I Told the Mob Boss I Would Not Be Bought, So He Offered to Be Sold novel · Chapter 12 of 24
Chapter 12: The Chest
We did not talk on the drive out Highway 17.
I sat with the old invoice unfolded on my knee, and he drove with his eyes on the road.
It was nearly dusk when we reached the barn.
I took the gavel from the truck and stood in the yard with it in my fist, looking at the south wall.
"The tack room," I said.
"Yes," Anson said.
"You never looked at it."
"I looked at it every time."
I frowned at him.
"I didn't see you."
"That was the point," he said.
I walked through the barn door and down the dark length of the building with the gavel hanging from my hand.
My father never let me touch it.
He took it to every sale and every dinner, and in the hospital he kept it on the bedside table with the head toward the door.
I stopped in front of the heavy tack-room door.
The padlock was brass and new and cold under my fingers.
I turned the gavel in my hand and looked at it, really looked, for the first time in my life.
It was a plain turned-wood gavel with a heavy hickory head, worn pale by three generations of palms.
The head sat on the handle with a thin ring of dark metal where the two joined.
I put my thumb on the ring.
It turned.
I stared at it.
I unscrewed the head one slow quarter-turn at a time.
The hickory came away from the handle with a faint dry squeak, and a small brass key fell out into my palm.
Behind me, Anson went very still.
"I never knew," I said.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of I Told the Mob Boss I Would Not Be Bought, So He Offered to Be Sold are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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