The Ledger

“This is the last one”.

She averted her eyes; wouldn’t look at me. I didn’t blame her, really. The only time she had met Danny was when he showed up, unannounced, on our wedding date. Mom was livid, and it provided a rare moment of bonding between the two of them, the start of the thawing of my mother’s perpetual layer of permafrost.

Not that I knew much more about this man, my mother’s older brother, who had been declared deceased a week prior. No body, though.

I only had a few memories of him myself. A Christmas here, a birthday there. My mother was never happy about his sudden appearances in our lives, but usually she tolerated them. Family, you know?

She passed away three years ago. Another victim to the big C. Chemo stripped away her faculties, and pneumonia finished off the husk of what was left. Apparently I was now next of kin, and this house we were emptying was all that remained of my Uncle Danny.

I took the box, and looked at my wife.

“Are you ok?

“ I really thought we might get some…”

“Answers?” I finished. She hates when I do that. So I knew this whole thing was bothering her when she let it go without comment.

“Yes.”

His house was boring. Mundane. If you surveyed 100 people on the contents of an average American house, the contents would land right in the median of the given replies. Absolutely nothing out of the ordinary.

Survey says: completely normal. Come down and get your washing machine.

Which was strange, truthfully, because we all have the little things we hide. In our house, where we reign supreme we feel comfortable letting the strange out. Those things we’re worried about someone finding as they comb through our possessions after we die.

Not this house. It was utterly, absurdly, ordinary. Almost like no one lived there.

That bothered me.

“Why don’t you run on home? I’ll do a final walk through and then be fifteen minutes behind.”

She kissed me on the cheek, and looked in my eyes. We loved each other, truly, deeply, still. Time hadn’t dampened that. Mostly it does. The excitement too quickly replaced by the comfortable rhythms of daily life.

“Don’t be too long.”

I loaded the last box into the trunk of her Explorer, and shut the trunk. I’m lucky, I thought, not for the first time, as her taillights faded into the gathering dark.

She didn’t press me on Danny, because she knew I didn’t have the answers. And, she still married me.

* * *

She was beautiful, that day, perfection incarnate. I was so engrossed in her that I didn’t even notice the strange man at our reception. Even if I had, I wouldn’t have recognized him. It had been eleven years since I had seen him last.

I did notice my mother, trying to usher him out. He brushed her aside. No one did that to my mother, and yet her it was. He placed a gift down on the table, and made his way to us.

His movements had the grace of a dancer, I thought. My wife later likened him to a jaguar slinking through a jungle canopy.

He drew close to me, and as he got near I realized who he was. He grabbed my arm and pulled me close, his mouth by my ear.

“There’s a box inside. Keep it for a week, then a man come by to pick it up.”

These words made no sense to me. All eyes were on us.

“Do you understand?”

I nodded, wanting the moment to be over.

“Don’t open the box. The rest is yours.”

Just like that, he let me go, and ambled out of the room.

When we woke the next day, we sat and opened our gifts. A blender here, a gravy bowl there. The accoutrements of our life, puzzle pieces we would use to start fresh, together. Until only his was left.

Neither of us wanted to touch it, but it seemed silly to be nervous about a wedding gift. So my wife took it and tore open the wrapping.

Like he said, there was a small wooden box in there. Surrounding it was two hundred thousand dollars, in cash.

My wife gasped when she saw the money. I suddenly wanted to return it. To have nothing to do with any of this. But where? And to whom? We had no way to contact him.

We set the box on a bookshelf, behind her collection of Dean Koontz novels. The cash was right beside the box. It somehow seemed fitting, like a plot that would happen in one of these books.

She was a huge fan. It was one of her few vices. The thrill of the atypical, she would explain. She would disappear into one of those books, reemerging a few days later with weary eyes and a renewed vigor.

“What do you think it is?”

“I don’t know”.

This conversation was repeated, over and over, as we waited.

“Should we go to the police?”

“And tell them what?”

“We should tell someone.”

“Maybe it’s dangerous.”

“All the more reason to stay quiet.”

Days passed. We went on our honeymoon, and managed to put the whole thing out of mind. The islands will do that, especially when combined with alcohol and the hormones of two young lovers. Yet when we got home after six days in the tropics, nine days after our wedding night, it remained.

The next morning when I returned from a run, she was standing outside the door.

“It’s gone.”

It took me a moment to realize what she was saying. Looking at her, I understaood that while I had put it out of mind, she never quite could. My family had a way of walking past the unusual and just continuing our lives, I realized later. A familial Omerta, of sorts. Humanity has a way of normalizing behaviors that only seem odd in retrospect.

“The money?”

“The box.”

Someone had removed the box, but not the money. There was no sign of forced entry. No indication that they had searched the place.

“They were here while we were sleeping.

She was right.

We debated back and forth what to do with the money. Eventually we settled on using it to buy a house. Neither of us were completely comfortable with the thought of someone coming into our home, even more so with us there. So we moved.

Years passed, life came and went, and we stopped talking about it, and even thinking about it. Or I did.

She threw away her Dean Koontz books after. I think suddenly the excitement was gone, now that the atypical had showed up at our doorstep. Maybe she realized there were some doorways that don’t need to be opened. You never know what lurks behind.

* * *

Walking through the empty house, all these memories came back to me. I checked the kitchen, the living room, then the bedrooms. Standing in the garage, I looked around, holding the handle before I closed the final door on this strange story. Then I saw it.

A vent . It was out of place.

The garage sat lower than the house. All the other vents were near the ceiling, attached to the HVAC system. This one was a foot off the floor in the back corner, behind where a bench had once sat.

As I approached, my heart beat faster. A peculiarity, amongst all this forced regularity. Tugging on the grate yielded nothing for my trouble. I retrieved a screwdriver from the car, and a few small turns allowed me access.

The inside was disappointingly empty. Maybe someone got here first. If whoever he worked with could remove a box hidden within our house, surely they could find the false vent.

Groaning in frustration, I pressed my hand against the floor of the vent to help me stand up. As I pressed, I heard a click. As I lifted my hand, the metal sheet rose up, revealing a hidden chamber underneath.

The first thing I that caught my eye was a small black notebook. Picking it up revealed the wooden box underneath, along with a small silk drawstring bag.

I raced home, bursting through the door, almost knocking my wife over.

“Jesus Christ! You almost gave me a heart attack.”

She stood there with two cups of tea, one of them now half spilled across the floor. She must have heard me drive up. I think she was angry, but then she saw my face and her anger gave way to apprehension.

“What is it?”

I placed the contents of the vent on the table, then sat on the sofa.

“I don’t know.”

“Where’d you find this?”

“Hidden in a false vent.”

We stood there, silent, for a moment, weighing the implications. The box seemed to call out to us.

“We could just get rid of it.”

“We could.”

We were lying. After so many years, so many questions unanswered, here it was again. Like moths to the flame.

She picked up the bag, I grabbed the notebook. Subconsciously, we left the box for last.

A rose colored gemstone slipped from the bag into her hand. It caught the light of the lamp, throwing prisms onto the ceiling. She set it on the table, and took another one out. Diamonds.

The notebook had been meticulously split into columns, each followed by a number. An accounting of some sort, but of what? I couldn’t make sense of it. As I flipped through, the dates increased, giving a timeline of… something. Towards the end, as the dates went passed 2010, it was followed by an alphanumeric string.

“What’s that?”

My heart jumped into my chest. I hadn’t noticed her behind me.

“I don’t know.”

I was towards the end.

“Those look like bitcoin addresses.”

They did.

“That date, I know it.”

November 23, 2006.

“That’s when Litvenenko was assassinated.”

“Are you sure?”

She was. Her family had emigrated from the USSR during the great purge. A fascination with the old country ran through her veins. She typed the date into the search engine, confirming her suspicion.

“Try another one”.

January 15, 2013.

Carlos Castillo Medrano. Shot in Guatamala. We stared at each other, the implications sinking in.

“One more.”

The one above it. January 9, 2013. It couldn’t be another death. Not this close together.

Sakine Cansiz, Fidan Dogan, Leyla Soylemez.

I closed the book.

This was it. Our dark secret. Or at least one of them. Why my mom kept her silence, her distance. Kept him away from us, or more likely us away from him.

We sat there, in stunned silence. What words would suffice? Three million dollars worth of diamonds sparkled in the lamplight, the death ledger on the table.

Beside it sat the wooden box.

I looked at her and caught her eye, then stretched my hand towards the box. A gentle touch on my arm stopped me. A plea.

“Are you sure?”

A long moment passed as I considered. Some doors couldn’t be closed, once you open them.

I kissed her hand, and then held it briefly. She looked so beautiful, and so lost. At that moment I could see how heavy this burden had been for her. A momentary voyeur into another world of intrigue, and on our wedding night. Now, once again, intruding on our home.

“I have to.”

Her hand lingered for just a moment, soaking in the beautiful, ordinary nature of our lives. Achingly, amazingly, heart-wrenchingly beautiful. Beyond words. But this was who I am.

The moment passed. Again, I reached.