Chapter One

“MY PRECIOUS RUTHIE, if you’re reading this, it means I’m not around anymore to take care of you. So you need to know about the Tree House.”

FORTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD RUTH HANNACKER’S legs collapsed out from under her and she made some sound, some kind of grunt as the punched-in-the-gut feeling dropped her onto the edge of the bed. Her eyes filled so suddenly with tears that the words swam on the page like she was reading them through a fishbowl.

Her mother’s handwriting was square, bold, straightforward. Mom had shown her the letters her first husband, Davie Monaghan, had written when he was in Vietnam. Well, parts of the letters he’d written. The man’s handwriting had looked like calligraphy. Mom told her that his handwriting on the note he’d slipped to her in American history class when they were high school seniors had so startled her she thought he must have gotten some girl to write it for him.

Jessica Harrington had gone out with him that first time because she was curious. What kind of seventeen-year-old boy had handwriting that looked like art?

Mom’s handwriting was as no-nonsense as she was.

Ruth’s eyes shifted to the date on the top of the letter she held in now-trembling hands — July 9, 1988. She instantly connected the dots. That was the year. The year Mom had been in a car wreck. It’d been more than just a fender-bender; the car had rolled. Her arm had been broken in two places, she had a six-inch gash on the side of her head and her whole body’d been bruised like — her words, “like I’d been inside one of those drums they use to tumble Bingo numbers.”

When Ruth was older, she figured out that the experience had forced her mother to face her own mortality, and Jessica Monaghan must have decided there were loose ends in her life she didn’t want to leave dangling. That decision had been a watershed event in the lives of nine-year-old Ruth and eighteen-year-old Drew Hannacker. In Sherry Lynn Hannacker’s life, too.

Jessica sat Ruth down and told her the identity of her father — that mythical man her mother’d refused to talk about, except to say that he loved them both and would be with them if he could. Ruth remembered how shocked she’d been to find out her father was Riley Hannacker — shocked, but not really surprised. A lot of things made sense then — including their twice-a-month treks to the federal prison in Beckley, West Virginia, four and a half hours away — how the trips were sacred, nothing kept her mother from going.

Her mother’d talked to Drew, too … and to Sherry Lynn Hannacker — irrevocably changing the lives of all three of them. Now, as Ruth looked down at the letter in her hands, she realized that among the loose ends her mother’d felt the need to tie up was writing a letter to her only daughter to tell her a secret. It was literally a “secret from the grave,” whispering into Ruth’s ear three months after Jessica had died in the devastating tornado in western Kentucky right before Christmas that’d killed fifty-six people. Ruth had stumbled upon the letter when she came home for a weekend to clear out some of her mother’s things — a task she had been putting off for months.

Taking a deep, calming breath, Ruth wiped the tears off her cheeks, forced herself to continue reading the words on the sheets of stationery she’d found at the bottom of her mother’s jewelry box. She’d spotted the box in the back of the attic, out-of-sight out-of-mind for who knew how long behind a box of Christmas decorations and the Nativity set with the broken Baby Jesus Ruth hadn’t seen since she was a little girl. Blowing the dust off the box, Ruth had started to go through it, and discovered under a tangled pile of costume jewelry necklaces, a sealed envelope with the words “For Ruth” written on the outside.

“Only four people in the world — Nate and Riley Hannacker, Willie Ray Taggart and me — ever knew the Tree House existed, that it was real and not the myth Willie Ray made it out to be. The day we started digging the hole, he told us that the best way to keep the secret was to go out and tell everybody he knew about it — and so he did. He’d brag about it to anybody who’d listen, how he’d buried a propane tanker in a field and stashed inside it all the money he made growing weed. It made a great story, a tall tale, a preposterous myth. What nobody knew but the four of us was that he’d been telling the truth. Willie Ray really did bury a propane tanker in a field and he really did fill it up with money.”

Ruth might actually have gasped, she couldn’t tell for sure. She did know that her heart suddenly shifted into a gallop in her chest, forcing her blood through her veins in a tympani-drum rhythm she could feel in her temples. And she felt … what? Alive! Ruth had been stumbling through every day since her mother’s death, feeling empty and numb and … dead inside. This letter — the secret it was imparting — was the first thing powerful enough to shove aside the aching pall of grief that had settled around her, hanging on like a frigid winter relentlessly resisting the warmth of spring.

Wild tales about buried boxcars and tankers full of money somewhere out in the hills were part of the wallpaper of life in Callison County. Everybody’d heard them. Oh, they weren’t true, of course … but it was fun to consider the possibilities. Now, Ruth Hannacker held in her hand … it was a secret map to a pirate’s treasure.

“The money in the Tree House kept you and me and a whole lot of other families afloat after the FBI seized all the Cornbread Mafia’s offshore accounts in 1978 and confiscated everything the government could lay hands on that’d been purchased with funds from our ‘criminal enterprise.’”

Cornbread. Mafia. If ever two words needed a trigger warning, those did.

The words rang with the resounding toll of huge cathedral bells down in the depths of Ruth Hannacker’s soul. She had heard about the Cornbread Mafia her whole life. Everything in her world when she was growing up related to it in one way or another. The Cornbread Mafia was magical to her, as if her mother and the others had been members of some holy organization like the Knights Templar. Oh, it had already been crushed, ground into the dust under the jack-booted heel of the mighty Federal Bureau of Investigation before Ruth was born, but still it had formed and shaped her world and the people in it, a little community as close-knit as steel wool where a generation of men had been hauled off and put in cages for … what? Criminal farming.

Almost a hundred Callison Countians had been busted working in Cornbread Mafia fields in seven states. They’d all been tried and were sentenced according to the marijuana laws in the state where they got caught. Unfortunate men like Joe Gabis, who’d stood before a “hangin’ judge” in Missouri, spent almost a decade behind bars. Most got lesser sentences. But this was Callison County, Kentucky — a place where big Catholic families raised broods of rowdy kids and lived in old farm houses with wraparound porches … or in clapboard shacks with dirt yards littered with the carcasses of dead appliances and dismembered automobiles. Brewster was a little five-traffic-light town that didn’t have a McDonald’s, a Walmart, a movie theatre or an open-24-hours anything. So a hundred families — every man, woman and child in the whole community — had a husband/father/son/brother/uncle/grandfather/boyfriend or next-door neighbor who’d been locked away for no good reason.

Oh, that’d been more than four decades ago, and the community had recovered from the original blows, but the ripple effects had cascaded down through generations. You didn’t have to scratch too deep in any Callison County family to find a connection to the Cornbread Mafia, or to find its attendant loathing of federal authorities.

It had always seemed to Ruth that who she was had been defined and refined by an organization that hadn’t existed since before she was born. Her mother was strong because she’d had to be to make it in post Cornbread Mafia Callison County. Ruth had watched, listened, conformed to that image. Her mother had been resourceful — so Ruth learned to be. Her mother had been smart, clever, stayed a step ahead of whoever was coming up behind. And she never gave up. Ruth followed suit, was a fierce competitor — particularly in sports. Tall like her mother, Ruth’s all-arms-and-legs six-foot frame was made for basketball and she was a star, towering over the other girls, dominating the court. She wore her butter-colored hair in a single braid all the way down her back, and her fair complexion earned her the nickname “the Ghost,” who could appear out of nowhere to block opponents’ shots and steal the ball. Ruth didn’t just like to win, she had to win. It mattered. She’d learned all that at the feet of the Cornbread Mafia.

And now …

Now she was being entrusted with one of their secrets.

The letter described how Willie Ray had badgered the others into helping him bury a propane tanker as a place to keep his money because he refused to put it in an account on some island “he hadn’t never been to.” They’d called it the Tree House because Willie Ray and her father had found the limestone cave the day they’d gone into the woods to build a treehouse. Her mother set down in clear script the combination to the locks, told her to take a lantern because there was no light, and warned her that Willie Ray had only been right about secrets when you wanted to make them into myths. Real secrets were just that — secret. She must never tell anybody about the existence of the Tree House.

“Ruthie, honey, I’m giving you the Tree House because if I’m gone, you’ll need those resources before your father gets home. It’s there as a safety net. It’s there to fund your future, way more than most young people have to set up their lives. So use it wisely and with gratitude.”

Ruth lost it then, sobbed, tears flooding down her cheeks, and her shoulders shaking, though she didn’t make a sound. She wept for the mother whose passing had ripped out her soul, clinging tight to the letter “For Ruth,” hugging it to her chest. When she was cried out, she left the three piles she’d been sorting her mother’s things into “keep,” “sell” and “Goodwill” on the bed and went downstairs. If Willa had still been in the kitchen, Ruth would have shared the secret with her, but there was only a pot of beans simmering on the stove and the girl’s truck was no longer parked behind the house. She’d left for her dentist appointment.

Digging around on the shelf in the hall closet, Ruth found a flashlight that actually worked. She had no idea where there might be a lantern and didn’t want to take the time to go buy one. Of course, she needed to talk to her father about the Tree House, but she wanted to see it for herself, first. Gratefully, he wasn’t still sitting in the rocker on the front porch — where he spent most of every day now. She could slip past while he was taking a potty break and not have to tell him where she was going.

How much money was still there now, after all these years, she wondered. Maybe there was none at all. The amount didn’t matter — unless it was some humongous figure — find a couple hundred thousand bucks, that’d matter to anybody. Finding a fortune was not the motivation here, though. It was … the mystery. The adventure. She found excited anticipation bubbling up in her chest where there had been nothing but the ragged edges of grief before and she was grateful for the brief reprieve. Grabbing a jacket off the hook by the door, she pocketed the keys to the Honda Accord parked out front that she had rented at Louisville International Airport. She wasn’t completely sure where the roads her mother had described were located, but she’d figure it out. Or she’d stop and ask. She’d find the place, oh, my yes, she surely would. She wouldn’t stop looking until she did.

As she drove through town, it occurred to her that there wasn’t a person in sight who hadn’t heard one of the tall tales about “weed money buried in a field.” And now, Ruth Hannacker was about to go dig it up.