Mrs. Havermann writhed up on one elbow and the head of the bedstead. “Karen, look at me.” When Karen had turned, Mrs. Havermann went on: “I don’t want you pleading for me. I don’t want a word from you in my behalf. You no longer mean anything to me. The love and loyalty I might have expected from you are as ashes. I want nothing from you. You owe me nothing.” Tears filled Karen’s eyes, ready to spill; and then Mrs. Havermann forced her head forward a little, and from between the cotton-flecked lips she spat into Karen’s face.

Skip laughed. Eddie moved to the rim of the room, anxious, hating the delay, hating his own feelings of fear and inadequacy.

“Why do we take time to argue?” Eddie said. “She’s hidden the money to save it for Stolz. So we find it. We don’t have to hurt anybody.”

“In this place we find it?” Skip hollered.

“Karen can help. She’ll know the places it could be hidden.”

Karen had gone away from Mrs. Havermann and the bed. She had wiped the spit off her face with her sleeve. At the moment Mrs. Havermann had leaned forward and spat, a look of unbelieving shock had flooded Karen. But now she seemed to have regained a dull composure.

“How about it?” Skip demanded of Karen.

She looked around at them, at Eddie and Skip. She didn’t look at Mrs. Havermann. “Yes, I guess so.”

They split up. Karen said she’d take the attic and the upper bedrooms, let Eddie and Skip search the easier area downstairs. There was a basement too, she told them; nothing in it but the oil furnace, though they’d have to check.

In the kitchen, in a lower cupboard behind a stack of canned dog food, Skip found two packets of hundred-dollar bills. For an instant he was about to let out a shout, thinking he’d located the hoard; but then in sizing it up he noted that the two packets were out of the way in a dark spot, as if Mrs. Havermann might have started to put the money in there and then changed her mind, retrieving what she had stored. These two packets had escaped her searching fingers.