Page 94 of Pandora

“Are you hungry?”

“No.”

A beat.

“Why is this thing so important to you, Hezekiah? Why do you covet it so?”

He feels his insides coil, his anger begins to rear, and he can hear a loud hum in his head.

“Because it is mine,” he snaps.

“Is it?”

Hezekiah curls his fist. He hears Lottie take a step back toward the stairs.

“Helen didn’t deserve it. I told you how calculating she was. How deceitful. She used me.”

“But Helen is dead.”

“Yes. And now it is mine.”

The humming stops. Hezekiah sighs.

“Then why don’t you sell it?”

For a long moment Hezekiah is quiet. He considers. How much to tell? To tell at all? But he knows Lottie, knows she is like a bulldog with a chop that will not rest until it has been satiated.

He breathes deeply, tastes the staleness of gin. “There’s a fortune.”

Another beat. “What fortune?”

Hezekiah gives her a sideways look. “There is money. A lot of money. It’s tied up, somewhere, in a place Elijah kept secret from me. Me!” Hezekiah exclaims on the shout of a bitter laugh. “His own brother!” He takes another breath, clenches tighter his fists. “There was the contents of the shop, of course; I sold it all long ago, to make sure there was nothing for her. But there was more. Far more. And I don’t know where. This vase is the key.”

“I see.”

In the dim of the basement, with her standing so far away from him, he cannot read her bruised face. Does she see? Or does she disapprove? But she has held no such qualms before. The money he has made over the years, she has never once questioned it. Not when it kept a roof over her head. Not when it kept her secure.

“The vase is the key?”

He wipes a hand across his eyes, suddenly overwhelmingly tired.

“There was a note. A piece of paper written by Helen under Elijah’s instruction. It stated how Dora could claim it. The fortune.”

Lottie is silent. Then, “And the note was in that?” She points a finger at the vase. Hezekiah nods. “What did you plan to do with it?”

“Claim it all as mine. Destroy the proof. Sell the shop.”

Hezekiah shifts on the floor, wincing at the stabbing pain in his leg, tries to ignore—though it is becoming increasingly difficult—the smell.

“Why did they not write it in the will?”

“There was no will.”

“Then how—”

“It doesn’t matter,” Hezekiah says, waves his hand to stop the words building on Lottie’s infernal tongue. “The point is the note was written, it was left in that vase, and it is not there now.”

She is silent again. His leg spasms. He breathes out through the pain.

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