The Pearls (5 page)

It is getting really late and Kaiden is so lost in his thoughts that he is slowly falling asleep in his chair. He lays his head on the table and falls asleep.
Sometime around two a.m. he wakes up and makes his way to his bed. Around nine in the morning his song starts slowly and then just eclipses into the most heart pulling song and he wakes suddenly knowing he needs to do something more today.

Mr. Steinman

November 1990

A week after Zoe was abandoned, the Lawyer that Elizabeth had contacted, dropped dead of a heart attack. He never told his colleagues about her phone call or the information that he had hidden in his safe in the floor. For twenty one years the information is lost.

Fall of 2011

Mr. Steinman has recently purchased and old law
office and is looking to start his own law firm. He is going to practice Family Law. He is looking forward to doing most of the remodel on his own. He grew up in Oklahoma, building homes as a way to get himself through college. He knew his way around a rebuild and knew exactly how he wanted to redo this building. He planned a playroom for the children with lots of toys and stuffed animals and even a small jungle gym. He wanted nothing more than for the families that hired him to know that he had a love for children. Mr. Steinman recently went through a bitter divorce and won custody of his two small children. He moved to this small mountain town in northern California to start over fresh. This remodel is exactly what he needed to let out some of his pent up aggression.

Mr. Steinman starts the demo early in the week. He starts with the walls he wants to take down
first. There are about eight offices in this building and he only plans on hiring two more attorneys. He has the playroom planned to go in the area closest to the lobby, three offices in the back, a kitchenette with a small eating area for late nights, and a conference room.

When you walk in the front doors there are four offices to the left and four to the right. The Lobby is right in the middle of it all so he decides that the offices on the left away from the front of the building are the best for the playroom. He chose to do the playroom first so he can bring his children here and spend more time with them. So he has four big walls to tear down first. He grabs the sledge hammer and starts knocking them out.
Three hours later he is piling the debris from the walls into a wheel barrow and hauling them to the dumpster he rented. He needs to get the kids from the nanny soon so he finishes the clean up and heads out to get dinner for the kids. His favorite part of the day was reading his kids a bedtime story and kissing them goodnight.

The following morning
he was once again doing wall demo on the other offices. He considered just making one huge room and rebuilding the walls where he wanted them, but that was a little more costly then he could afford at the moment. So he had to stick with the walls that were in place and working with what he had.

Across the hall to the planned playroom
there were two more offices. Mr. Steinman thought this was a perfect area for the conference room. If the subject of the conversation got too hard for the child they could send him or her to the playroom and still be able to see them. He planned a giant window looking into the playroom. It takes him two hours to knock down the middle wall and another to pick up all the debris. While he is down at the dumpster, on the last haul of garbage, he grabs the sawzall out of the back of his truck so he can cut out the area for the window and call it a day. An hour later the window was cut out and the mess cleaned up and Mr. Steinman was on his way home to his children. Tomorrow he planned on bringing them up and showing them what he had done, then the toy store to let them pick out a bunch of toys for the playroom.

After a week of demo and getting the walls he wanted down and the window areas cut out Mr. Steinman decided the flooring was next. The whole place was in a
n awful green shag carpet that looked like it was from the early 70’s. He planned to do the playroom in soft mats, so if the children fell down they would not get hurt. The rest of the building was going to be done in wood flooring. The lobby, halls, and the offices were going to be done in a nice cinnamon Berber carpet. He was not going to be doing the flooring however, the flooring guys would be there at noon. That gives him four hours to get all the old flooring up, including the padding, have it all downstairs in the dumpster, and any lose scraps cleaned up.

He started in the playroom and decided to see if he could get most of it in one large roll. He cut along the walls to the hall
, the wall to the outside, and began pulling it up. Two hours later he had only the two offices to the right of the lobby left to do. The flooring was coming up very easy and in big sections so it was exceptionally easy so far.

He walked to the end of the hall and decided to do the room to his left first. He cut along the walls
, as he did in all the other rooms, grabs a corner, and started rolling it up. When he got to the area that he would have put a desk, the carpet stuck. He rolled out the roll of carpet he already had and cut down the length of the room leaving enough to grab hold of and yank up when he got back. He took the roll he had and dragged it out to the lobby.

He liked to pile it all near the door so he wasn’t going room to room all the time. Mr. Steinman dropped the roll he had
, grabbed the duct tape, and taped around the middle and ends of the carpet so it wouldn’t unroll on him. He went back to the office he was working in, braced himself legs apart and knees slightly bent, grabbed the edge of the carpet and pulled as hard as he could.

The n
ext thing he knew he was on his butt and the carpet was all up with a small square section still on the floor. “Now that’s not something you see everyday” he said aloud, he got up and brushed off his butt. He had about an hour and a half before the flooring company would be there so he rolled up the section that just came loose and went to the other office to get that carpet up. He would deal with the little square of carpet that was left when he got done.

He had
forty five minutes to spare before the flooring guys got there. He had taken the rolls down and all that was left was this little square. Mr. Steinman knelt next to the square of carpet and gave a little tug, the edge popped up easily and he pulled it up more to reveal a little door. Inside this door he found a safe built into the floor. The safe was not bolted to the floor so it lifted out easily. He pulled the safe out and took it to his truck and set it in the back seat. He will look at it later, after he gets the kids to bed, right now he needed to go sweep up the floors and bolt down that square and rip the carpet off the top.

Three months went by and the remodel was almost done. The furniture was all ordered the other two attorneys hired
. The walls were being painted right now. He hired a local artist to do a jungle theme in the playroom and had a monkey bar running across the room, not to high though. He also had the bottom half of the smaller wall done in chalkboard paint so the kids could draw, the artist made it look like a tar pit when she was all done.

His office was being done in fall colors of orange, burgundy and green with a dark oak desk and book shelves. He planned to put his desk towards the back of the room with two wing back chairs in front of the desk for clients, a small kids table with coloring books
. A window seat with lots of pillows was to be built in the window and another couch facing the window, for a more personal feel.

Mr. Steinman left the color schemes and decorating of the other offices to the associates he hired. He wanted them all to feel comfortable in their spaces. The conference ro
om he pretty much left blank, cream walls and a large oak conference table.

Things were starting to feel right after so long. His children were happy with the Nanny and their new school. They loved coming to the office and deciding how to decorate the playroom. They were their father’s number one fans. Life was looking good for the young attorney and single father.

Mr. Steinman was getting really busy in his new Law office; he was able to open the doors in November and already had quite the case load. In his off time he was ordering Christmas gifts online for his kids. There wasn’t much shopping here unless he drove to the city and he wasn’t able to do that too often. The Nanny had moved into their home a couple weeks ago and started to take on more around the house. She understood his career and wanted to help where she could. She was an older lady with grown kids of her own that had moved away, so his kids were like grandchildren to her, she had told him that a few days ago.

It was getting close to Thanksgiving and Mr. Steinman had given her three days off and bought her a ticket to go see her daughter in New Mexico. He planned
on cooking with the kids and his parents were flying in to see him and spend Thanksgiving with them.

Christmas and New
Years flew by in a whirlwind. The New Year brought a new batch of cases. He was swamped but made time for the little league games and soccer games and anything his children were enrolled in. Spring break took them to Hawaii for some fun in the sun. They also had a Disney cruise planned for a week in July.

The months came and went and before he realized June and crept up on him. The kids get out of school in a week and he needed to pack their bags for camp. Mr. Steinman went to his garage to get the duffle bags he stored in there. That seemed to be the one thing that he remembered putting away, he was often just tossing thing in here and forgetting about them.

As he reached for the tote with the duffle bags he hit his shin on something hard. “OUCH!” he yelled out. “What the hell is that?” he moves the box off the top of whatever he hit his shin on and realized it’s the safe he dug out of the floor, he forgot all about it. He takes the safe to the dining room table and sets it down; he heads back to the garage to grab the duffle bags before he forgets those too.

Later that night after he has the kids packed for camp and
all tucked in to bed he decides to examine the safe. It is not very big maybe eighteen inches across and about a foot deep. There is an old school dial on the top. The safe is black and gold, probably very pricey twenty years ago.

Mr. Steinman grabs the safe and takes it to his home office
where he has a file of the previous owners is in his filing cabinet. He grabs the file and turns his laptop on. It was too late in the evening to be calling anyone for information on the safe.

Mr. Steinman
reads through the file and sees the name of the previous Law Firm, Johnson, McKay and Berry. He does a quick search and sees that they closed the office when one of the lawyers died in his office and the other two retired. They are all deceased now.

Johnson died of a heart attack in 1990, McKay in 1998 to a car accident and most recently Berry in 2002 to old age it seemed. He was 85 when he passed. The
Law offices have been closed down since 1995, both men retired. Well the safe had to have been one of theirs, and there is no one left to claim it.

Mr. Steinman decide
s to crack it open himself see if there is even anything in it. Surely it was cleaned out when they closed the offices and took everything out. He takes the safe back to the garage, sets it on a table and goes in search of the tools he will need. He finds his hammer and a chisel. He places the chisel on the crease between the dial and the actual safe. He holds the chisel tight and hits it with the hammer. After a couple hard hits, the dial breaks off and he is able to open the lid easily.

Inside the safe he finds a package marked, FOR ZOE DEVONSHIRE ONLY, a copy of a birth certificate and an instruction letter. This is odd he thinks. He begins to read the letter and i
s quite shocked at what he reads. The letter is address to the lawyer that had a heart attack in his office and died. He looks at the late on the letter and sees that it was marked the same month and year the letter was written.

Mr. Johnson,

This letter is instructions of what I would like you to do with my daughter
, in case I go missing, and don’t come back for her. Her name is Zoe Mechelle Devonshire. I am enclosing a copy of her birth certificate. Also enclosed is a check and should cover any expenses of what I need you to do. I need you to take her to Ireland, I can’t tell you the exact location to take her to, but I would like you to contact Makayla Michaels. She will find you once you contact her. Zoe is very special and can only be trusted with Mrs. Michaels. Please don’t fail me Mr. Johnson; she is all I have left in this world. Also give the enclosed package to Makayla; she will know what to do with it. Please for your safety DO NOT open that package. I beg you Mr. Johnson get her to Ireland safely. Makayla’s number is enclosed.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Devonshire.

He noticed then the check attached to the back, made out to Cash in the amount of One Million Dollars. He also noticed the copy of a bank statement
with Millions of dollars in it. The account had Zoe Devonshire as the account holder.

He looks
at all the documents in front of him a little stunned. He didn’t dare open that package. He did have his own children to think about and would not risk anything that would take them away from him. Mr. Steinman grabs all the documents, the package, and went back to his office. He wanted to see if he could find any info off basic sites on the internet.