Bryce stepped through. A hall went left and right. The air was still and dry. The lights overhead were bulbs surrounded by a wire mesh mounted every few feet, and they made the place almost too bright.
Charlotte headed left. They passed a series of gray metal doors, big rivets lining the metal frames. An ammunition bunker was the closest parallel Bryce could come up with, the doors able to absorb and contain a blast. Nothing was numbered or marked; it was just a line of identical gray metal doors.
“Here’s vault five.”
It was the ninth door they had passed.
She used keys to open the two locks on the door and switched on the lights.
The room was a decent size, probably twelve by sixteen, crowded with shelves and boxes. A table in the middle of the room, a row of cabinets with map drawers two inches high and twenty-four inches long on the east wall, two-by-two-by-eight coin boxes neatly stacked, six boxes high on the shelves.
She cleared the table of coin magazines. “What would you like to see first?”
“The Bust half-dollars.”
She scanned the cabinets, reached for a drawer, pulled it out and brought it to the table. “Here is a sample of them.”
He picked up white cotton gloves from the stack on the shelf, pulled out a chair at the table. There were more than fifty coins in the drawer, and he selected three at random. He found an 1814 Very Fine, an 1807 Fine, an 1828 Extremely Fine. “Nice, Charlotte.”
“I think you’ll find a lot of pleasant surprises in this room.”
She returned the drawer to the cabinet. “I know it can feel like being stuck in a tomb in here, but if you can handle it, I’ll let you have some time to simply open drawers and look through what’s here.”
“It does feel a bit like a metal coffin.”
She turned on the radio. “Phone service isn’t great inside a berm, but the radio gets decent reception. And just for info’s sake—emergencies within a berm are handled in a pretty basic way. Toggle the lights five times on and off—that pattern flips a circuit and makes the security board light up. They’ll come get you.”
“And if they don’t see the distress signal?”
“When we entered the gate for this section I put in my code and our destination. If we don’t exit that gate by end of shift, someone will come to physically check on us.”
She sorted through her keys. “Let me show you the rest of vault five. This is just the entry room. It’s actually six rooms.”
She stepped out into the hall and went to the next door, opened it, turned on lights, moved down to the next door, and the next, doing the same. He looked into the rooms. Across the various rooms there were thousands of shotgun rolls of coins stacked neatly on metal shelves and coin tubes arranged in groups. He stepped into the third room and picked up a coin tube of Benjamin Franklin half-dollars, slid them out into his gloved hand. Full Bell Lines. He felt the sigh deep in his chest.
He heard Charlotte return and glanced over at her. “What did you think when you first opened this vault and saw what was here?”
She perched on the small table inside the door. “Fred showed me this vault the year before he died. His dad had passed it down to him. He said he didn’t know much about coins, but that I could probably learn.”
She shook her head at the memory. “I drove into town and found a bookstore that had a coin-price guide and tried to figure out what I was looking at. You get numb to it after a while. They’re coins, Bryce. I’ve got a lot of things in my life I will enjoy more. But I understand their value. Fred slept better at night knowing he wasn’t dependent on a bank not to fail.”
“Who knows this place exists?”
“John. Myself. My grandfather never spoke of old coins to anyone I’ve met among his friends. He probably told his family, but he outlived the last of his family by ten years. The old record books for this section simply say Graham on the storage ownership, and the rest of this berm’s units are empty. His security was silence. Even the coins at the house—you’ll see when we stop by there—if you didn’t know where to find them, there’s no indication they are there.”
She went quiet for a moment, then half smiled at a memory. “Employees know the Graham family kept a lot of stuff going back decades in these old bunkers, but when we clean them out, most are filled with trunks of old clothes, old machinery parts, farm tools, boxes of books. Lots of old books. My grandfather didn’t live or act wealthy. He watched every penny of his business. It would surprise his friends to think he left a million dollars outside of the business, let alone the actual truth of what is here.”
“He didn’t want the distance wealth would create between himself and his friends,” Bryce offered.
“Probably part of his thinking. He simply enjoyed running this place, had more cash available if he needed it, and never did.” She slid off the table and went to the two-drawer file cabinet, opened the top drawer. “Feel free to mark this up.” She handed him a stapled ten-page inventory list. “I pulled together all the inventory sheets I could find for this vault into one list. The handwritten notations are my counts. If it lists fifteen rolls, I’ve noted how many I counted. The grades have only been spot-checked, but the old inventory sheets appear roughly accurate.”
He scanned the pages. “Thanks. It’s a good place to start.”
“I found it helpful.” She glanced at her watch. “Let me give you some time just to look around. I’ll come back at, say, six thirty? John wants me to help on a lift. I’ll be on the crane for about forty minutes, with my trainer standing at my shoulder. It’s taken six weeks of asking for him to give me an assignment, so I’ll probably be lifting a pile of steel plate or something else non-fragile, but still, it’s the big crane.”
Bryce smiled. “Six thirty will be fine.”
“I promise I’ll return.” She smiled as she said it, then disappeared out the door.
Bryce looked around the room at the rolls of coins, the list in his hand, softly laughed, then prayed, Jesus, I was thinking something interesting would be coming, and this certainly qualifies. This woman just keeps surprising me. What’s the wise thing to do here? He headed to the last room, planning to work his way back to the first after a quick visual inspection.
Bryce heard Charlotte coming back and closed up the box he was inspecting, returned it to the shelf. He pulled off the gloves and took a seat at the table, found his pen and made a note on what he had just found.
She came through the door in a bit of a rush. “Returning, as promised. I’m only five minutes late.”
He smiled. “How did the lift go?”
“Eight oversized drainage tiles. I set them down like a snowflake on a butterfly wing. Got a ‘good job’ from Brad, which is impossible to get.” She grinned. “More than you probably wanted to know. So, coins. What do you think?”
“I’ll take it all.”
She pulled out the chair across from him, dropped into it, and just looked at him. “I underestimated you, Bishop. My apologies for that. I’ll get an accurate inventory done for you this month.”
“I’ll take your preliminary count for what is here, and we’ll square up the price if it is off more than five percent.” He offered the inventory pages to her along with her price list. “Check my math. It’s five million six.”
She scanned the numbers, reached for the calculator and ran his tallies again. She nodded. “We’ve got a deal.”
“I’ll have the bank wire the money in the morning. You’ve got some very nice coins here, Charlotte.”
She smiled. “Now you do. I’ll lease you the space for a dollar a year. You can have the keys and set a new security code for this berm as we leave. I’ll post a security bond for the five million six and put you on our insurance as a client. Your coins will be safe here until you can make arrangements to move them.”
“You’ve thought of everything. Appreciate that.”
“Group three is at the Shadow Lake house. It’s going to seem anticlimactic afte
r this vault, but do you have time to come over and see a portion of what’s there? I know it’s getting late to do a five-hour drive tonight, and you still need to arrange a car.”
“Phone reception is actually decent in here. There’s a rental car for me now dropped off at the sales office parking lot, I’ve got a room at the Hyatt in Madison, and your Henrietta stopped at the mall for me after her hair appointment and picked up the basics of a wardrobe so I could stay a couple days.”
“I would’ve liked to have overheard that conversation,” Charlotte said. “I’ll stop doubting your resourcefulness.”
“Show me the group three coins, Charlotte. I’m curious to know what I’m going to be buying next.”
“What are you going to do with these coins? Expand Bishop Chicago?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ve got a friend who built a very good business in the fifty- to five-hundred-dollar coins, then sold it when she decided to become a cop. I’m going to go pick her brain for ideas on what to do. But for the next day or two, I’m simply going to open every drawer, every box, and take a photo of it. From those I can formulate a game plan for how I want to sell the coins.”
She looked around the room. “I’m so glad this is now your problem.”
He smiled. She’d given him a very good deal to clear out her problem and make it his. But having seen the scope of Graham Enterprises, he was beginning to understand why she’d set him up to have this conversation. She had bigger concerns to deal with. She had a lot of coins to sell, and she wanted one buyer. He’d been in a position to say yes. Their business was about done. He was beginning to almost regret that.
He followed her through the berm, reset the code, and accepted the keys.
SEVEN
Bryce liked her grandfather’s home on sight. The ranch-style house was built on a hillside near Shadow Lake, structured as three wings under a common roofline. She parked at the back of the house where a large porch and patio overlooked the lake.
Four German shepherds were on the porch. “Fred’s dogs, and they still miss him. Hang back a moment while I say hello and get them settled.” Charlotte walked to the porch, and the oldest of the dogs brought her a knotted rope. She knelt and played tug-of-war for a moment, then ruffled his ears and kissed him. She tossed tennis balls for the other dogs to chase. “Come on up. They’re friendly, just rightfully cautious of strangers.”
Bryce joined her on the porch and hunkered down to greet the older one.
“The dogs are content now living with the foreman, but I’ve asked if he would bring them out here when it’s convenient for him so they can enjoy the lake and what used to be their home. He’s fishing at the moment—that’s his van and boat trailer down by the dock. He’ll take them home with him when he’s done.”
Charlotte unlocked the back door to the house and turned off the security. “I’m in the middle of packing up the house. It’s been hit or miss on my priority list depending on what else we’ve found to deal with, so some rooms have been emptied out, others I haven’t touched yet. I’m currently working in what was previously the library.”
Bryce followed her into a large room, where built-in bookshelves on two of the walls were now nearly empty. He saw the coins John had mentioned neatly lined up on a table in the center of the room. Several dozen more coins were stacked on the bottom shelf of one of the bookcases.
“What’s here is the start of group three. I’ve packed the first hundred-plus coins”—she gestured to the boxes on the far wall—“but you’re welcome to open the boxes and go through them. The ones here still to be wrapped will get me up to about two fifty, the rest I’m still gathering out of various safes. Fred believed in numerous safes, well hidden, instead of one general vault.”
She glanced at the time. “I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for some dinner. I’ll go over to the diner and get something to bring back for us. Do you mind if I leave you here for about an hour? The trip is twenty minutes; the conversations that will inevitably happen with people are the other forty.”
“I’ll be fine here, Charlotte.”
“There is surprisingly good internet access in this house. Feel free to check your email, call your office—whatever you need, the computer is on. The kitchen is fair game too, although I think I packed the glasses last week by mistake. There should be sodas in the refrigerator, and a stack of paper cups beside the paper towels. Help yourself to whatever you can find.” She left with a smile, and after she left, the sounds of an empty house settled around him.
Bryce walked over to the table to look at the coins. Several caught his attention, but he stopped when he saw the middle set. The first of the Flowing Hair half-dollars he had seen in the collection. She had two of them. Only 294,000 ever minted in the year 1795, and she had two. He just stood and looked and let that realization settle inside. He’d never seen an estate like this one. He’d have a buyer at eighteen thousand for one of them, and probably get a bidding war for the other at twenty-six thousand.
He scanned the other coins on the table, ran the math. Three million, maybe three million two, if the rest of the coins in group three were like these.
He wished Charlotte had simply called him and let him do this work for her. She should have a staff of people helping her, and yet she was ordering her days to do the work herself. Part of it he was beginning to understand. She thought of the coins in the same way she thought of the hurricane lamps and the Mason jars—as responsibilities to sell for her grandfather. Because somewhere under the weight of this was the realization she was now very wealthy, and this wasn’t a woman accustomed to being wealthy. How did you help someone accept wealth? Then again, he wasn’t sure he wanted her to learn.
Bryce picked up the roll of tape and put together another box. He could at least help her pack the coins.
“Anybody home?”
“Back here, John.”
The head of security for Graham Enterprises walked through the door of the library with Charlotte’s two dogs trailing behind him.
“That the chair she was climbing on?” Bryce asked, nodding toward a dining room chair that was out of place in the room. Footprints with crushed white gravel road dust were still obvious on the chair seat.
“Yes. The safe in this room is built into the wall above the top shelf of the bookcase. She’s too short to be trying to clean it out. Should have been smart enough not to try.”
“There were some very nice coins in that safe.”
“I thought so too.” John picked up another roll of tape and taped together a box. He started boxing more of the books. “Know anyone who could figure out the value of old watches?”
“I can ask around.”
“Shoebox over on the desk is the collection she’s found so far.”
Bryce wondered if that really was the topic on John’s mind tonight. “I’m buying the coins in vault five.”
John nodded. “Did the background check on you, concluded you were the right guy to handle them for her. You’ll make some money on them. She’ll be relieved to have them gone.”
“A phone call would have been an easier introduction.”
John grinned. “Now where would the fun for her be in that? She’s got her reasons for the store.”
“I gather she’s getting tired of selling stuff.”
“We both are. Found five hundred tennis rackets this afternoon where there should have been crates of paving tiles. There’s not a tennis court on this property—not that I’ve found yet anyway. I think some in the family had a bit of dementia in their later years. Fred was a sharp enough man at ninety-two that he wasn’t the one. But he probably knew and decided to leave it to Charlotte to sort out all the oddities after he was gone. Not sure I wouldn’t have pushed back a bit harder if I knew what he was leaving her to do.”
“She could hire someone to handle this for her.”
“Not her style.” John taped the box of books closed, wrote on the end what was inside, and picked up another
box.
“What kind of trouble did she have when she was twenty?”
John shot him a look.
“Paul Falcon told me you were her bodyguard for a couple years.”
“Her business to tell, not mine.”
“It’s over?”
“Cops killed them before I got hired for the job. Best I could do was punch a few reporters who invaded her privacy.”
Bryce smiled at the way John said it. “Okay.” Bryce took another look at the man Charlotte trusted. “Between the time being her bodyguard and taking over security for Graham Enterprises, what did you do?”
“Worked for the musician Brandon Yates for a few years. The singer Evelyn Hayes.”
“That’s where I’ve seen you before. The guy who tackled the guy—”
John smiled. “Got more famous than Charlotte for a few days. I can understand better why she dislikes the press as she does.” He finished packing the books and hauled the boxes out of the room. He came back and sorted around the packing materials until he found a plastic sack. “Thought I would finish chasing down the golf balls tonight. Found some in the garage, the mud room, kitchen drawers. Since I haven’t found any golf clubs, I think someone liked to sit on that back patio and throw them into the lake. You golf?”
“No.”
“I’ll find someone who does. One thing Charlotte is determined not to do is to throw anything away.”
John left the room and the dogs got up to follow him out.
Bryce picked up the shoebox of old watches on the desk. Most were simply old, but two were gold, and one was diamond-rimmed. Fred Graham was the kind of guy he wished he had met at least once, so he could square what he was seeing now with the man he had been in life.
Bryce pointed to the fish in the sampler platter Charlotte had brought for him. “This is good.” He reached for a napkin. They had settled at the kitchen table. “I figure most of tomorrow to get the photos taken, and then I’ll head to Chicago and get a plan put together for how to sell the coins. I’ll likely be back next week to begin hauling coins out.”