Chapter 2 - What Lies Beneath the Dirt
The neighborhood was dead silent as Sheriff Walker, accompanied by two deputies, walked up the front porch steps and knocked heavily on the front door.
"Arthur! Evelyn! Open this door right now!" Walker demanded. "Your false report has been logged. You need to step outside and explain yourselves!"
Inside, blinds twitched, but the door remained locked.
Mr. Holloway walked over to me, reaching into his coat to pull out a thick, yellowed envelope stuffed with dozens of un-opened letters bearing official Army postmarks.
"I kept every single one, Sarah," Mr. Holloway whispered, his eyes filled with tears. "Every time you wrote about your promotions, your training in Georgia, your deployment... I saved them all. Your parents told everyone in town you stole fifty thousand dollars from your father's business and ran away."
"I didn't steal a dime," I said, taking the letters. My heart throbbed as I touched the paper I had written on cold desert nights halfway across the world. "My father stole my college trust fund left to me by my grandmother to cover his gambling debts. When I threatened to report him to the bank four years ago, he gave me a choice: leave town forever or he would lie to the police and say I stole from his office."
Mrs. Donnelly stepped onto the lawn, tears streaming down her face. "Sarah... oh, my dear girl... we believed them. The whole church prayed for your 'rehabilitation' every Sunday! We felt so sorry for Evelyn!"
"Evelyn didn't need your pity, Mrs. Donnelly," I replied softly. "She needed a story to protect her husband's reputation."
"What about what your father said?" Sheriff Walker asked, stepping back down the porch stairs after getting no response from inside the house. "He yelled about something you buried. What was he talking about?"
I set my duffel bag down on the grass. I looked past the house toward the detached garage in the backyard, where an old garden shed sat overrun with wild ivy.
"When I was seventeen," I explained, turning to Sheriff Walker and the news camera, "my grandmother passed away. Before she died, she gave me a small metal fireproof box. She told me never to open it unless my father tried to ruin my life. Night before I shipped out to basic training four years ago, I buried that box under the loose floorboards of the old garden shed behind the garage."
The crowd murmured with intense curiosity. The news reporter gestured wildly for her cameraman to follow us.
"Sheriff," I said, "that shed is on property that legally belongs to my grandmother's estate—which was left entirely to me in her primary will before my father forged the secondary executor documents. I have the legal right to retrieve my property."
"Lead the way, Sergeant," Walker said, signaling his deputies to follow.
We walked around the side of the house, stepping past the neatly trimmed bushes into the overgrown backyard. The old garden shed stood dark and weathered against the tree line.
I stepped up to the wooden door, pulled a combat knife from my boot sheath, and popped the rusted padlock off the latch with one swift, practiced lever motion.
The door creaked open. The interior smelled of damp earth and old cedar.
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I knelt down in the corner, brushed aside three inches of dirt and rotten floorboards, and reached my hand into the dark cavity beneath. My fingers made contact with cold, heavy metal.
I pulled out a dull silver fireproof lockbox, caked in dirt, but completely intact.
