The engine of my old sedan roared as I pressed my foot to the accelerator, my hands gripping the steering wheel so hard my knuckles turned white. Beside me, secured safely on the passenger seat, sat my mother’s brass urn.
“Hold on, Mom,” I whispered, tears blurring the road ahead. “He won’t take this from us.”
When I pulled up to the corner of the street, two block-long moving trucks were already idling in front of my childhood home. Workers in heavy boots were carrying out my grandfather’s hand-carved mahogany chairs, tossing them onto the truck bed as if they were cheap firewood.
Esteban stood near the front porch, wearing a sharp linen suit, holding a glass of scotch while Lorena—his supposed “client”—wrapped her arms around his waist. They were laughing as the workers stripped away fifty years of my family’s history.
I parked around the corner, slipped the heavy oxidized key labeled S-17 into my jacket pocket, and grabbed a heavy steel crowbar from my trunk. I didn’t approach through the front gates; I knew every inch of that property better than the back of my hand. I slipped through the overgrown thicket behind the old utility shed, sliding through the rusted iron storm doors that led straight into the cellar beneath the library.
The cellar was dark, smelling of damp earth, dried herbs, and old paper. The roar of the workers’ footsteps vibrated through the floorboards directly above my head.
I scrambled across the dusty stone floor toward the far corner beneath the library’s main bookshelf. Just as the mysterious text had shown, one of the heavy oak floorboards was slightly elevated. I jammed the crowbar into the seam and pried it up with a sharp groan of tearing wood.
Beneath it, embedded in solid concrete, sat a reinforced iron safe with a heavy brass keyhole stamped with the matching mark: S-17.
To see what lies inside the vault, continue reading below for Part 3.
