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Something warm trickled down my cheek, and my breath came out all at once. I was crying. There were goddamned bloody tears streaking down my face like rivulets.
“I’m fine,” I said, yanking my chin out of his grip.
“We can leave,” he said, his eyes sympathetic. “We don’t have to do this,perla.”
But we did. Not because of the money, but because I did remember something, or more accurately,somewhere. A place my father might have left something of himself behind. A photo? One of the quickly scrawled love notes my mum would leave for him and he’d shove down deep in his pocket?
“This way,” I said, crossing the room to the boilers and then around behind them.
My father hadn’t liked me playing freely down here while he was working. Too many hazards, he’d said. So, he’d shown me his secret place and made me promise never to tell anyone about it.
Something squeezed painfully in my chest as I looked for the telltale bolts in the wall. I supposed I was breaking my promise to him now.
And there they were, not quite the four corners of a perfect rectangle, but close to it. I reached for the first one and turned it slowly. The long bolts used to spin right out for me, but they were stiffer now, rusted with disuse.
“Those two,” I said, pointing to the two bolts that made up the top and bottom left of the rectangle.
When we had all four bolts removed, Amadeo looked at me, waiting for what came next.
“Just pull,” I said, putting my hands against the section of the wall that looked very much like concrete, but was not. My father had never said what it was made of—perhaps he didn’t know—but whatever it was moved easily, like the whole section of wall couldn’t have weighed more than thirty pounds.
Amadeo followed suit, and we pulled the section of wall out toward the boilers, revealing the small, hidden room behind it.
Aside from thick cobwebs, there wasn’t much here. An old shelf with ancient canned goods stacked neatly on it, two stools and a storage bench in front of them where my father had stashed all my crayons and coloring books. There was also a big, old toolbox in there that must have been left by the last maintenance man, my father had said.
I knelt down in front of the bench and slipped my trembling fingers beneath the lid. If the contents had remained untouched, then there would still be the coloring books inside that my father and I had colored in together. But what else?
If he’d had any inkling that his life was in danger, would he have left something here for me? A letter written in his own hand? A picture of the two of us together? Some way to remember him beyond the sketchy pieces drawn from a child’s imperfect memory?
With my heart in my throat, I lifted the lid.
And there they were, the stack of generic books filled with outlines of clowns and cats and lollipops. The crayons were there too, and the doll in the pink frilly dress that I’d carried with me everywhere for a time. But there were no notes, no pictures. Nothing else but for the old, dusty toolbox.
The sound that escaped my lips wasn’t pretty. I could hear it muffled like most of the sounds I made. A choked croak that sounded more like a frog than a breaking heart.
I was about to slam the lid shut when the sight of the toolbox stopped me. It was just as dirty and dust-covered as it had been the last time I saw it, nothing that would ever have tempted an eight-year-old me.
There was no lock on the box, just a latch. I reached in and flipped it open and slowly lifted the lid, now dreading what I’d find inside. I wanted there to be rusty tools in the box. Lots of pencils—my father was always losing pencils.
I rolled my eyes at him as he patted his hands down his chest, over the pockets of his shirt, then slipped his hands into his trouser pockets, searching and coming up empty.
“I’ll get one, daddy,” I said as he sighed, shaking his head at himself for the umpteenth time.
“What would I do without you, Heidi-girl?”
“You’d have to get your own pencils,” I joked, then skipped down the hallway to the small office on the main floor.
There was never anyone in the office but sometimes there’d be a pencil or two. I was allowed to take them from the desk top, but the desk drawers were off-limits. This time, there were at least half a dozen, freshly sharpened, on the desk, and like I’d found a pot of gold, I scooped them up and skipped back with my shoulders chuffed up.
I’d taken it on as my personal responsibility to keep him well-stocked after that. I even convinced my mum to buy the pretty blue pencils with yellow flowers on them from the shop, just to ensure I had my own steady supply for him.
But there were no tools inside the toolbox now. And no pencils.
There were gold bars. Diamonds. Stacks of fifty-pound banknotes. Altogether, I had no idea what the contents were worth.
And I didn’t care.
I sat back on my heels, staring at the toolbox but not really seeing it.
