Chapter 1

The inspiration for this story came from the story Shelly Hugh Driscott, by John Wales, posted on SOL from 2007 to 2008, as well as the story Reflections in Time by J. Ryter posted 9/30/2018.

2035

I sighed, regretting immensely that I had to tear down what had once been a magnificent house. In twenty years, this was the first time I’d had to completely raze such a previously exquisite structure. All the others had been rehabs, although some of the repairs had been extensive, meaning expensive. Only the anticipation of possibly finding something valuable or historical hidden inside the old house helped to slightly ease my unhappiness as I climbed out of my pickup and started setting up my gear. Based on previous experience, I had a one in three chance of finding something hidden in the house. Things Dad and I found previously included a family bible, business ledgers, old letters, an antique pistol, and even caches of old coins.

I unloaded the generator and then carried the first bank of lights into the dilapidated building. Despite the house’s current state of disrepair, I could easily picture in my mind how beautiful it had been when it was completed just over two centuries ago.

The three-story Antebellum mansion, complete with a steeply gabled slate roof, looked like it could have been a plantation mansion. There was even a four-story hexagonal tower-like turret on the front corner of the house, topped with a lightning rod. The lightning rod was bent as if it had been blown over by a violent wind.

I bought the house and the two-acre property it was sitting on at a government auction a month ago. It has been sitting, uninhabited, since the mid-1960s when the last known owner had been under surveillance by the FBI, although I could never find out why he was under suspicion. Hearing a muffled rifle shot from inside the house, the two agents watching the house had rushed inside to investigate.

Thirty minutes later, after all three upper floors had been searched, they located the door to the basement. Halfway down the stairs, their quarry fired a shot and hit one of the agents in the leg. Both agents returned fire and reported seeing the suspect hit and then slumping to the floor. After helping his wounded partner out of the basement, the second agent worked to stem his partner’s bleeding while waiting for backup and the ambulance to arrive.

After help arrived and the wounded agent was safely on his way to the hospital, six agents cautiously entered the basement. They quickly located a puddle of blood where the suspect had been seen collapsing. While they found a scoped 30-06 rifle that had recently been fired and was missing one bullet, they only located one spent casing and they never found the wounded suspect. The weapon that had been used to shoot the agent was a .357, and probably a handgun. That weapon was never recovered. Since the two agents had been at the top of the basement stairs the entire time, they assumed that he had snuck out of a basement window in the ensuing confusion.

The name that the suspect used to buy the house led them nowhere. They had no idea who Andrew Swanson was, where he came from, or who he might be related to. Hence, the property sat vacant with a federal government lien until it was finally released after 60 years. At that point, the county claimed it for unpaid taxes, and it continued to sit vacant, continuing its slow deterioration until it reached the sad condition it was in today.

With the economy currently in the shitter (and someone holding the handle down so it continued flushing!) the county was in the process of reviewing the necessity of each property they owned, hoping to sell some of them to raise cash.

I was the only bidder on this property. Most of the others were looking for commercial real estate, not a dilapidated house far enough outside of town that it would be years before the town grew enough to reach it. Aside from the value of the land, most of them wouldn’t have any idea what the property was worth because they wouldn’t know how to value a decrepit house.

I knew because I had checked it thoroughly. It wasn’t worth the time of day and would have to be torn down. Wood rot, neglect, and termites had weakened the old house beyond repair. That I was sure of. I’m Kevin Ross, age 35. Having taken over my dad’s construction business two years ago after working for him for over twenty years, I knew my way around a derelict house. Dad started me on an idiot stick (a five foot pole with a push broom on one end, and an idiot on the other), and slowly increased my responsibilities until I had learned every facet of construction. Our company’s specialty was repairing and remodeling older homes, craft homes, and historical buildings.

Most county historical societies in North and South Carolina, as well as Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, and Florida knew about us, as did many in Maryland, Delaware, eastern Kentucky, eastern Tennessee, and eastern Alabama. We had repaired dozens of historical buildings in those states, leaving each building looking as close to the original as possible while also upgrading the buildings whenever possible to meet modern building codes, even though historical buildings weren’t required to comply.

This house was only good for one thing: parts. Barring termite infestation, some of the siding and trim could be salvaged and stored for repairing future projects. Most of the windows and doors were salvageable, along with the plumbing and lighting fixtures. Some of the wooden flooring and the mostly undamaged slate roof tiles could be salvaged. The rest of the house would end up in the landfill.

Before my crew arrived Monday, I would get to indulge in my favorite hobby, going through very old houses looking for things former owners or their heirs forgot about. What made it fun wasn’t so much the value, but the discovery, although, what I’d found in the last decade had been worth about thirty grand. I still remember finding six silver buttons beneath a loose floorboard when I was fourteen. While they sold for a surprising amount, the moment of discovery is what is indelibly etched into my memory.

Nearly every home constructed for the wealthy a century or more ago had at least one built-in hiding place. Most had several, ranging from a loose floorboard to an elaborately hidden room.

The ground-penetrating radar (GPR) unit I use hadn’t been cheap but had more than paid for itself over the last five years. Aside from work applications, I used it to look for underground passageways, vaults, and buried items. It’s amazing how many canning jars full of old currency and coins I’ve found stashed in the backyards of old homes. Hidden underground rooms and tunnels abound, especially around a well, a barn, a carriage house, and the foundation of the house. Aside from a trinket or two and the occasional rat, most of the rooms and tunnels are empty except for an accumulation of spider webs that any fan of horror films would love.

A similar but much smaller handheld system worked inside the house, enabling me to look into the walls to find electrical conduits, water pipes, and natural gas pipes. It also lets me spot hiding places in the walls or under floorboards. Again, most are empty, but Dad and I had found the occasional jewelry box, cache of currency, and even old coins. Before I started working with him, Dad had even found a pre-Civil War single-shot pistol that was in reasonably good condition.

After setting up a light pole with four bright lamps in each main room of the house, and then making sure both GPR units were fully charged and working properly, I checked the time and called for a pizza delivery. I always locate a nearby pizza parlor and work with them so we are able to get pizza delivered to an address known by the locals to be vacant. I do the same for a nearby place that delivers Chinese food, as well as a deli so we can have lunches delivered. My wife Amy and stepdaughter Vickie were due to arrive within half an hour, driving our motor home.

I met Amy fifteen years ago when she, her husband, and their three-year-old daughter moved in next door to my parents. The second I saw her, my cock got hard enough to use as a pry bar. Aside from a beautiful face and great figure, she had a vulnerable look that drove me crazy and made me want to protect her.

And I ended up having to help protect her just a few days later. A frantic pounding on our front door one Saturday evening brought me to the door just in time to open the security screen door and pull Amy and her daughter past me to temporary safety inside the house. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to close and secure that door before her irate husband grabbed the edge and yanked it open with his right hand, pulling me off balance while his left was directed at my face.

I’d been in a couple of scuffles as a teenager but had never really been a fighter. And no, I didn’t have any martial arts experience. What I did have was a body that was used to hard work and carrying heavy loads for several hours a day. My other advantage was that I was sober, and he was three sheets to the wind.

As I ducked to avoid having my face rearranged, his fist still clipped the top of my head and I fought to regain my balance. Instead, I decided to use my forward momentum and tackle him. That, I did have experience with, having played football through junior and senior high school. While the husband looked as if he outweighed me by fifty pounds or so, mostly around his middle, I wrapped my arms around him, lifted him off his feet, and piledrove him into the front lawn. After that, I didn’t care if he was unconscious from being drunk or from my tackle.

Turning around, I saw dad backing me up with my aluminum baseball bat and Mom on the phone with the police. I pulled off Bozo’s shoes, rolled him onto his stomach, and quickly pulled the laces out of his shoes. After securely tying his hands behind his back, I used his belt to secure his feet together, too. The cops arrived just as Bozo was coming to and heard him threatening to kill both me and his wife.

Between a previous arrest for a violent crime and violating the conditions of his parole, Bozo ended up sentenced to ten years. His violating the conditions of his parole meant that he also served the remaining eight years of the sentence for his first crime. Three years later, having been able to obtain drugs even while incarcerated, he was involved in a drug-fueled prison brawl and killed another inmate. With the sentence for that death, plus his third violent felony, he won’t be out until he’s too old to be a threat to anything but little old ladies in wheelchairs.

For a year, Mom invited Amy and Vickie over for dinner twice a week on days that Amy worked. She also watched Vickie while Amy worked as a waitress. It was only after a year that Mom made a comment about Amy that made me realize that she was trying to play matchmaker.

And I couldn’t see a downside to such a match, although I must admit to being a bit skittish after catching my last two girlfriends cheating on me.

When she agreed to date me, I included her daughter in our dates, going places a youngster would enjoy while Amy and I had time to talk and get to know each other better.

Despite my original reaction to Amy, one that still occurs every time I’m close to her, we didn’t have sex for two months ... and she was the one who initiated it. I had sensed in things she said that she was reluctant to jump into bed right away. That’s how she had ended up pregnant at age 16, and married to an abusive husband. After dating for six months, she moved in with me. In my parents’ house.

Well, it wasn’t really in the house. Since graduating high school, except for meals, I’d been living in the apartment over the garage. Right after high school, I attended the local college for a year, fulfilling a promise to my parents.

I already knew what I wanted to do with my life: work with my dad and eventually take over his business. I felt that on-the-job learning would be better for me than college. After completing the promised year of college, my parents accepted my dropping out with good grace. However, Dad insisted that I start taking the classes each construction trade offered, everything from basic carpentry to general contractor.

Those classes were good for teaching the basics, and I did learn something from each one. It also took eight years to finish all of them and get my general contractor’s license. Still, the classes held my attention, and I did well, unlike the classes I barely managed to pass in college.

The classes taught the basics and turned the students loose to practice what they’d learned. In a way, it was similar to the medieval apprenticeships. After the classes, on-the-job experience both reinforced what I’d learned in class and added to my knowledge. The men and women who worked for Dad were both experienced and passionate about their work. I classed them, male and female, as true craftsmen. Dad only hired the best, and he paid well for their expertise and dedication.

Amy and I were married after a year of dating. She was the one delaying the marriage, explaining after we married that she had wanted to make sure she fully knew me before agreeing to get married.

Due to severe complications with Vickie’s delivery, we could not have any children of our own. I treated Vickie as if she were my biological child. She knows she’s not, but I treat her that way.

Shortly after turning fourteen, Vickie suddenly seemed to focus on me. It came to a head the day she crawled into my lap wearing one of my old T-shirts and nothing else. I made sure to tell Amy about it and was surprised to learn that she’d seen Vickie trying to flirt with me and get my attention for at least four months.

“She definitely got my attention tonight! When that shirt rode up, I saw places I haven’t seen since she lost her swimsuit in the pool the first year I knew you. Those places have definitely changed,” I commented.

Amy laughed for nearly ten minutes at both my comment and my embarrassment.

After mother and daughter had one of THOSE talks, it didn’t get any better. Amy told me to relax and let Vickie explore her budding sexuality. She explained that getting a rise out of me (literally) made Vickie’s day because it meant I found her sexy.

“Of course she’s sexy,” I protested. “She looks a lot like you did when I met you and you know how I reacted to you,” I reminded her.

Between that comment and the one I made about Vickie’s exploration not involving any spelunking, it took Amy several minutes to stop laughing enough to catch her breath.

Nearly two years later, Amy dropped a bombshell on me. For her sixteenth birthday, Vickie wanted to lose her virginity. To me. Even before I got my mouth open to protest, Amy put her hand on my lips to stop me. She explained that she had no illusion that Vickie would be a virgin when she married and was surprised that she’d held out this long since more than half the girls her age were already sexually active.

Now, Vicky’s and my occasional couplings were usually limited to mornings or afternoons, and never in the master bedroom. There were, however, special occasions like her birthdays and her graduation where Vicky got to spend the night in my arms, but that was in her bed.

Just last weekend, Vickie’s boyfriend broke up with her, instead choosing a girl named Tiffany. Tiffany had bigger boobs and a bigger ass, hence the catty nickname other girls used behind her back: ‘Titfanny.’

Once the motor home was parked, both women flowed into my arms demanding a kiss which I gladly dispensed.

I was up before dawn Saturday, and fixed my favorite breakfast, sausage, potato, egg, and cheese burritos with a generous amount of salsa added to make the filling good and squishy. When I checked, Vickie was awake, smiling as she watched me cook. Amy playfully tried to drag me back into bed for a repeat of last night, but knew we had a lot of work that had to be finished by Sunday night.

Two burritos and two cups of coffee later, Vickie was using the outdoor GPR unit, starting as close to the edge of the house as she could physically get. We figured that it would take all day to thoroughly explore the two-acre yard. Extending out from under the kitchen, she quickly found a tunnel that extended to the now-covered, stone-lined well.

While Vickie was searching outside, I was operating the handheld unit inside the house, working my way over every square inch of the floor and each wall in the living room, finding nothing. I always start with the living room as a warm-up. The only place I’ve ever found anything in the living room was around the fireplace. Amy helped me by periodically taking over to give my arms a rest. She also marked the locations of wiring and plumbing I located, using blue, yellow, and green chalk on the walls and floors to mark where they ran.

The fireplace had two hiding places, both filled with something. One spot was inside the fireplace, far to the right. A one-inch-thick piece of brick covered the opening where an entire brick should have been. Eight neat piles inside the opening held 224 gold Double Eagles and they poured out into my hand when I scooped them out.

“Holy fuck!” I exclaimed.

I did the rough math in my head. Assuming they were each one ounce of gold, and with gold currently worth north of $3,000 an ounce, they were worth nearly two-thirds of a million dollars just for the gold. I was sure the numismatic value would be even higher. That more than covered what I paid for the property.

The second hidey-hole was high in the back left corner of the hearth. It took me a few minutes to find the release. This cache held a treasure trove of old silver coins, mostly silver dollars, with dates from 1855 to 1931.

In most houses, the study was the most common room in the house to find a hidey-hole. This study was no exception. Unfortunately, the space under the floorboards was empty except for a lot of spider webs and a couple of dead spiders. The space under the floorboards in the bedroom was likewise empty. It wasn’t until 9:00 Saturday night that we finished searching the upper floors and the attic. I was exhausted but didn’t have a bitch in the world. How could I complain about finding more than a million dollars? Well, I suppose I could complain about being in a higher tax bracket. The Chinese takeout driver loved the twenty-dollar tip I gave him.

I was surprised to find Vickie in our bed when I got out of the motor home’s shower.

“It’s not like there’s anywhere in the motor home I won’t hear you two,” Vickie explained. Amy just shrugged her acceptance.

Sunday’s sunrise found me chewing a mouthful of my third breakfast burrito while struggling to get the outdoor GPR unit down the narrow stairs into the basement, kind of like getting a power lawnmower down the basement stairs.

I checked the basement floor, finding nothing. The concrete basement floor had been too thick for the handheld unit to penetrate. Scanning the walls had turned up nothing except behind the heavy wooden shelving unit covering the area where the tunnel Vickie found originated. I finally found the latch release under the lowest shelf and on the far side of the shelving unit and pressed it.

After swinging the still-sturdy shelving unit out like a door, I could see behind it and found a small room about six feet by ten feet. The tunnel continued from the back wall of that room but was barely tall and wide enough for someone to walk through without stooping or turning sideways. Before following it, I checked the two-drawer wooden filing cabinet along the left wall of the room and found that it contained US currency, silver certificates with dates from the 1940s, 50s, and early 60s. All of them were silver certificates. It was a shame the government stopped allowing their redemption for silver.

There were dozens of banded stacks of five, ten, twenty, fifty, and even hundred-dollar bills. There were also three passports, US, Canadian, and Russian, each with a different name but the same picture. Remembering that there had been a gunfight in the house with someone the FBI had been watching in 1963, I felt the cash might be from a bank robbery or something, maybe even an airplane hijacking. I wondered when the infamous DB Cooper hijacking had occurred but then remembered that it had been solved a few years ago and much of the ransom found. Thankfully, we all wear leather gloves when we work so none of our fingerprints were on any of the money or passports, although, after over sixty years, I wondered if the owner of any fingerprints would still be alive.