Chapter 28: A Week Later
My face in the mirror stares back at me, as I comb my hair in preparation to go out on an actual date with Joanna. At first, I was apprehensive about trying to start a relationship with her. But I have had a yearning to be with her every day since she saved me from the mansion. My life has changed extensively in the past week and a half. The girlfriend I thought I loved turned out to be an accomplice in the murder of my parents. Ryleigh’s manipulations have left a crater on the surface of my heart. I guess I always had my doubts about her, but someone doesn’t just shrug away the things she did to me.
Joanna has shown more than a little patience, but she wanted one dinner date, and I can give her at least one dinner date. I never knew how deeply she felt for me until she opened up a couple days ago.
“Ryan, we need to talk. I need you to understand something.” I mute the television and look into her pale blue eyes. “I understand you might not be ready to hear some of this after being in a relationship with that woman for the past few months.”
She twirls her finger around a strand of hair as I scoot closer to her. She asks, “Do you remember the date we went on a few years ago?”
“Yeah, we went out to eat.” Then I ditched her afterwards to go out with some friends. I didn’t know it was a legit date.
In a soft tone, she replies, “I never got over how it ended. I let you think it was a casual evening without ever telling you how I felt. We have been friends for so long, but I always wanted more. You just never seemed interested. I’m not going to make a mockery out of us; we need to figure out what we mean to each other. I love you.”
Now what do I wear. I reach into my dresser drawer and pull out a pair of blue jeans. As the jeans fly out of the drawer, a piece of paper soars out with them. My face cringes as I pick it up and read the encrypted note.
‘I know the secret. The truth lies in languish beneath the right guardian waiting to be set free. Don’t let them get our’
“Joanna! We are going to have to move our date back a few hours!”
She hastily walks into the bedroom. Her nose crinkles as she speaks, “You promised you were going to try—”
I put my figure over her lip gently to stop her from talking. I hold up the note in front of her. I’m expecting a bit of enthusiasm on her part as I read it, but she only shrugs her shoulder.
Her crystal blue eye’s stare into mine. “I thought we were going to bury this behind us. Just forget about it.”
Is she right? Should I just forget it? “No, we need to find it. I have learned a lot over the past week. Some truths are better left forgotten while others must be remembered for survival. I need this mystery solved because I have to know how it ends. I can live with not remembering the slaying of my parents. I can live with only a dream of the events that took place afterwards. But, I can’t survive knowing my parents died for a fortune that will remain lost because I didn’t complete what they started. It has to have purpose.”
After I’m finished speaking, she kisses me. Our lips slide past each other’s in the awkward moment. She recoils and tries again. This time we are synchronized, my lips are burning against her lips, not in a painful way but with a deep intensity. The time I kissed Ryleigh cannot even begin to compare themselves with this one. For the relationship that brings life is much stronger than the one of death.
“What about me?” She asks.
“Let’s find it together. I think I know where it might be. The final piece of the Gate family puzzle is ours for the finding. In fact, all the pieces of my shattered memory have led me to you. In the midst of the chaos, I found my own deprived truth… I love you.”
Her face turns pink as her nose crinkles with her grin. “I love you, too. Let’s find it together.” She slaps my face playfully, “Then let’s make sure there is more to us than chaos and adventure.”
She leads me into the living room where she tells me to wait while she gets something out of her car. When she returns, she has a folder. It’s not the folder from the office, but the folder from my parents’ house. She opens it up from the back.
“Your dad shared with me the information that he then used to write that note. He found the remnants of a journal in the town logs from when the city owned the mansion. Jim or Ryleigh must have stolen the file from the house, but the police recovered it. Your dad ripped out the page that spoke of the place he thought it might be hidden, but the context might help.”
The page is faded and has been worn by time. The letter starts with James’ name and then describes the mansion as a place of solitude and languish. It was built in 1856 and was the home of James’ parents for twenty years. The way he writes about the past is almost resentful, like how someone might describe the extraction of a tooth. The rest largely consists of his account and reasons for hiding the fortune. To my astonishment, his tale weaves together very different motives. He claims my family ancestors demanded an increased ownership of the plantation.
The dark tale even details a supposed botched murder attempt on James’ life. He suspects either Jonathan or his wife were responsible for the assassination attempt. The entire motivation of my family is in complete contrast to the narrative I have been told thus far. It even suggests that Jonathan forced James’ sister into marriage just to get a share of the plantation. But that his plan was never to only get a share of it, he wanted the vast majority of it.
When I’m done reading, Joanna says, “Your dad didn’t believe most of it. Other sources gave very different accounts, and all the documents from your family’s side negated James’ assertions. He was sure of one thing though; the fortune was hidden near or in the mansion. The portion of the letter he ripped off gave the clue you deciphered from his note.”
A huge grin forms on my face. “I don’t know if this letter tells the whole story or not, but I know where he hid the fortune.”
We immediately get in my car and drive once again to the Gate’s Plantation. We are engrossed by pure excitement, which makes the drive fly by as we discuss possible ways to spend the loot. We pull through the plantation gate. My heart begins to pound in my chest. I calm myself by taking several deep breaths. Joanna tries to keep me calm by taking my hand as I drive.
The car travels down nature's runway as we near the mansion. My foot presses hard against the pedal as I wait for the mansion to explode into view. The daylight does nothing to curve away the menacing aura given off by the rigid structure. My skin tingles—the hair on my arms standing on edge.
We move closer to the gravel walkway and I floor the pedal as my hand grips the steering wheel. Joanna’s fingertips dig into my arm. We skid onto the dry gravel, and then I slam my foot down on the brake. The car tires slide over the loose gravel as friction slows the car. A pile of dust flies from behind us over the car.
Joanna starts laughing as I ask, “What? Might as well try and have fun.”
When we get out of the car, the mood is light as air and smiles stretch across both our faces, but as we walk down the rest of the walkway, our smiles turn to stone. The sight of the building makes me sick to my stomach. I can’t even glance at the structure without being light headed and nauseous, so I walk with my head down, staring at the dirt and gravel.
Before we reach the porch, we turn left. The tall oak smells of rotten wood, and the splintered swing sways ominously in the breeze as the unraveling rope threatens to give at any second. Weeds and vines fight for space along the base of the tree, while a few roots spring up from the ground like dry varicose veins.
My eyes dart from the tree to the mansion, then back to the tree. The right guardian perhaps? “Hmm. Well, let’s see what is lying beneath her.”
Joanna hands me a shovel she has been carrying. I slam the spade into the ground, which presents some resistance, but the rain from the prior week has moistened the soil enough to dig. As I dig, the shovel pulls up an assortment of weeds and roots with each scoop of dirt.
For som
e reason, the shoveling and excavation of dirt are very intimate for me. I’m careful not to sling dirt wildly or damage the tree. It's as if as I dig deeper into the earth, I dig deeper into time and deeper into myself. I work my way around the base of the tree. My back tightens as the repetitions get harder to finish, the compacted dirt hard as rock in some places. My shovel pounds its way into the earth time and again until it hits something wooden.
The hole is about three feet deep when the impact occurs. I throw the shovel aside and bury my hands into the root infested soil. It could be a root or a tree limb covered by years of soil. My hands pass over something wooden and flat. It also has depth, but the corners are still buried in the soil, preventing me from removing it. “Come help me!”
Joanna feels for one side as I struggle to find the other. “I feel the bottom edge!” I say.
She grunts as she maneuvers her hand in the hole. “I think I got it.” She responds.
I say, “Lift it on three. One! Two! Three!”
Together we lift it, and the corners free up from under the roots and soil. We set it on the ground gently. We both stand up and wipe the dirt from our clothes before turning our attention to the unearthed object.
It’s a box about the size of two of my college text books placed on top of each other. The wood is coarse beneath my palms as I wipe the box in an attempt to remove any extraneous dirt. There is a little iron clip with a small rod sticking through it that locks the lid in place.
After some initial struggles, I remove the rusted rod. I shake my arms and rotate my neck around with anticipation as Joanna stoops down to open the lid of the box. My heart pounds. My thoughts clear. The box opens.
Joanna gasps in awe. We have found the Gate’s Fortune. I have finished what my Great-Great-Granddad Jonathan started many years ago. My family's unraveling has been avenged.
Inside the box, lie several stacks of U.S Federal Government Notes from the mid to late 1800s along with an assortment of coins. I bend down and begin filtering through the stacks of crisp notes and smooth coins. “From my estimation, there, are twenty something stacks of bills with at least fifty bills in each stack. But that estimate could be off, and there’s no telling how many coins are scattered throughout the box.’
“How much would that be worth today? She asks.
“I have no idea. I don’t know what the exchange rate is on civil war period notes. But it's a lot!”
Joanna pulls the car up to the tree and we get the box loaded, but before we leave I return to the treasures hiding place to refill the hole around the tree. As I shovel the unearthed soil back into its proper place, I can’t help but ponder the life of James Gate the first. Why would he betray his entire family? Why would he betray my family, if Jonathan never meant him harm? Why aren’t here any other sources to substantiate his side of the events that ultimately lead to his destruction?
The Gate family took everything from me. Yet, there is a deep felt connection between the Gate family and I. Even Jim or Officer Boyd as he will be known through Everton lore, had much more in common with me than I would like to admit. When we first met inside the mansion, his darkness called out to my own, his obsessions were my obsessions. I just didn’t kill anyone to fulfill my needs and wants.
Once the hole is filled, we leave the plantation, hopefully for a very long time. The past events fade into the deepest recesses of my mind. All I want to do is spend time with Joanna. The way she looks at me in the car cuts right into my heart. Her eyes, soft, full with compassion and love fill me with the raw power of love and not just the apathetic kind. The way she touches me when we get to my house makes me want to be a better man. The hope I thought I had found with Ryleigh amplifies to the nth degree with Joanna.
We do go on our date later in the evening as we had planned. But only after, we first put the box of poisoned fortune in a safe in my dad’s law office. Our date runs so smooth that we go on another date the next night, just to test our connection.
I learn so many things about her that in the past I had neglected. Like the way she twirls the locks of hair when she talks. Or how she says please and thank you every time to everybody regardless of the fact the person might be a sorry waiter who only brings one refill thirty minutes into our date. As gorgeous as she is on the outside, she is even more so on the inside.
Our love blossoms out of our weed riddled life with beauty. The fortune doesn’t matter to us because we found each other. But we aren’t stupid. We do set up a day to get the notes checked out by a specialist.