An inexplainable lump came to my throat. My parents had more in common than I’d thought. How often had they thought of each other, I wondered, how much had they missed each other’s company, and how many habits and idiosyncrasies had they shared? I grabbed the key and tried it in the drawer’s lock. It worked! But nothing would’ve prepared me for what I found there.

A chess set?

I removed the wooden box to check underneath. There was nothing. But this couldn’t be it.

Why on earth would anyone hide a game? And what did this chess set have to do with my father’s plantation?

I set the board on the table to examine it. There was nothing extraordinary about it. On either side were drawers to hold the pieces. I shuffled through them and found another key.

This one was tiny and had a weird shape to it. It looked like the key to a safe. I groaned. Couldn’t my father be a little more straightforward? Now I had to look for a safe? Then I remembered that most safes usually had combinations, not keys. Maybe this was a key for those safety boxes kept at banks?

Yes, that had to be it.

In the morning, I would go to the bank and see if there was a match.

As I tiptoed across the patio, a quick movement to my side caught my attention. I turned toward the back door that Martin and I had used earlier today to leave the hacienda, and made out the shape of a woman in a cloak.

I spotted a flash of blond hair flying about. It could only be Angélica’s.

She didn’t see me as she opened the door and left the house, mingling with the shadows of the night.

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 34

The bank manager was hesitant to let me open my father’s safe deposit box, but after I told him that Don Armand Lafont himself had left the key for my wife—the majority holder of all his properties—and that I would be willing to pay him a small fee for his help, he acquiesced. He added, as a means to justify his actions not only to me but also to himself, that he already knew that my father had made María Purificación the primary beneficiary of his will.

After showing me to my father’s safety box, he left me alone in the vault, a room with walls made of iron—a claustrophobic’s nightmare. My mother would’ve hated it. She couldn’t stand closed spaces and always left the windows open in our apartment, even when it was cold outside.

I unlocked the safe and remove a rectangular metal box. I tried to guess its contents. Money? Jewelry? A gun? But I was wrong. The only thing inside the box was a package of letters tied with a string.