“Hi, sweetheart,” she said into the phone.
“Oh, Mama, thank goodness.” Angie sounded out of breath. “You’ll never guess what we found!”
Maria’s heart hammered. She’d had more than enough excitement for one day. “Is everything all right? Is the baby all right?”
“Yes, yes, Little Jeff is fine. As you know, though, we’re doing some remodeling of the old house, and they just started taking out the big wall in the master bedroom.”
Angie was always changing things or moving things. She’d done it since she was a little girl. The old ranch house at Bay Crossing was beautiful just as it was. Maria had lived there herself with Wayne and the kids until she’d inherited Cha Cha from her great-uncle and the family had moved east. But leave it to Angie, always having to have her way. Maria smiled into the phone. Angie was just Angie, and Maria wouldn’t have her any other way.
“Yes?”
“So they’re taking out the drywall, and guess what they found inside the large back wall?”
“I couldn’t possibly guess.”
“A safe.”
A safe? Something niggled in Maria’s brain. Wayne had mentioned a safe once—that his Grandpa had kept behind on old Impressionist painting in his bedroom. But by the time Wayne and she moved into the house, the safe gone.
Or rather…drywalled over.
“Do you know the combination, Mama? Did Daddy ever tell you?”
“No, he didn’t, Angie. We didn’t even know the safe was still there.”
“We’ll pull it out of the wall and take it somewhere to have it opened,” Angie said. “I can’t begin to guess what might be inside.”
“Whatever’s inside belongs to your brother and sister as well as to you. And to your Uncle Je— Er, your father.”
“Of course, I know that, Mama.” Angie scoffed. “You give me so little credit sometimes.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart. Sometimes I forget how much you’ve changed in the past couple years. I couldn’t be more proud of you.”
Jeff walked into the kitchen. “Is everything all right?”
“Yes, it’s Angie,” she said to Jeff. “Hold on a minute, sweetheart,” she said into the phone. She turned to Jeff. “You’ll never guess what happened. They found your grandfather’s old bedroom safe while they were tearing down walls.”
Jeff’s mouth dropped open. “You mean, you never knew about it?”
“No, I did. Wayne told me, but by the time we moved into the house it was gone. Turns out your grandfather built a wall over it. Wayne just assumed he’d gotten rid of it. Angie’s going to take it to a locksmith to have it opened.”
Jeff smiled. “She doesn’t have to. I know the combination.”
* * *
“I can’t believe your grandfather walled that safe up,” Maria said.
“He must have gotten a little weird in the head at the end,” Jeff said. “Did Wayne ever say he was going senile or anything?”
“As you know, he died a few years after Wayne and I got married, and I never noticed anything strange. If Wayne did, he never mentioned it, other than to say he was always a little weird in the head.”
Jeff thought for a moment. Then, “Grandpa definitely had his own way of doing things. He hated banks, so he kept most of his cash in the house in two safes in his office. No one ever knew what was in the bedroom safe. Until now.”
“That explains the stock certificates,” Maria said. “He wanted them in his possession rather than in an account somewhere.”
Jeff nodded. He couldn’t believe it himself. The safe held sixty-year-old stock certificates in an electronics company that had split so many times they were now worth millions. Plus ownership interests in several silver mines throughout Colorado.
But that wasn’t the real treasure. For Jeff, the ultimate riches lay in the will dated a few months before Grandpa’s death, giving Jeff back his inheritance, along with a letter, handwritten by his grandfather, forgiving him. Why Norman had walled up the safe and decided not to make the new will public, Jeff would never know, but at least he knew his grandfather had been thinking about forgiving him. That meant the world.