Then he slid one final photograph toward me.
Recent.
Color.
Taken only two weeks earlier.
My father, Richard Hayes, standing outside a restaurant shaking hands with a man wearing a gold ring shaped like a serpent.
The detective watched my face carefully.
“We believe your father found out who Eleanor really was.”
Ice flooded my veins.
“And if he knew about the deposit box…”
The detective finished quietly:
“Then your grandmother’s funeral may have been the safest place to get close to you.”
Right then—
someone started pounding violently on the precinct’s front doors outside.
Officers shouted.
A radio crackled urgently.
Then one terrified voice echoed through the hallway:
“Detective! Richard Hayes is here—”
Another officer cut in loudly:
“And he brought armed men with him.”
“My father threw my grandmother’s bankbook into her grave and said, “It’s worthless”… but when I took it to the bank, the teller went pale and called the police.
PART 1
“That little book is worthless. Let it rot with the old woman.”
My father tossed my grandmother’s savings passbook onto the open casket just before the funeral workers lowered it into the wet earth.
No one said a word.
Not my uncles. Not my cousins. Not even the priest who had just finished the final prayer.
Everyone stared at the muddy blue booklet like it was trash.
Like it wasn’t the last thing my grandmother Eleanor Hayes had left me in this world.
I was twenty-seven years old, wearing a borrowed black dress, my hands so cold I could barely feel my fingers.
My father, Richard Hayes, adjusted his black gloves and smiled at me the same way he used to when I was little and he told me crying was “just attention-seeking.”
“There’s your inheritance, Claire,” he said. “An old bankbook. No house. No land. No money. Your grandmother always loved pretending she had secrets.”
My stepmother, Denise, laughed softly behind her dark sunglasses.
“Poor thing,” she muttered. “She still thinks Grandma left her treasure.”
My half-brother Tyler leaned close and whispered in my ear.
“If there’s twenty bucks in there, you’re buying burgers.”
A few cousins laughed.
I didn’t.
