Christine sneaked into the sealed room late one night while Vivian was asleep. She brought two empty suitcases and loaded each with jewels, gems, bars of gold, and bundles of wrapped dollar bills. She saw that there wouldn’t be sufficient room in either suitcase for the diaries and the photo albums. Therefore she left them in the trunk. She figured she would retrieve them on another day when the time was right.
“Okay, Rose Hutchins,” Christine said. “This is war.”
Christine placed the suitcases in the guest room and set them on the floor inside the walk-in closet. She then looked all over the house for her gun. After two and a half hours of searching, she went into the garage. She saw that everything was in its proper place and stored in an orderly fashion.
She snooped around the wooden shelves along one wall, then pulled open each drawer of the tool storage organizer. Next, she eyed another wall where columns of cardboard boxes, piled atop one another, were stacked as high as six feet. The majority of the boxes were small in size, small enough to heft one and carry it across the room unless it had too much weight.
Christine went up to one stack of boxes and glanced around to the side. She saw two more columns of boxes behind the first set. She shined the beam of light around the garage and saw a collapsible stepladder at one corner. She went to it, brought it over, and climbed it with care to maintain her balance. She opened and closed each box at the top of each column. Most boxes contained papers and documents.
She opened yet another box and aimed the beam of light into it. She put her hand in the box and pressed down on one side of a bunch of yellowed papers, then pressed down the other side which did not give way. It had a rock-solid feel to it. For a second, she thought it might be either a paperweight or a stapler. She lifted the small bunch of papers.
“Bingo,” Christine said.
There lay her gun.