The Phoenix's Rebirth for Revenge novel · Chapter 31 of 32

Chapter 31: The Cellar

The key was heavier than I remembered.

I'd only ever held it in the dark.

"It's your house in my will," Gran said. "So that's your cellar. Do what you like with it."

I closed my hand.

"I want it empty," I said.

"Then empty it."

At eight the next morning Ambrose and I let ourselves into the Beacon Hill house with Gran's front door key.

There was a moving truck parked on Mount Vernon Street with its ramp down.

Boxes lined the front hall, taped shut, labeled in my father's square capitals.

He was nowhere in sight.

The kitchen smelled of coffee and floor polish.

The cellar door stood at the far end, beside the pantry.

The old oak was patched where the lock had been torn out, and rehung with new black iron.

I fitted the key into it.

It turned twice, heavy, the same as always.

The door swung inward on the cold.

Ambrose stood beside me at the top.

He didn't go first.

He waited.

I switched on the new bulb and went down the fourteen steps with one hand on the rail.

At the bottom I stood on the stone floor and looked at it.

Dry and clean and ordinary.

Then I turned around and looked up at him.

"Come on," I said. "There's about four hundred bottles."

"Your grandmother says four hundred and twelve," he said, coming down. "She bet me ten dollars I'd drop one."

"Will you?"

"Not for ten dollars."

We carried them up in wooden cases, two at a time, and stacked them on the kitchen floor.

Claret, port, champagne from somebody's wedding in the nineties.

Gran had already decided where it was going.

"Auction it," she'd said at breakfast. "The money goes to the children's heart unit, with a card that says from Winifred."

On the forty-first trip up I found my father standing in the kitchen.

He was in old jeans and a sweater with a hole in the cuff, and he looked like he hadn't slept.

He was holding a large envelope.

"I didn't know you'd be here this early," he said.

"I didn't know you'd still be here."

"The truck's for me." He put the envelope on the kitchen table. "I've taken two rooms in Charlestown. You can see the yard from the window."

Ambrose set his case down quietly and went back down the stairs for another, and left us alone.

My father looked at the open cellar door for a long time.

"Is your grandmother coming?"

"At noon."

"Then you'll give her this." He touched the envelope. "My resignation from the board. All of it, for good."

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