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Chapter 12

It wasn’t ours. That was the obvious answer and I shouldn’t have had to argue any further.

I did have to argue further. “Why would you think you could have it?” I asked my mom and Maël. “Obviously, you can’t!”

My mom had a mature, reasoned answer to that: “Finders, keepers, Hekate!”

“It’s Kat! And that is a very, very bad argument. It’s how squatters and thieves operate, not normal people,” I told her. “You don’t want to be like a squatter or a thief.”

She and Maël both seemed to consider those potential occupations.

“You don’t!” I said and then rubbed my temples because my head was throbbing. “I can’t believe this.”

I had rushed home from Oliver’s office and found chaos in my living room—more chaos. “What happened?” I’d asked my mom, but she was twittering and fluttering, dancing around, and I got nothing useful out of her.

I had picked up a piece of white, plastic-y wood from the floor and recognized it. “This is from my bookshelf,” I’d said. At that point, I had realized that the bookshelves were missing. That was the first issue I’d had to solve.

“Maël landed on them when he was doing a back handspring,” my mom had explained briefly, but then pulled my hand hard, yanking me toward…

“Who put that hole in the wall?” I had yelped. There went my security deposit! Not that it mattered, since I wouldn’t ever move out. I was never going to leave the Milaflores Building.

“Look! Look!” my mother had yelped back. I sighed and tried to make my way over.

Maël had crashed into my shelves as he did the gymnastics moves I had told him were forbidden, and then something (either him or pieces of my furniture) had flung into the wall.

“It broke some of the white stuff,” Mom had explained, fluttering her fingers in front of her nose. “Ew!”

This time, the gesture had a purpose. She was pantomiming the explosion of dust that had apparently rained down. White powder covered a lot of the bed and shelf pieces on the ground, as well as my desk and everything I had on it.

“Look! Look!” she’d repeated. I had climbed up on some of the rubble to see what they had uncovered, and then I almost fell over backwards in surprise. I saw what had caused her excitement and why Maël was standing in the corner and grinning. I saw a safe.

“Maël thinks he can get it open. He’s not only good at gymnastics,” she had said, looking lovingly in his direction. “He’s been working on it since the wall broke.”

“Move,” he’d told me. He had actually lifted me out of his way (“So strong!” my mom had murmured) and returned to messing with the safe. It took a while as she had patted his brow and sometimes he pressed his ear to the metal door. I’d waited impatiently and frequently suggested that I could call a professional but suddenly, we’d all heard a click.

Then he’d cranked open the door and reached inside.

“That’s a gun!” my mom had said, in case no one else could recognize it. But that wasn’t all he pulled out. There was money—old money, although the bills were crisp. They all said “United States of America” and they were green and white, but they looked vastly different in design and they were even a different size than the currency we used today. I had looked at the date on one and saw “1926.” But I’d only gotten a quick glance before Maël had grabbed the paper-banded stacks out of my hands.

“Mine,” he had stated.

I had disliked it when he didn’t speak but I hadn’t cared for what he was saying now, not at all. “This isn’t yours!” I’d told him, and shook my head at both of them. “Why would you think you could have it? Obviously, you can’t!”

That had been the moment when my mom countered with her brilliant argument of “finders, keepers,” and here we were.

I gave up on convincing them, at least for the time being. “That stuff has been in there, hidden, for a hundred years!” I marveled. “Maël, please put down the gun.” I bet that it could still shoot, even if it was old.

In answer, he hugged everything closer.

My mother wasn’t quite ready to let go of her argument for possession. “It should belong to us,” she told me. “He found it. It’s a karmic gift because of the good he’s brought into the world!”

We both looked over at him, watching as he patted the gun like Gollum with his ring.

She smiled fondly. “Somebody had painted right over that safe, like no one even knew it was there. No one would know if we took what was inside, either. We can just hang a picture over the little door.”

“Hang a picture…” I repeated, thinking. That was where I’d tried to put up my whiteboard, standing on my office chair which creaked so much I had given up. I must have been trying to drive nails into the metal of the safe!

“Hekate—I mean, Kat, think about it,” Mom continued. “That’s a big pile of cash.”