My Mother's Secret

The sun shines through a pink and white sheer curtain and lands on an alarm clock blaring music and flashing 6:00 a.m. As soon as it began the alarm ended with a petite hand smacking the snooze button. A rustled, black haired girl emerges from underneath a down filled comforter, she heard from downstairs “Lealah it’s time to get up and get ready for school. Lealah finished up and headed downstairs to meet her mother for breakfast as she always did. She saw her mother holding her head and asked her was she okay, her mother answered her saying, “I just have a bad headache dear, hurry up eat your breakfast before your late!” Lealah made it to school on time and she had an amazing day, she couldn’t wait to get home to tell her mom about the college scouts that stopped by from her Alma Mata, Harvard. She arrived home and was horrified to see her father in tears, flashing lights, and EMT’s loading her mom in the back of an ambulance, she screamed “NO,THAT”S MY MOM... WHAT HAPPENED TO MY MOM,DAD! Lealah and her father rush to the hospital and the doctor says, “I’m sorry Mr. Taylor, your wife was DOA and we couldn’t revive her she suffered a Brain Aneurism”, Lealah and her father both sank to the floor as if quick sand took it's toll on them, holding each other in tears. Lealah felt so lost after her mother’s funeral, she sat in her mother’s beautiful garden in their back yard, and as her eyes followed a bird who flew away suddenly, they landed on a tin can poking out of the dirt in the flower bed. She rises from her seat in the garden and wipes the tears from her eyes to clearly see what is in the tin can, she opens it to find a little black book filled with numbers on the inside, and she wondered what did the numbers mean, and why did her mother bury it in her garden? Just as her mind wondered, a very well dressed Italian gentleman approached her father, she had never seen him before. He leaned in and whispered something to her dad, and whatever it was it sent him into a rage, he demanded that the man leave immediately! Over the next few days strange calls started coming to the house, first they would just hang up, then they started demanding my father to give them my mother’s belongings. I kept asking my self what could all this be about? One day I answered the phone and I heard a man say, “This is Mr. Brambilla and you have Seven days to turn over your wife’s belongings or you and your daughter will be six feet in the ground with her!” I was terrified, and I knew it had something to do with that LITTLE BLACK BOOK of numbers my mother hid. I started studying the numbers, then I remembered my mom was a Financial Accountant from Harvard, the same field of study I was going to take up. I had to save me and my fathers life! I found out that the numbers were longitude and latitude degrees to many locations all around the world, under different companies, with different bank accounts equaling $275 Million dollars, and they all belonged to Mr. Brambilla! I rushed to explain everything I found to my father, just as I finished there was a knock at the door, my father shushed me, told me to hide, and slowly walked to the door, and opened it to find a note on the ground and it read, “You have 72 hours to return what your wife stole!” I told my dad if we give it to him, he will surely kill us both! The next day we went to the Police Department and they couldn’t help us, so my father took the information to the IRS. The calls stopped coming into the house and one night me and my father were eating dinner while watching television, a “Breaking News Report” flashed across the screen. It read, “ Just in, corporate millionaire Vince Brambilla has been arrested and indicted on multiple counts of fraud, embezzlement, tax evasion, and the list just kept going on. I just wanted what was left of our lives back, and I was so happy now that me and my father were safe again. I just kept thinking if mom was still here she would be so proud of me.