I jumped into the passenger side of the green Volvo, and Matthew pulled out of our driveway. He surprised me, just a short ways down the road, by turning into the church parking lot.
He raised his eyebrows at me, his face lit up with a grin, and he hopped out of the car. By the time I climbed out of the passenger seat, he was already fumbling with his keys at the side door of the church. He opened the door and held it wide, beckoning me inside.
“Is this a ploy to get me into the church for some kind of secret ritual?”
“As delightful as that sounds, no.” He smiled and closed the door behind us. “I know something you don’t know, and I can’t believe I haven’t thought about it before now.”
His eyes were shining so brightly that I couldn’t help getting caught up in his enthusiasm. “And what do you know that I don’t know?”
“This church has an archive vault,” he explained, leading me down the dark hallway, our footsteps echoing in the emptiness. “Generations of parishioners, especially people who lived through the Great Depression and didn’t trust banks or safety deposit boxes, have stored important items there for safekeeping.”
He opened the door to the basement and flipped on the light. “Maybe your mother came to Chip Olsen, who was the minister back then, with the manuscript—”
“To avoid having it destroyed!” I finished his thought. “If my grandfather had thought it was inflammatory enough to have killed for it, he certainly would have wanted to get rid of it.”
“And since she loved Coleville, your mother definitely would have wanted it saved,” Matthew said as we descended the stairs toward the basement. I noticed the air was getting colder and colder, the smell of stale earth stronger and stronger.
“Chip would have absolutely kept her confidence about it,” he went on. “She could’ve brought it here with nobody else knowing where it was.”
I could imagine my mother doing just that, saving the last work of the man she loved.
When we reached the bottom, Matthew flicked on the light, bathing the room in a yellowish hue. I gasped when I saw several stone sarcophagi, worn white with age, lined up in a row. This wasn’t just a church basement—it was a crypt.
I took a quick breath in, delicately touching one of them. “Who are they? What is this?”
“Freaky, huh?” Matthew smiled broadly. “I was stunned the first time I saw them, too. Church elders, mostly, from two centuries ago, and some even older than that. There’s even a Native American chief and his wife—a testament to how closely the settlers and the natives lived together at that time.”
He led me to a massive metal door on the far side of the room and quickly worked the combination lock, which responded with a loud click. “The church archives,” he said with a flourish, opening the door and ushering me inside.
Matthew flipped the light switch and I saw a cavernous room containing shelf upon shelf of items, almost like the stacks in a library. “This is where we keep old church records of births, deaths, baptisms, marriages, that sort of thing, along with valuable items parishioners want stored,” he explained.
“Lots of these things look really old,” I said, noticing a dusty felt box.
“Most of it is old. People don’t so much use church vaults nowadays. Frankly, lots of these items are forgotten, their owners having passed away without telling anyone they’ve stored something here.”
“And you don’t keep records?”
He nodded. “We do, but some parishioners didn’t want to leave a paper trail, especially if they were hiding something.”
A chill shot through me at that thought. That’s exactly what my mother was doing with the manuscript—hiding it. “How are we ever going to find it amid all of this?” I asked, looking around at the shelves. “There’s an awful lot of stuff in here.”
“Look here,” Matthew said, running a finger along the side of one of the shelves. “The shelves have dates on them. What year did this all go down again?”
“Nineteen fifty-six,” I said, moving from shelf to shelf, counting my way back in time as I went. He started at the other side of the room and did the same.
A few moments later, he called out. “I found something!”
I flew to his side and saw a box just big enough to contain a ream of paper. It was marked ADELE MITCHELL, 1956.
“I can’t believe it,” I whispered, taking the box gingerly in my hands. “This has got to be it.”
Just then, I heard a loud click. Matthew snapped his head around and ran toward the door.
“Damn it!”
I poked my head around the shelf to face him. “What’s the matter?”
He didn’t have to respond. I saw him standing against the closed door.