Page 112 of Once a Hero

If Dad had left it, he would have known to get it before he came here.

Unless he didn’t know about the stash.

Could Philomena have left the pouch for her? Or for anyone?

Twelve hours prior, Dad had mentioned that Philomena was a “fellow treasure hunter.”

Could Philomena have found the lost Amber Room, but not tell anyone, not even Dad?

“Hurry up!” Molyneux barked into Beatrice’s ears.

“If you push me, I’m going to blank out, and then we will get nowhere,” Beatrice said.

“You’re weaker than your birth mother!”

“She’s dead, so I’m doing better than she is, am I not?” What Beatrice said threw off Molyneux.

“You’re more like I am than Philomena,” Molyneux said. “How can it be?”

“You raised me until I was five years old, remember? You adopted me and cared for me as a mother would.”

Molyneux went silent. Her eye softened. Perhaps she thought she had a daughter after all.

It wouldn’t be Beatrice’s intention to reestablish a mother-daughter relationship. She just wanted to make sure Molyneux didn’t set off the C-4 in her vest and that of her dad’s.

“Right now, we still have a puzzle to solve,” Beatrice said. “If we mess up here, we could all die in a cave-in. Maybe you should go upstairs and wait.”

“No,” Dad snapped. “Imogen stays here with us. If we die, she dies with us.”

Molyneux laughed. “Look at you two. You just found each other twelve hours ago and already you’re bickering.”

Beatrice took a deep breath. She coughed. The air in this end of the tunnel wasn’t that great. She wondered how much oxygen they had. “How’s the oxygen level in here?”

“It’s fine. Shut up and open the door.”

Dad drank some water. He offered the bottle to Beatrice. She quickly shook her head. Biological father or not, she wasn’t going to drink from the same water bottle.

“Isn’t it ironic, Imogen?” Dad wiped sweat off his head. “You want us to open the door carefully, but you made us wear vests with explosives all around. If we explode, the whole church explodes with us.”

“We already established that.” Molyneux paced the floor. She motioned to one of her guards surrounding them. In minutes, a director’s chair appeared and she sat on it.

“Dad, help me figure this out.” Beatrice reached for the brooches. “I think if we put the cabochons on the right intersections in succession, the door would open.”

She looked up. The steel door had an array of indentations in a grid. She looked down at her brooches. Maybe the cabochons fit into those indentations.

She started with the two-amber brooch because she knew it was real. She could not pry the amber off the brooch.

“What are you doing?” Molyneux looked alarmed.

“Testing something.” Beatrice knew that if she succeeded, then she would immediately fail with the other two brooches since they were fake amber.

She wondered if the indentations checked the weight of the amber pieces. If they did, she was a goner. Molyneux would immediately know that the brooch box she had stolen from Beatrice at the San Francisco bank the other day was all a set-up.

God, help us get out of here ASAP.

“Your father and I were quite a team,” Molyneux said. “We would probably have found the Amber Room a long time ago if he had been able to control his urges.”

“You were gone a lot,” Dad said.

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