Chapter 6 - The Lockbox in the Cellar
Black kerosene smoke rolled across the ceiling of the narrow vault, stinging my eyes and making Rosemary cough violently against my shoulder while the oak door grew hot to the touch.
Jade rushed to the small sink, soaked four heavy damask tablecloths in cold water, and jammed them tightly along the bottom crack of the door to slow the smoke, her hands shaking so badly she could barely hold the wet fabric.
"We are going to suffocate in here, Maggie, there are no windows and the fire is blocking the only door!" Jade sobbed, looking around the six-by-ten-foot room in sheer claustrophobic terror.
I braced my hand against my tightening stomach as a third contraction rolled through me, forcing my brain to remember what my late father-in-law Harold had told me three winters ago when we were storing apple cider downstairs.
Not everything empty is waiting to be monetized, Harold had said, and he had refused to let Daniel seal up the old Prohibition-era dumbwaiter and coal delivery chute that connected the back of the silver vault directly to the subterranean stone wine cellar beneath the dining room!
"Jade, help me pull the bottom mahogany silverware drawers completely out of the back cabinet tracks right now!" I commanded, dropping to my knees in front of the built-in cabinetry at the rear wall.
Together, Jade and I yanked the three heavy velvet-lined drawers out onto the floor, revealing a bolted iron service hatch recessed into the brick chimney wall behind the woodwork.
With my fingers slick with sweat, I slid the rusted iron bolt back and pushed the hatch open into a wide, forty-five-degree polished wooden delivery slide that smelled of damp earth and old limestone.
"Wait, that drops ten feet straight down into the dark!" Jade cried, peering down the wooden chute with her phone flashlight—Wait, her phone had been destroyed, so I shone the flashlight of my own phone down the smooth cedar ramp onto a stack of canvas grain sacks Harold had left at the bottom.
"Slide down first so you can catch Rosemary at the bottom when I lower her with the tablecloths tied around her waist!" I ordered, tying two wet linen cloths into a sturdy harness beneath Rosemary’s arms with a surgical square knot I could have tied blindfolded.
Jade didn't argue; she hiked up her torn green dress, sat on the edge of the wooden chute, and slid down into the subterranean wine cellar, landing safely on the canvas sacks below.
Using the heavy brass pipe of the sink as a pulley brace so the strain wouldn't tear my placenta, I slowly paid out the linen rope and lowered sixty-eight-year-old Rosemary safely into Jade’s waiting arms while smoke filled the upper half of the vault behind me.
Just as the flames outside began eating through the lower oak paneling of the vault door, I climbed into the narrow iron hatch myself, cradling my thirty-two-week belly with both arms as I slid down the cedar chute into the cool, forty-degree air of the stone wine cellar.
Jade caught my shoulders at the bottom, helping me steady my feet behind a towering rack of dusty Bordeaux bottles.
"Where is the storm door out to the garden?" Jade whispered urgently in the dim cone of my phone light.
"Right behind the reserve rack at the far brick wall," Rosemary breathed, pointing a trembling finger toward the arched alcove where Daniel had claimed he got the bottle of Burgundy he brought to the front door at four twenty-two that afternoon.
As we hurried past the reserve alcove, the beam of my phone flashlight swept across the stone niche behind the three remaining bottles of Burgundy—and stopped dead on a recessed steel document box bolted into the mortar with a four-dial brass combination lock.
Daniel had torn the attic and the study apart looking for Harold’s private lockbox after the funeral last year, never once realizing it was hidden behind the exact wine bottles he was too lazy to dust.
Knowing Harold as well as I did, I spun the four brass dials to ten-fourteen—the October date in nineteen-ninety-four when my husband and his late sister Claire had carved their childhood initials into the warped library window frame upstairs.
The brass lock clicked open immediately, and when I lifted the steel lid to grab the original copy of Harold’s will so Daniel couldn't burn it in the house fire, my flashlight illuminated a certified hospital biomedical log and a sealed memory card sitting right on top of the parchment!
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My eyes scanned the one-page summary letter signed by a private forensic respiratory technician Harold had hired two days before he died in intensive care last Thanksgiving, and my heart stopped cold in my chest.
Harold Hollis hadn't died of natural post-operative respiratory failure in the ICU while I went downstairs to get coffee last Thanksgiving—the internal memory log from his ventilator proved that at eleven-fourteen that night, someone using Daniel’s visitor pass had manually overridden the oxygen mixer to zero for nine minutes, and when Harold survived with brain hypoxia, Daniel had smothered his own father with a pillow!
