It would turn this town into a tacky resort destination and attract the wrong kind of tourists—the kind looking for cheap lodgings and fast food. The shops in town wouldn’t have customers plunking down hundreds of dollars for Chanel sunglasses, and the restaurants and country clubs and golf courses would sit empty. Everyone, from the business owners to the people scrubbing their floors and toilets, would suffer.

“Seems the town council wouldn’t allow such a thing. You didn’t have to buy up all the land.”

“I didn’t say rerouting 32 was a bad idea. Done right, it would create a big, flat, lakefront parcel accessible by a brand-new four-lane road. In someone else’s hands, someone committed to maintaining the look and feel of Lake Crosby and its surroundings, it could be a gold mine.”

“In other words, you.”

He lifts both hands from the table. Paul has always been a shrewd businessman.

“But how come this is the first I’ve heard about it? If I hadn’t looked in the safe, I wouldn’t know about Pitts Cove or any of the other properties.”

“None of this is a secret. There are copies of the deeds all over the office, in the file cabinets and on the server. I just don’t talk about them much because they’re long-term investments. I can’t do anything until I own all the land, and that takes time.”

He looks me in the eye as he says it, and his words come without the slightest hesitation, not even the tiniest pause to think. So far, all his answers have come this way, and they all make a weird sort of sense. I want to believe it, but I can taste the lie buried underneath his words, the way this explanation is meant to deceive.

“You own all the land on Pitts Cove,” I remind him. “Every single inch.”

He nods. “True, but I can’t really do much with it just yet. The timing’s not exactly ideal.”

“Because Pitts Cove is haunted?”

He laughs, the first genuine one I’ve heard from him in days. “Come on. You don’t really believe that, do you?”

“No, but plenty of other people do. There’s not a soul around who doesn’t know what happened there, who’s been sitting on the lake bottom for the past twenty years. Nobody wants to live there.”

He shrugs. “So I’ll sit on the deeds a little longer.”

Before Paul, I thought being rich meant a full refrigerator. I thought it meant an insulated roof over my head and the ATM spitting out cash every time I tapped in my pin code. I never dreamed it meant sitting on a million-dollar investment until a collective memory fades. Who knows how long that will take? Maybe decades, maybe never. But Paul doesn’t seem the least bit worried.