Chapter 65 - The Hallowed Planks
The flame danced in a draft that seemed to come from beneath the floor itself. I clicked on my heavy flashlight, sweeping the beam across the nave. Decades of dust lay thick upon the carpet runner, but right down the center aisle ran a distinct set of footprints—narrow, sharp-heeled shoes, the kind Evelyn used to order bespoke from the city.
The tracks led directly to the sixth pew on the left, the exact pew where our family had sat every Sunday of my childhood, dressed in rigid Sunday finery while Father read the scripture and Melissa kicked my shins beneath the hymnal rack.
I approached the pew, the floorboards groaning beneath my boots.
The runner had been pulled back. Two wide planks of northern red oak had been pried up from their hand-forged iron nails, resting crookedly against the bench support. Beneath them yawned a dark, square cavity in the subfloor, roughly two feet deep, carved out between the stone foundation piers.
I knelt down, shining the flashlight into the opening.
Resting in the dirt was a lockbox made of heavy galvanized steel, roughly the size of a deed repository. Its surface was covered in a crust of dried wax, sealed with the very same signet ring my mother had worn until the day she vanished into the Kennebec.
Beside the box lay an empty velvet pouch and a single gold earring—an emerald set in filigree, the matching piece to the one found in the Kennebec River inside her abandoned sedan seven years ago.
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The lock on the box had an aperture cut precisely to match the Celtic cross key in my pocket.
My hands shook as I reached down into the hole. The cold radiating from the earth bit through my jeans. I slid the key into the slot. It turned with a heavy, grinding crunch that echoed off the vaulted ceiling like a shattered pane of glass.
