Chapter 8 - Thomas's Last Warning
I dreamed about Thomas that night.
Not the sick man I had watched disappear in a hospital bed.
The younger Thomas.
Strong hands.
Dark hair.
A crooked smile.
He stood in our first apartment, holding the brass compass.
"Don't confuse peace with surrender, Maggie."
I woke before dawn.
For a long time, I sat beside the window.
Then I opened the compass.
The needle still moved.
Despite the dented casing, it pointed north.
I smiled sadly.
"You were always stubborn," I whispered.
When I tilted the compass, I noticed something unusual.
A tiny screw inside the brass rim had loosened.
Thomas had repaired the compass several times.
I remembered him once telling me that he had modified the back.
I took it to a jeweler I trusted.
He examined it beneath a magnifying glass.
Then he looked up.
"Mrs. Vance, did you know there's a compartment inside?"
My heart stopped.
"No."
He carefully opened the rear plate.
Inside was a folded piece of paper, yellowed with age.
My hands trembled as I unfolded it.
There were only three lines.
Maggie,
If Charles ever comes back, look beneath the foundation.
Trust the original, not the copy.
Below those words was a date.
November 14, 1994.
I stared at the paper.
Thomas had hidden this message more than thirty years earlier.
Why?
And what did he mean by the foundation?
I called Daniel immediately.
He listened without interrupting.
Then he asked me to photograph the note and secure the original.
"Could he mean the foundation of a building?" Daniel asked.
"Possibly."
"Or the foundation of the company?"
I considered that.
Thomas often spoke in metaphors.
But he was also a practical man.
If he had hidden a message inside his compass, he wanted me to find something specific.
Then I remembered the original Vance family warehouse.
A small industrial building near downtown Los Angeles.
Thomas and I purchased it in 1987.
We used it to store construction materials when our business was struggling.
After Thomas died, I kept the property.
It had remained mostly unused.
"The warehouse," I whispered.
"What?"
"Thomas poured a new concrete foundation there in 1994."
Daniel became quiet.
"Margaret, are you telling me your husband may have hidden something beneath a building?"
"I don't know."
"Then we need to find out."
Two days later, a structural engineer inspected the warehouse.
Using building plans and nondestructive scanning equipment, he identified an unusual cavity beneath a section of the old office floor.
The cavity appeared to contain a metal container.
When the engineer showed me the scan, I felt the years collapse around me.
Thomas had left something behind.
May you like
Something he had believed was too dangerous to keep in plain sight.
And whatever it was, Charles Whitcomb had spent thirty years trying to make sure nobody found it.
