safe house well outside of the city.

  Bella said, “Whatever it is, it’s not on the news yet.” She had turned on the kitchen television. “I’ve got Buddy’s old shotgun around here somewhere.”

  Sara found her key fob in her purse. “Stay inside.” She grabbed her mother’s hand, squeezed it tight. “Call Daddy and Tessa and let them know you’re okay.”

  She put her hair up as she walked toward the door. She froze before she reached it.

  They had all frozen in place.

  The deep, mournful wail of the emergency siren filled the air.

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  About the Authors

  Karin Slaughter is one of the world’s most popular and acclaimed storytellers. Published in 120 countries with more than 35 million copies sold across the globe, her 19 novels include the Grant County and Will Trent books, as well as the Edgar®-nominated Cop Town and the instant New York Times bestselling novels Pretty Girls, The Good Daughter and Pieces of Her. Slaughter is the founder of the Save the Libraries project—a nonprofit organization established to support libraries and library programming. A native of Georgia, Karin Slaughter lives in Atlanta. Her standalone novels Pieces of Her, The Good Daughter and Cop Town are in development for film and television.

  www.KarinSlaughter.com

  Lee Child is one of the world’s leading thriller writers. He was born in Coventry, raised in Birmingham, and now lives in New York. It is said one of his novels featuring his hero Jack Reacher is sold somewhere in the world every nine seconds. His books consistently achieve the number-one slot on bestseller lists around the world, and have sold over one hundred million copies. Two blockbusting Jack Reacher movies have been made so far.

  www.LeeChild.com

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  Also by Karin Slaughter

  Blindsighted

  Kisscut

  A Faint Cold Fear

  Indelible

  Faithless

  Triptych

  Beyond Reach

  Fractured

  Undone

  Broken

  Fallen

  Criminal

  Unseen

  Cop Town

  Pretty Girls

  The Kept Woman

  The Good Daughter

  The Last Widow

  Ebook Originals

  Cold, Cold Heart

  Blonde Hair, Blue Eyes

  Last Breath

  Novellas and Stories

  Like a Charm (Editor)

  Also by Lee Child

  The Jack Reacher series

  Killing Floor

  Die Trying

  Tripwire

  The Visitor

  Echo Burning

  Without Fail

  Persuader

  The Enemy

  One Shot

  The Hard Way

  Bad Luck and Trouble

  Nothing to Lose

  Gone Tomorrow

  61 Hours

  Worth Dying For

  The Affair

  A Wanted Man

  Never Go Back

  Personal

  Make Me

  Night School

  No Middle Name (stories)

  The Midnight Line

  Past Tense

  Blue Moon

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Lyrics from “Africa” by David F. Paich and Jeffrey T. Porcaro.

  Will Trent is a trademark of Karin Slaughter Publishing LLC.

  Excerpt from The Last Widow copyright © 2019 by Karin Slaughter.

  cleaning the gold. Copyright © 2019 by Karin Slaughter and Lee Child. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Digital Edition MAY 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-297022-0

  Cover designed by Claire Ward

  William Morrow and HarperCollins are registered trademarks of HarperCollins Publishers in the United States of America and other countries.

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