Chapter 5 - THE CEDAR HOPE CHEST
I pulled the SUV to the curb two houses down, hidden behind a neighbor’s weeping willow, and killed the engine.
On my mother’s porch, the man in dark coveralls gave the crowbar a sharp jerk. Metal screeched softly in the quiet neighborhood as the antique brass mail slot popped loose from the oak door. He reached his arm through the opening and unlocked the deadbolt from the inside.
Daniel hadn’t even given his auction crew a key. Or maybe this wasn’t an auction crew at all.
“Ellie, get down on the floorboard behind the passenger seat,” I whispered, pulling my phone from my purse. “Lock the doors the second I step out. If I’m not back in ten minutes, you call 911 and tell them someone broke into your grandmother’s house.”
“Mom, no!” Ellie grabbed my sleeve, her eyes wide in the dark. “You can’t go in there alone!”
“He’s looking for whatever Grandma left for me,” I said, kissing the top of her head. “I know that house better than anyone alive. There’s a cellar entrance behind the pantry that hasn’t been opened since I was sixteen. I’ll be fine.”
Before she could argue, I slipped out of the car, clicked the lock button on the fob, and darted across the damp grass into my mother’s backyard.
Every bush and flagstones path was muscle memory. I had played hide-and-seek in this yard for fifteen years. I climbed the back porch steps without making a board creak, pulled my keyring from my pocket, and slid my mother’s worn brass key into the kitchen back door.
Inside, the house smelled faintly of lavender soap and old paper.
Above my head, heavy boots crossed the upstairs hallway. He was in my father’s study.
A beam of flashlight cut across the top of the stairs. I heard drawers being yanked out and dumped straight onto the hardwood floor.
He wasn’t packing for an estate sale. He was tearing the house apart.
I didn’t go toward the stairs. I moved silently through the dark dining room into the butler’s pantry. No, wait—my mother wouldn’t hide something in my father’s study after Daniel had already robbed it once in August.
Where had she been sitting in the first video Ellie played at the hotel?
Her old blue armchair in the sunroom.
And right beside that armchair sat the cedar hope chest my grandfather had built for her when she turned eighteen.
I crept into the sunroom. Moonlight filtered through the glass panes, illuminating the dust motes hanging in the air. The blue armchair sat empty, my mother’s knitted cream shawl still draped neatly over the armrest.
I knelt beside the cedar chest and lifted the lid.
Inside lay stacks of linen tablecloths and my old baby blankets. I slid my hands down along the pungent cedar walls, pressing against the wood. When I was twelve, I had accidentally dropped a silver dime down a gap in the false bottom where my mother kept her birth certificates.
My fingernails caught the tiny notch on the left side. I pulled up the thin cedar board.
Resting in the hidden compartment beneath wasn’t a legal document.
It was my father’s broken gold Hamilton pocket watch, a blue velvet jeweler’s folder from Green Hills Diamond Brokers, and a thick green composition notebook labeled in my mother’s handwriting: MARGARET’S MEDICAL DIARY — AUGUST TO OCTOBER.
I grabbed all three items and shoved them deep into my large leather purse just as the footsteps upstairs stopped.
The floorboards at the top of the landing creaked.
I dropped the lid of the cedar chest and ducked behind the heavy velvet drapes separating the sunroom from the living room.
A second later, a tall man in dark coveralls walked down the stairs holding a heavy Maglite flashlight.
Then a second figure stepped through the front door from the porch, clicking on the foyer chandelier.
“Did you check the safe in the closet?” a woman’s voice asked.
I parted the curtain a fraction of an inch.
Standing in my mother’s foyer, wearing a pair of black leather gloves and carrying a crowbar of her own, was Sarah.
“Empty,” the man said. “Just old tax returns. Whatever your brother thinks the old lady kept, it ain’t upstairs.”
Sarah let out a sharp, frustrated breath. “It has to be here. After that brat played those videos at the hotel tonight, Daniel went back to the office and checked the Carter Holdings file. Margaret’s original signed bank rejection letter from 2005 is missing. If Claire finds the original bank covenant showing Margaret put up the life insurance policy, the Delaware transfer falls apart in five minutes.”
My heart hammered against my ribs.
“What about the storage locker in Franklin?” the man asked.
“I’m heading back there as soon as we finish here to burn the rest of that box,” Sarah said coldly. “Daniel’s lawyer is meeting Judge Halpern at his house at eight o’clock tomorrow morning to get the emergency mental hygiene warrant signed on Claire. Once the sheriff puts her on a seventy-two-hour psychiatric hold at Vanderbilt, Daniel gets temporary custody of Ellie and full control of the estate.”
My knees nearly buckled behind the curtain.
A psychiatric hold.
They weren’t waiting for the bank examiners to arrest me. Tomorrow morning at eight o’clock, Daniel was going to have me involuntarily committed so nobody would believe a word I said about the land, the pearls, or the affair.
Suddenly, from two houses down the street, the sharp, piercing blare of a car horn shattered the silence of the neighborhood.
HONK! HONK! HONK!
My SUV alarm.
Ellie had set off the panic button to draw them outside.
Sarah spun toward the front window. “What the hell is that?”
“Someone’s out front!” the man said, bolting through the front door onto the porch.
Sarah ran right behind him, her heels clacking down the front steps toward the street.
I didn’t waste a second. I sprinted through the dark house, burst out the back kitchen door, and vaulted over the low wooden fence into Mrs. Gable’s yard next door, cutting through the shadows behind the hedges until I reached the driver’s side of my SUV from the blind side.
Ellie popped the lock the instant my hand touched the handle.
I dove into the seat, slammed the door, and floored the gas pedal just as Sarah and the man in coveralls came running down the sidewalk thirty yards behind us.
“Ellie, that was brilliant,” I breathed, my hands shaking on the wheel as we turned onto Harding Pike. “How did you know?”
“I saw a lady go inside after you,” Ellie said, her face pale in the passing streetlights. “What did you find?”
At the red light under the interstate overpass, I pulled the items from my purse.
First, I opened the blue velvet folder from Green Hills Diamond Brokers.
It was a professional insurance appraisal dated August 16—two days after Daniel had snooped through my father’s desk.
I read the description and froze.
ITEM ONE: Vintage 32-strand Akoya pearl necklace with platinum leaf clasp. Appraised value: $8,500. ITEM TWO: Custom replica 32-strand freshwater pearl necklace with sterling leaf clasp, commissioned by Margaret Carter on August 16. Value: $180.
I stared at the paper, then opened my palm where the necklace Lauren had returned to me at the ballroom was resting in my purse.
I lifted the clasp to the dome light and turned it over.
Stamped into the tiny metal leaf weren’t the letters PLAT.
They were 925. Sterling silver.
My mother had known Daniel would steal her pearls from the safe after she died. She had had a hundred-and-eighty-dollar fake made in August and put it in the safe for him to take.
“Where are the real pearls?” Ellie whispered.
I looked down at my father’s broken gold pocket watch sitting in my lap. My mother had written a note on the back of the appraisal slip: “Claire—the real clasp is inside your father’s watch. The real pearls are with the only person in Nashville Daniel couldn’t buy. Look in the green notebook.”
I flipped open the green composition book—MARGARET’S MEDICAL DIARY.
On the very first page, taped neatly to the lined paper, was a voicemail transcript and a printed bank receipt showing that Dr. Arthur Pendelton—the hospice doctor who had witnessed the forged will—had received fifty thousand dollars from Harrison Custom Homes three days before my mother died.
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And underneath it, my mother had written one sentence that made the blood drain from my face:
“Oct 10: I am not taking the liquid medicine Daniel’s doctor left by my bed anymore. I poured a drop on the porch ferns yesterday, and by this morning, the leaves were dead.”
