Chapter 12 - The Floorboards of Room Four
The demolition of the lower level began two days later, on Tuesday morning.
I took the day off from the lab, wearing steel-toed boots, denim overalls, and thick work gloves. Caleb had rented a heavy-duty industrial dumpster that sat in the driveway, and together with a local contractor named Marcus, we began stripping away the past.
The first thing to go was the faux-wood paneling in my old downstairs bedroom. Marcus used a crowbar, pulling off the dusty, brittle boards with satisfying crunches, tossing them into the collection bin.
"Look at this construction," Marcus said, shining a flashlight into the exposed wall cavity. "Your old man built this place like a bunker. Solid two-by-six studs, reinforced joists. They don't make houses like this anymore, Miss Vance."
"He was an architect," I smiled, sweeping up the fallen insulation. "He believed that if you build something, you build it to withstand the worst storm."
By noon, Marcus took an hour break to grab lunch in town, leaving Caleb and me to pull up the threadbare gray carpet that had covered the concrete subfloor for twenty years.
Caleb grabbed the corner near the closet, pulling with all his strength. The ancient adhesive gave way with a loud, tearing rip, kicking up clouds of chalky dust.
"Whoa," Caleb coughed, waving his hand in front of his face. "Look at this section over here, Erin."
I walked over, kneeling beside him near the back corner of the closet—the darkest corner of the room, right beneath the main staircase.
The subfloor wasn't smooth poured concrete like the rest of the basement. A section measuring roughly three feet by three feet had been framed in heavy steel angle iron, with tongue-and-groove oak planks bolted directly into the metal frame.
"That's strange," I murmured, brushing away decades of grime. "Why would my father install finished hardwood under a subfloor carpet inside a basement closet?"
"He wouldn't," Caleb said, his analytical mind kicking in. "Unless he wanted to hide an access point."
I ran my fingers along the edge of the steel frame. On the far side, flush against the baseboard, my fingertip caught on a small, recessed brass ring.
My heart began to beat a rapid, uneasy rhythm.
*“You have no idea what your father was doing before he died,”* Diane’s voice echoed in my memory from the day of the eviction. *“You have no idea what is buried in this house.”*
"Caleb," I whispered. "Help me pull this."
Caleb grabbed the brass ring while I wedged a flat pry-bar under the oak planking. We counted to three and heaved upward together.
With a heavy, grinding squeak of rusty hinges, the square hatch lifted backward, revealing a dark, concrete-lined compartment beneath the floor.
Caleb turned on the flashlight on his phone, aiming the beam into the rectangular void.
The compartment was roughly four feet deep. Sitting at the bottom was not a box of old family heirlooms, nor was it a stash of cash or property deeds.
It was a heavy, fireproof military-grade Pelican case, sealed with four heavy clasps and locked with a digital keypad.
Taped to the top of the case was an envelope with my father’s unmistakable handwriting. But the ink was faded, dated just three weeks before he passed away in the hospital.
*For Erin,* the envelope read. *Do not open this until Diane is under oath. If you are reading this, she has already poisoned me.*
The air in the room instantly turned to ice.
My breath seized in my lungs. My father hadn't died of sudden heart failure. The cancer... the illness... the mysterious decline that had taken him from a robust, healthy man of forty-five to a corpse in less than six months...
Beside the Pelican case, resting in the corner of the concrete vault, was a small, amber glass vial labeled with chemical markings from the university research pharmacy where Diane had worked as an administrative assistant in the nineties.
And next to the vial was a digital cassette recorder, its red battery light blinking a faint, ghostly green—signaling that it was plugged into an active trickle-charge battery backup.
My hand trembled violently as I reached down into the dark, cold vault.
"Erin... don't touch it," Caleb warned, his voice cracking with sudden dread. "We need to call the sheriff. Right now."
Before I could answer, the floorboards above our heads—in the main living room upstairs—creaked sharply.
The heavy, unmistakable sound of deliberate footsteps moved across the hardwood floor toward the basement door.
The front door locks had been changed. The windows were secured.
May you like
And yet, someone was inside the house.
The basement door at the top of the stairs clicked slowly open, and a long, dark shadow stretched across the concrete steps, accompanied by the cold, metallic slide of a chambered round.
