Page 32 of Echoes at Driftwood Cottage

“Gran had a safe deposit box here. We discussed it last spring. But now, I need to access it. I brought her death certificate with me and a copy of her will if that helps. And I have the key.”

Naomi waved off the documentation. “I don’t need to see that again. I made copies of it for the file last year anyway. Come on. I’ll take you in the back. We have a special place for box holders to sit where you can take all the time you need to go through the box.”

Naomi led her to the vault area and to an adjacent room with a table and a chair. “Your grandmother had one of the larger boxes. You go wait in there, and I’ll bring it in.”

Rowan sat down and began to fidget with the strap on her handbag. Why was she so nervous about this? Then she realized it was the anxiety about not knowing.

Naomi came in carrying a rectangular metal box, five by ten by two feet long. “Here you go. Take as long as you need.”

Rowan could tell the box was heavy by the way Naomi carried it. “Thanks.”

Left alone, she studied the box like it might hold the secrets to the universe. A full minute went by before she realized she was wasting time staring at it. She took a deep breath, stuck the key in the lock, and lifted the lid.

The contents resembled what she’d found inside the cardboard box at home—a jumbled mess of papers, two property deeds, an odd assortment of recipe cards with Gran’s favorite dishes written down in longhand, five large envelopes, none labeled, and a handwritten list of her household furnishings for insurance purposes.

She started with the largest envelope and worked the clasp free, hoping to find more photographs. But she was disappointed. Inside contained nothing but old, yellow newspaper clippings about a boat accident at sea that sunk over twenty years ago. There were dozens of articles about the shipwreck, about the Snelling family lost along the coast north of Pelican Pointe during a Christmas vacation. The various articles appeared in different newspapers. From the San Francisco Chronicle to the Oakland Tribune to the more local Santa Cruz Sentinel, Lynette Dewhurst had kept them all. Rowan stuck the envelope down in her bag to read later before opening another thick envelope. This time, she found nothing more than outdated receipts for repairs done on the house from twenty years back.

She picked up a small purple bag trimmed in gold with the Crown Royal logo on it and brushed her fingers over the velvet. “I didn’t even know Gran drank whiskey,” she murmured to herself as she peered inside to see various denominations of coins. If she added up all the Eisenhower silver dollars, Kennedy fifty-cent pieces, and quarters, it probably totaled thirty dollars in change. Poor Gran, Rowan thought. She saved every nickel and dime she could over the years.

At the bottom of the box was another envelope, this one smaller. She was stunned to find a bundle of twenty-dollar bills tucked inside. After counting out the cash, she stopped at four thousand.

Rowan studied the money laid out on the table. “I don’t understand, Gran. Where did all this cash come from? Why were you eating canned beans and peanut butter sandwiches most of the time if you had this kind of cash stashed away?”

Deciding at the last minute to empty the box and take everything with her, she stepped out of the room long enough to get Naomi’s attention. “I don’t have the space in my bag to take all this with me. Would you happen to have a sack or a grocery bag I could use?”

“Sure. Let me check the breakroom. I’m sure there’s something in there you can use.”

A few minutes later, Naomi returned carrying a cardboard box. “Will this do?”

“Perfect. Thank you.” Rowan began to load up all the cash and envelopes.

After returning to the lobby, she saw Daniel waiting near the front door. “So, what did you find?”

“Not here,” Rowan whispered, handing him the box before steering him through the double doors. Once they were outside on the sidewalk, she kept her voice low. “Before we go to the police, there’s something you need to see. We need to go to my house and unload this stuff, especially the cash.”

“Cash? Are we celebrating that you’re now a millionaire?” Daniel joked.

Rowan snickered. “I wish. No such luck. Gran had a stash all right, but it was slightly more than four grand.” At the car, she stopped to take the box out of Daniel’s arms so he could unlock the doors. “Aside from the fact that Gran lived very frugally, the money’s not the weird thing I found.”

Intrigued, Daniel took the short route to Cape Geneva.

Inside the cottage, Rowan laid everything out on the dining table. She took out the money first, the bag with the coins, the inventory list, and the old newspaper articles.

Daniel picked up one of them, read most of it, and then skimmed the others. “I don’t get it. Why would your grandmother care about a ship crashing into the rocks and an entire family drowning?

“The victims. One was a little four-year-old girl named Hallie Snelling. When Naomi went to get a box for me to put this stuff in, that’s when it hit me—Hallie Snelling, a four-year-old child—maybe that’s who’s buried in that grave.”

Daniel scowled. “That’s a decent theory. There’s just one problem with it. Why would your Gran bury little Hallie Snelling and put a marker with your name on it? That doesn’t make sense. Isn’t it more likely that you could be this Hallie Snelling? The real Rowan Eaton was already buried for a month or more when this shipwreck occurred.”

Rowan dropped into the nearest dining chair. “Okay. But every single newspaper article claims that Hallie drowned.”

“According to these clippings, the entire family supposedly went down with the ship. But they’re dated right after it happened. There are no follow-up articles to the story.”

Her shoulders slumped. “I don’t understand any of this, Daniel. If there’s nothing to this Hallie Snelling theory, then why did Gran hold onto all these newspaper stories?”

He took a seat across from her. “What if Gwynn did lose a child? They had a funeral. But then, after a few weeks, your mother shows up here at the house with another little girl. Gran gets curious and starts digging, wondering where Gwynn got hold of another four-year-old, seemingly a month after her own died. Short of kidnapping somebody’s child, explain how Gwynn managed to get a kid. Those articles prove your Gran was serious about getting answers even if they didn’t come from Gwynn.”

“You’re saying Gwynn never told her where I came from. She just showed up with a kid, and Gran went along with it. What kind of person does that to another mother? Gwynn didn’t just find me on the roadside, then tossed me into her car. No. There’s a deeper story here, one that needs pursuing. But I need facts, proof of something, not speculation.”

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