Chapter 42 - The Second Ledger
The descent into the Prohibition tunnel was colder and much more oppressive than it had been during the chaotic federal raid earlier that night. Without the flashing red and blue lights of the state cruisers to pierce the gloom, the subterranean corridor was swallowed in an absolute, suffocating darkness. The beam of Ethan’s industrial flashlight cut through the heavy, moisture-laden air, illuminating millions of dust motes dancing like frozen ghosts in the cone of white light.
His boots crunched rhythmically against the damp gravel and scattered brick debris left behind when the federal marshals had breached the inner bulkhead. The air smelled heavily of wet limestone, decaying timber, and a strange, metallic scent that Ethan couldn’t quite place—like old copper coins left sitting in stagnant water for decades.
He navigated the winding stone corridor, his breath pluming heavily in front of his face as the temperature continued to drop the deeper he went into the mountain. According to the cryptic note found inside the music box, the target was located near the north cooling vent—a section of the tunnel that extended past the footprint of the main house and directly underneath the steep, rocky slope of the Aspen grove, where the ground remained frozen even in the early weeks of spring.
After walking for nearly ten minutes, the stone walls began to give way to rough-hewn granite bedrock. The tunnel narrowed sharply here, forcing Ethan to duck his head as he squeezed past a jagged outcrop of rock where the old Prohibition-era bootleggers had carved out a secondary storage alcove.
And there it was.
Just beneath the rusted iron grating of the north cooling vent, a thick patch of frost coated the lower section of the eastern stone wall. Unlike the rest of the tunnel, which was merely damp, this specific patch of wall was covered in a thick, crystalline sheet of ice that never seemed to melt, kept permanently sub-zero by the draft descending from the mountain peak above.
Ethan approached the icy wall, his flashlight beam illuminating a series of shallow, hand-chiseled grooves in the granite blocks—grooves that formed a distinct geometric pattern, resembling the architectural blueprints of the original Hayes homestead built in 1912.
He reached out with his bare hand, pressing his palm against the freezing stone. The cold bit instantly into his skin, numbing his fingers within seconds. He swept the thick layer of surface ice away with his sleeve, revealing a small, square iron access panel flush with the bedrock, secured by an old-fashioned combination lock with four rotating brass dials.
The combination. The music box. The note.
Ethan’s mind raced. What numbers had significance to the house, to Helena, to the dark history they had spent a decade trying to escape?
He thought of Coral’s birthday. He thought of the year the house was built. He thought of the date Sarah and he were married in the little chapel down in Bar Harbor. None of them fit the four-digit format required by the brass dials.
Then, his eyes fell upon the final line of the parchment note he had tucked securely inside his jacket pocket: *Look beneath the floorboards where the snow never melts.*
Wait—not a date. A coordinate. Or a page number from the original 1954 ledger they had recovered earlier from the sea-wall cellar.
May you like
Ethan closed his eyes, visualizing the handwritten pages of that leather-bound ledger—the financial records of his grandfather’s illicit shipping routes, the names of local politicians paid off during the roaring twenties, and in the margins, the cryptic property notes written in his grandfather’s shaky, dying hand.
*Page 54.*
