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The gate closes behind me as I pull out of the Hawksley Manor’s driveway and into the street. Every second puts more distance between me and the mansion, and every second builds on my crushing worry that Austin is not in the car.
A muffled thump startles me, and I glance in the rear-view mirror to see the back seats folded down. And staring into the mirror, an excited grin playing on his lips, is Austin, climbing out of the trunk.
I exhale deeply and drop my head onto the seat headrest. “You just had to wait as long as you could before revealing yourself, didn’t you?”
He plops into the front seat and buckles himself in. “To be honest, I was just trying to make sure I didn’t get spotted. But if I would have thought to make you wait in suspense, I totally would have.”
I smile. Somehow, we actually pulled the whole operation off without getting arrested. But did Austin discover anything useful? I ask him as much.
“Oh, yeah. Did you expect me to come back with nothing? I found something awesome.”
“Where is it?”
“That’s the thing. I don’t have it…here. It’s still there because I couldn’t move it. So the better question might be, what is it?”
I’m too giddy to care about his games, so I play along. “What is it?”
“Let me tell you the whole story.” He props his feet up on the dash, spreads his arms wide, and begins his tale of discovery.
Austin, cramped in the trunk of Cannan Gable’s car, was getting bored. Sure, it was only two minutes after Cannan had left, according to his cheap digital watch. But for someone who always had something to do, two minutes was a long time to do nothing.
After a full three minutes, he folded the back seats down, crawled onto the car floor, and popped the side door open. Sliding from the car, he crouched on the ground like a cat and surveyed his prey.
The courtyard boasted no security—a quick check showed walls empty of cameras and ground empty of guards. Austin smirked. This would be easier than he thought.
Still crouched, he walked forward, keeping his footsteps quiet. He would leave prints in the gravel driveway and dirt surrounding the manor, but he had a strong suspicion no one would notice them for a long time. Long after they took the treasure.
He came to the side of the house and pressed his back against the wall. As still as a statue, Austin listened for voices or footfalls. The lazy breeze was the only sound. He slid along the edge of the manor, head constantly turning back and forth.
His eyes caught on a danger, and he dove to the ground. Heart pounding, he glanced up at the window. A set of eyes peered out at him.
But it was only a dog. A German shepherd, to be specific, old and haggard. It looked at Austin curiously, unmoving, almost as if it too had been caught sneaking around. And weirdest of all, the window it stared out of was level with its head—just a foot or two off the ground.
It opened its mouth, stuck its tongue out, and panted. Austin smiled and almost laughed, but restrained himself just in time. The dog’s owner, if nearby, would doubtless hear him if he made such a reckless noise. Maybe that was part of a trap to catch thieves.
Austin stood, brushed himself off, and continued sneaking along the house’s perimeter. Several times he came to a portion of wall that jutted out, like an entire room or just half a room was added on to the side. He edged around these, taking care to avoid any more low, dog-bearing windows.
After several minutes of this, he came across a door planted on the house’s side. He stepped back and looked around to check for signs of additional security, but that area was just as empty as the places he had passed. Austin hadn’t expected to find an entrance this easily. He glanced over his shoulder and checked the door. Locked.
Lucky for us, he thought, I brought my expired credit card. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and withdrew an old credit card, sticking it into the crack between the door and the door frame. He leaned on the door and wiggled the card around, glaring at the door as if he could open it with sheer annoyance.
The door swung open, and he pocketed the credit card and grinned. “I’m in,” he whispered. But where, exactly, was he in? He intended to find out.
Papers cluttered the floor of the spacious room, concealing the ground. Only a few hints of dark wood poked through the sea of envelopes, documents, and letters. Austin groaned. If there was some hint of the treasure here, it would take hours to find. And he hated reading. Unless there were pictures, and he didn’t think these had pictures.
But with a fortune at stake…
He groaned again and slumped to the ground, sitting cross-legged and picking up one paper. This was going to take a while.
“So what is it? What did you find? Did a paper reveal the location of the treasure?” The car sits in the parking lot of our apartment complex. The light wanes, and the car’s front window perfectly frames the setting sun.
I hardly notice it, caught up in the story’s suspense. Austin spent the last several minutes describing every paper he picked up, from bank records to personal letters and business correspondence. While another time I might be interested in getting a glimpse inside the life of the eccentric family, right now, I only want to know what he found.
“Hey, calm down. I’m getting to that. I just want to tell you how bored I was, reading all this stuff.”
“I’m getting bored too. Just get to the point.”
“Fine, fine. I was getting bored with talking about it, anyway. So, I dropped one of the boring letters, and…”
A letter slipped from Austin’s hand. His head jerked up; he had been falling asleep. The paper fluttered to the ground, twisting this way and that, before lining up perfectly perpendicular to the floor and nose-diving. It landed in the empty area Austin had cleared to sit in, sticking between two floorboards and sinking until only half was visible.
Austin blinked. Were floors supposed to be like that? He pulled the letter out and peered at the crack it had fallen into. It looked just the same as the rest of the floorboards. He had to check it, though, just to be sure.
Once again pulling out the credit card, he dug at the crack without success for a full minute. He stared at the card, then back to the floor. He needed something smaller.
He reached back to his wallet and replaced the credit card, instead reaching for the pocket of his jeans. Out came a small pocketknife. Austin flipped it open and plunged it into the floor, wriggling the thin blade gradually deeper between the boards. Once it had gone about halfway down, he pressed sideways on the handle.
The floor popped up.
With a little more scraping and pulling, Austin opened a foot-wide square trapdoor from out of the ground. His eyes widened at what lay underneath.
“And when I looked down, I saw…a metal safe.” He dropped his arms and leaned back, a smug look on his face.
I sit quietly for a moment, expecting him to reveal what he found inside.
“Yeah, I was speechless too. I just stared at it for a while, like you’re staring at me now.”
“Did you open it?”
“What, do I have to do everything? Of course not. I looked at my watch and saw that it was time to go home. Because as much as I want to find that treasure, I do not want to get left behind in that creepy place. So I got back in the car.”
Something else tickles at the back of my mind. “Did you run around the side of a room with big stained glass windows?”
“Maybe. I ran past a lot of buildings.”
“Why were you running?”
“Oh, I uh…was just trying to…hurry. So I didn’t get left.”
His answer doesn’t feel right, but I don’t have the patience to draw the truth out of him. My mind goes back to the news of his discovery. “We have to go back tonight.”
Austin raises his eyebrows. “What did you think I want to do, wait ‘till next lesson? Of course we should go back tonight. I was just about to say that.”
I watch the sun setting, painting the sky in brilliant orange. “We should take a few minutes to plan first. And then we can go crack that safe.”
Austin nods. “Works for me.” He unbuckles, pushes the door open, stands up, and waltzes toward his apartment. I stay rooted in my seat, viewing the rainbow sunset, my mind slipping into thought.
Could this be it? Might we, tonight, find the—as Austin said it—dragon’s horde? All of my troubles might end before the sun rises again.
One thought finally shakes me from the stupor. I won’t find it if I keep sitting around.
Twenty minutes later, we’re back on the road. We ate a small dinner in my apartment while huddled over my laptop, using satellite pictures of the mansion to plan our entrance. Then we waited until the sun disappeared and the light faded. Now, with only a few scraps of daylight left, only my headlights illuminate the dilapidated road. The drive passes in silence; the darkness and secrecy of our mission make talking feel out of place. And while I can’t know what Austin’s thinking, my thoughts are consumed with the treasure. Even if we don’t find it in the safe, we’ll be one stop closer to unveiling it.
The Hawksley Manor has no exterior lights. It’s almost invisible in the twilight. Once it’s within viewing distance, I slow the car and park, half on the shoulder and half in a dirt field. The mansion looms ahead, a maze of the unknown. It feels like a giant puzzle itself, like opening the wrong door might make the entire house come alive and swallow you whole.
“This is it,” Austin whispers. He jumps out of the car and I follow—but with much more caution. The night air is as quiet as a graveyard, and every sound feels like it will carry all the way to Hawksley’s bedroom window. Hopefully, there are no night guards in the courtyard.
We walk cautiously along the side of the road. My nerves are pulled to their limit and my senses are on high alert. What if one of Hawksley’s servants drives down this very road and sees us sneaking up? What if the man himself looks out a window and spots us? There are so many ways this could go wrong. “We should have waited until midnight,” I mutter. “We’re still easily visible.”
“Aw, we’ll be fine. There’s nobody out here.”
As he finishes speaking, the whoosh of a car reaches my ears. I spin around to see a pair of blinding headlights coming straight toward us. I freeze, my heart sinking. There’s no way we’re going to explain this to Hawksley. We’re done for. Austin sees the car too, and his face shows that he’s thinking the same thing.
The car comes to the gate of the manor, but it doesn’t slow. It continues straight on past it, hurdling down the road.
I nearly collapse in relief. Austin chuckles nervously. “That was close.”
I nod my agreement, and we resume walking—now both startled into silence. By the time we reach the iron fence, check for guards, and walk around to the back where our entrance awaits, the day’s light has all departed. We stand beside a crooked tree that forms a perfect ramp up and over the fence. It was a lucky find from our checking the satellite images. The main bulk of the tree is outside the fence, but a sturdy branch sticks over. It should also be close enough to the ground that we could use it to get back out.
Austin leads the way, walking up the side of the tree with his arms out like a tightrope walker. When the slope steepens, he grabs on a low-hanging branch and pulls himself farther up. He passes over the fence, inching across the branch, and drops to the ground on the other side. Now it’s my turn.
I take the climb carefully, grabbing branches with a death grip as I crawl up the side. Though it’s difficult to see anything, I can barely make out Austin standing on the ground, tapping his foot and watching me with his hands on his hips. I reach the peak, shuffling around among the branches, attempting to reach the critical bridge that will take me across. Several minutes of impatient glares later, I drop from the branch and land next to Austin. “Let’s go.”
He rolls his eyes. “Oh, yeah, I hadn’t thought of that.”
With the growing darkness, I feel like I’m back inside the windy hallway to the piano room. I hold my hands out in front of me, following Austin, who seems to see perfectly fine. But it’s just as well that he leads since he knows the way to the room. I lose all concept of time as we walk and walk through the gloom, passing empty windows and blank walls.
I feel Austin’s coat in front of me and I stop. “What is it?”
“We’re here.”
My heart beats even faster. We’re finally here. “Can you get the door open again? You brought your wallet, right?”
A creaking door answers my question. Austin grabs my arm and pulls me inside before softly shutting the door.
“How are we supposed to find the safe without light? I can’t even see the floor.”
Austin is just as invisible as the floor, but from somewhere he replies. “You have a flashlight on your phone, don’t you?”
Oh. Of course. I pull my phone from my back pocket, swipe through the menu, and turn on the flashlight. The white light nearly blinds me after so much time in the dark, and I snap my eyes shut. “Don’t you have a phone? Why weren’t you using that this whole time instead of walking around in the dark?”
“I don’t have a smartphone. The government uses those to track you. I only use flip phones.”
With the pain from the light mostly gone, I ease my eyes open and survey the room. Just as Austin described, there are papers everywhere, but no furniture. It’s like this used to be an office, but the filing cabinet and desk split open, spilling their contents everywhere.
Austin is crouched on the floor in a space where the papers have been cleared away. He waves at me and motions toward the floor. “I need the light over here.”
As I come closer, I see him twisting his knife between two floorboards and using it as a lever. The combined effort of the knife and his clawing fingernails raise a piece of floor high enough for him to grab. He swings a square trapdoor open and points at the metal door underneath. “That’s the safe.”
I get to my knees next to him and hold my phone close to the safe. A four-number combination lock sits in the middle of the door and a handle is off to one side. “Do you know what the code is?”
“Not at all. If I did, I would have opened it.”
My hopes dive to the bottom of my shoes. How in the world are we supposed to know what number some unknown Hawksley used to store his valuables? “What was the year Arthur Hawksley started his company?”
Austin squints. Then his eyes widen again with remembrance, and he slides the number wheels to 1883. Turning the knob, he pulls the door.
Still locked.
I groan. “There has to be a hint around here somewhere. Just try every combination. I’ll see if one of these letters has a date important to the Hawksleys that they might use.” I sweep the ground with the light, but nothing stands out immediately. It seems the solution to this safe will be good old trial and error.
Letter by letter and record by record, we try every four-digit number we find. We even try the dates of American independence, the moon landing, and the end of World War Two. The safe remains closed.
We both grow increasingly frustrated, so close to achieving our goal yet held back by an impossible obstacle. Each failed combination sends me both further into despair and anger. How could God put me in a position where I’m so desperate for money that I’m scouring an old man’s personal papers for a code that might help me take his money?
As our time in the mansion approaches two hours, my eyes grow heavy. If we don’t find the combination soon, we’ll have to go home. We can’t be dead tired at work tomorrow. I pick up an envelope and glance over it for any numbers, but I realize there’s still paper inside. Every other envelope I checked was empty. Was this one never read?
I spin it around to see that the ornate wax seal is still intact. The front reads only, “Son”. With a twinge of guilt, I use Austin’s knife to break the seal. I open the flap and take out the letter, unfolding it to see the full text. The handwriting is in neat cursive, small but easily readable. The paper is decorated around the edges with printed designs.
I skim the letter, not really reading it, but only looking for another combination to try. I can’t bring myself to actually read the words; this is a letter to someone else, and from the gist I’m picking up, it’s a heartfelt one. Words at the very end catch my attention: “It is my sincerest hope you have a splendid birthday today. Love, Your Father.”
So it’s a birthday note. Whoever this Son and Father are, they seem to have a great affection for each other. What accounts for the unopened letter? Did the son hate the father, and the father wanted to win him back over?
Regardless, it gives us another date worth trying. The top of the letter gives the date of writing, which is hopefully the same date as the birthday. I hold the paper out to Austin and point at the numbers. “Try this one.”
He puts the combination in, twisting the knob without a second thought. He gives it a half-hearted pull and moves on to looking for another combination.
“Wait, I think it moved.” I crawl closer and pull on the door again.
It swings wide open.
For a while, we both just stare at it, unable to comprehend that something actually worked. My mouth hangs open, and Austin blinks repeatedly.
At the same moment, we both come back to life, scrambling forward to see what we just revealed.
I point the phone flashlight into the metal box, heart racing and eyes wide.
There’s nothing there.
Again we stop, eyes darting around the safe. It must be some kind of mistake. Maybe there’s another secret door that opens inside the safe so that a thief breaking in would still not find the valuables inside. I push aside the fact that we are, in this situation, the thieves.
Austin slaps his forehead. “Oh, come on! There’s seriously nothing in there?” He plunges his hand in, feeling around every corner for something, anything, that we missed.
Turns out, we did miss something.
His face turns from indignation to surprise, and he sticks his tongue out in concentration.
“What is it?” I scoot forward to see his hand.
“I think there’s something…taped to the top of this thing.”
“The top? I thought we just opened the top.”
“But that was just part of it. There’s more top area over…here.” A muted banging sound comes from inside the safe as he raps his knuckles on the roof. “And I feel paper here. Either a few papers or a really thick paper.”
“Well, pull it out! What are you waiting for?”
“It’s kinda hard when the flashlight is way over there.”
I realize that my phone, still in hand, is pointing the light toward the side of the room. I swing it back around to face inside the safe.
The screen lights up and the ringtone blares out. I jump back, dropping my phone into the safe where it lands with a loud clang. The room is plunged into darkness.
Austin jumps back too. Though I can’t see him, I’m sure he’s glaring at me something fierce. “You forgot to put it on vibrate?”
The ringtone—a lively rendition of Mozart’s “Rondo Alla Turca”—is only amplified by being in the box. It’s deafening after so much whispering. “If you want it to stop, grab it already!” I dive forward and fish around in the safe with my arm, finally wrapping my fingers around the device and pulling it out. “Who on earth is calling me at—“ My eyes settle on the caller ID.
It’s Eva’s hospital. I gave them my number after the crash.
“Hold on, Austin.” I turn off the flashlight and answer the call.
After greeting me, the caller gets right to the point. “Evangeline is getting worse,” she says. “We’re going to take her into surgery tonight. The doctors say it’s a dangerous procedure. While their hopes are for the best, there’s a possibility that she won’t survive.”
I take all this in numbly, unable to think of a thing to say.
“We can take her off her sedatives temporarily if you’re like to come in and talk with her, but it has to be now. The doctors say the operation can’t wait.”
“I’m—I’m on my way. I’ll be there soon.”
We exchange goodbyes, and I hang up. My arm drops to my side, phone still clutched inside. I stare vacantly into the shadows.
“Cannan? A little light?”
“Yeah, I’m coming.” I stand and wobble over to Austin, who’s holding some papers. I turn the light back on and point it at them.
Eva? Getting worse? And a surgery? Surgeries cost money. I have no money.
Austin, sitting on the floor with the papers in hand, elbows my leg. “Hey, this is really cool. Look.”
I shake my head and try to focus on what he’s showing me. “I can’t make any sense of it.”
“I think this one is a map of the house.” He holds up the other papers. “Not sure about these, but they might be maps of other places.”
“I need to go.”
Austin looks up. Presumably noticing my blank stare, he mellows and nods. “Alright, we got what we came for. Let’s go.”
But I don’t hear what he says. Only four words echo inside my head, over and over.
Evangeline is getting worse.
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