The Antique Silver Box
Part One: Discovery
Casey Spencer parked her black SUV in the middle of the circular driveway of the family manor she’d inherited from her grandfather. She turned the car off and opened the trunk to unload the bags of groceries inside.
The massive house had been in the family for decades. Since her father had run off years ago and she had no siblings or cousins, she’d inherited the manor. Her mother had married into the family and wasn’t considered blood by Casey’s grandfather, who wanted it to be kept in his family. The property covered hundreds of acres far out in the country. The house was enormous, with twenty-two rooms, and was incredibly costly to maintain, and thankfully, the staff had agreed to stay on after her grandfather’s death. Casey wouldn’t know who to hire for what. She had multiple flower gardens, bushes, trees, a pool, a lake, and a boat on top of a massive manor with too many rooms.
The manor was left furnished precisely as it had been when her grandfather had been alive. Casey’s few pieces of furniture and boxes of personal items were delivered last month and placed by the movers in one of the seven unused bedrooms.
The funeral had been small; only a handful of Grandpa’s friends were still alive. The family had dwindled to just her and her mother. Since her mother spent most of the year in Florida playing bridge, Casey rarely saw her, especially since she moved to her grandfather’s home after his funeral a few months earlier.
“Marsha, I’m back with the groceries,” yelled Casey as she entered the house, her arms filled with grocery bags. Marsha, a rotund older black woman who had worked for Casey’s grandfather since Casey was a child, came bustling down the hall. “Is that everything, or is there more in the car?”
“There are still a few bags in the car, but I’ll get them, Marsha. Let me just put these down.”
“Give those to me,” said Marsha as she took some of the bags from Casey, carrying them into the kitchen to place on the long island. “Why don’t you start putting away the groceries while I get the rest from the car?” suggested Casey. She brought in the few bags left from the car and unpacked them on the kitchen table.
“Now that you’re back with the groceries, I can start preparing dinner. Get out of my kitchen so I can get to work!” said Marsha as the doorbell rang. “Go make yourself useful. Answer the door!” Marsha laughed. Casey walked out of the kitchen and down the long hall, also laughing. Still smiling, she opened the door to find the contractors she had hired to fix the basement and attic.
“Hello, gentlemen. Come on in.” Casey smiled at the workers. “Who’s at the door?” called Marsha from the kitchen.
“The contractors I hired. They’re here to start fixing the damaged areas of the attic and basement. Then they’ll check the foundation for possible necessary repairs,” replied Casey. “Maintaining a house this big is a full-time job, requiring a pile of money!”
“Well, we’re a team of four, so two of us will work in the attic, the other two in the basement. The work will get done faster that way. We promise not to empty your bank accounts,” said Ted, the contractor in charge, making everyone laugh.
“Sounds good to me. I just ask you to show me what you’re planning to do before doing it, so I know what repairs you’re making.”
“Of course. We never do anything without consulting the owner first,” said Ted.
“Let’s get started then.” Casey turned to Marsha, “I’m going to get them set up, then I’ll be in the study.”
With the contractors hard at work, Casey settled herself in the living room with a pen and notebook to write a to-do list. She wrote a new list each day, but they never seemed to get any shorter. There were always several items needing to be finished.
She spent the afternoon running up and down the stairs between contractors. When they called it a day, one of the contractors from the attic brought Casey a heavy antique silver box the length of a sheet of loose paper, three inches high. “I found this under a loose floorboard, which I fixed. I thought you might want it.”
“Yes, thank you. I appreciate you bringing it to me.”
Saying goodbye to the contractors for the day, Casey settled herself in a big, cushiony chair in her grandfather’s study, one of her favourite rooms in the manor. One day, Casey was determined to turn one of the other rooms in the house into a library of her own, complete with floor-to-ceiling books like in her grandfather’s study.
The locked antique box was sterling silver. She admired the intricate flower pattern inlay of the heavy box. Shaking it lightly, she heard the rattling of metal and other things inside.
Casey carefully jiggled a thin letter opener in the box’s lock until she heard it click. Putting aside the letter opener, she reverently opened the box, unconsciously holding her breath, not knowing what to expect. At first glance, she saw loose papers and two small velvet bags. She took them out to find four slim notebooks that appeared to be old passports. Lists of names and corresponding numbers, and amounts filled the other notebooks.
Her eyes widened at the sight of gold bars lining the box. No wonder the box was so heavy. Examining one of the bars, she noticed an emblem imprinted on it. Her breath caught in her throat. It was a swastika, indicating the gold bars belonged to the Nazis in World War II. She hefted one in her hand, wondering how her grandfather came to have Nazi gold.
Casey put what she looked at back into the box, except the small blue velvet bags. She opened one, shaking the contents into her palm. A couple of dozen not-so-small gems twinkled in the light. There appeared to be different coloured diamonds, sapphires, emeralds, and a few small rubies. She gasped at the sight. Shaking with shocked caution, she poured the gems back into the blue velvet bag, made sure it was closed tightly, and put it back in the box.
She opened the other small blue velvet bag and emptied the contents into her hand. She fingered through what appeared to be war medals, none of which she recognized. Her grandfather had never mentioned being in any war, making Casey wonder where they came from.
Her hands still shaking, she picked up the loose papers and began going through them. She found her grandparents’ American birth certificates. She also found German birth certificates whose dates matched her grandparents’ in the names Sophia Wagner and Franz Schmidt.
Casey sat back, confused. After obtaining her birth certificate, she used a magnifying glass she had discovered on the study desk to compare it to the two American birth certificates from the box.
Upon close inspection, Casey found discrepancies between her birth certificate and the American ones she’d found in the box. Even yellowed with age, Casey could see the watermark on her birth certificate was missing from the other two, but otherwise, they seemed identical. If they were forgeries like she believed, they were excellent.
Pulling out the notebooks, she found four passports; two with her grandparents’ forged names and two with their original names. The other notebooks appeared to be lists of people with numerical amounts written in German in her grandfather’s handwriting. She put that aside for later perusal, looking through the other loose documents. She found her grandparents’ American marriage certificate in addition to what appeared to be a German wedding certificate with what she assumed were her grandparents’ German names.
Casey unfolded what appeared to be a letter. She was about to put it aside with the other documents when she noticed the signature at the bottom. Adolf Hitler. She dropped the paper on the desk as though it were on fire.
Hitler? Her grandfather, whom she assumed was “Franz,” had a letter signed by Hitler. Why? What did it say? The documents indicated her grandparents had been Germans who had contact with Hitler during World War II.
Never would she have believed her grandfather was a Nazi. But the evidence was in front of her.