She exchanged the coins of her past for cold, hard cash an hour south of Little Falls so as not to raise suspicion in Little Falls, but she never returned them, or donated any of the money to a useful cause—not even a Pennsylvania-based German orphanage she received pamphlets about in the mail every Christmas. Instead, she let the coins sit in the attic walls—still divvied up and stashed in two locations just as her husband had hid them—in case someone found two of the boxes, there would be two others. There they would stay, after her death and through seven resales of the house until finally, eighty-eight years after she died, her beloved Victorian house was demolished due to an uncared-for, tree-damaged roof that rotted walls and eventually crumbled the foundation. As the jaws of the mac
