Nessa counted the bills as she picked them up—twenty-four in all. Then she noticed that the date on them was the previous year. She drew her brows down in a deep frown and carried the money to the kitchen. “Are you testing me or whoever cleans out the closet? I’ll share this with Flynn and April, but why did you put it up there unless . . .” Nessa clamped a hand over her mouth. “You knew you were sick, didn’t you? You put this money there for us grandkids to find. This was probably the last of your quilting-business money.”

She stared down the hallway at the empty closet and then looked toward the living room. “On the outside, you were prim and proper and God-fearing. But on the inside, you were like this closet—messy and locked up—and you knew your family was all in a jumble, too.”

She put the chair back where it belonged, laid the money on the dining room table, and was about to leave the house when Waylon came wandering down the hallway. “I wish you could talk to me,” she told him, “and tell me what was going on here those last months before she died. I guess I’ll never know what she was thinking when she put that money up there on the shelf. Do you think she was really losing her mind, like my dad says?”

The cat meowed loudly, jumped up on the sofa, and curled up to take another nap.

“A lot of help you are,” Nessa said. “I’m going to the falls to try to figure out why she put money away on that shelf. Did she really leave it for us cousins, or was she up there hiding things and just tucked the envelope away?”

When she was halfway there, the noise of tires crunching gravel told her that April was home. That meant Flynn would be there in a few minutes, but Nessa didn’t care. There was a slow cooker of stew on the counter, and they were both adults. They could make their own supper, and she would eat when she got back.

When she reached the water, she kicked off her flip-flops and waded out into the cool water until it came up to the edge of her cut-off denim shorts. She was deep in thought about her grandmother when a big splash startled her so badly that she whipped around to see what was going on. Tex was swimming toward her, and Jackson was taking off his shoes at the edge of the creek. She took a couple of steps, and then her foot landed on a slippery rock and she lost her balance. On instinct, she sucked in a lungful of air just before the water covered her face, and then she came up sputtering. Jackson was right beside her, a big grin on his face and laughter in his blue eyes.