The man grabbed her field bag from the corner and dumped its contents out. Her tape measure and clipboard crashed to the marble, along with Beatrice’s notes. He didn’t give any of it a second glance, and ordered her to dump the cash and jewelry inside the bag.

The ninth box was empty except for another red votive candle. He motioned for her to hand it over. She cringed when his hand brushed hers.

“ ‘Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil,’ ” he read, and then smirked. “That’s good advice for you, Iris. Now where were we . . . ? 885.”

Iris lost track of how much money, how many diamonds, and how much gold went through her hands. Her eyes wandered down the endless row of doors. There was no way that they could open them all before someone found them there, but that wasn’t the plan. The man called another number from the book. He was only checking boxes listed in the ledger.

To keep her mind from cracking, she did the numbers in her head. If each gold brick was worth $117,000, how many bricks would it take to make a million? She could barely keep track of the keys as the gun traced her steps, but she forced her brain to keep churning.

After opening two more boxes of gold brick, she’d figured it out. It would take about eight and a half bricks to make a million dollars. There were at least forty bricks stacked inside the filing cabinets already, but the detective had said over $50 million had gone missing. That was over four hundred bricks. It could be even more. She had no idea what the price of gold was back in the 1970s.

“How? How are you going to get these out of here?” she asked, rubbing her aching arms. The cart would weigh a ton.

“Always the engineer, huh, Iris? Don’t worry, the truck won’t be here for at least an hour. But we’d better get moving if we’re going to get these files packed up.” He grinned at her.

That was how he would escape detection, she realized. Hiding the gold in file cabinets and hauling them away in another black truck. He had ordered her to lock each box back up once it was emptied. No one would know they’d even been there.

When he called Box 256, the case clipped her shoulder as she yanked it to the ground. Iris fell to her shaking knees.

The man chuckled. “Get off your ass and open it!”

Inside was another red candle, along with hundreds of keys. These were the missing keys, she realized, running her hands over them. They weren’t lost. Someone had hid them, just as the detective said. A slip of paper fell from the bottom of the votive as she picked it up. It was another prayer.

The man tapped his gun against the wall of the vault until she looked up. “What does it say?”

“ ‘Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,’ ” she whispered.

“Ha! I wouldn’t count on it. Anything else in there?”

There were two complete sets of bank keys for the deposit boxes, along with rings and rings of others. Under them she found a yellowed piece of parchment. It was part of a birth certificate. It had been ripped in half. The other half lay facedown underneath. Iris’s eyes locked on the name “Beatrice Ma—” typed at the top. Beatrice? She risked a second look and saw the birth date was June 12, 1962. It was issued by Cuyahoga County.

“What do you got?” he demanded.

“Nothing. Just some junk.”

Beatrice. Seeing the name gave Iris a jolt of adrenaline. It was a message.

“Hey, you’re not on break. Box 933!” he barked.

Iris pulled herself back to her feet, her mind racing. “The meek shall inherit the earth” had been scrawled in Beatrice’s file. Beatrice must have put it there. She had left the red candle. Beatrice had been in the vault. It was her birth certificate in Box 256. She had locked away all those keys in the same box. She had left Key 547 in Suzanne’s desk. Beatrice called Suzanne to tell her about the box. Beatrice wanted it to be found.

“Beatrice,” she whispered.

“What did you say?” the man demanded.

“N-nothing. I was just . . . praying.”

“This isn’t fucking church! We have a job to do, Miss Latch! Now get back to work.” He threw a red candle at her.

It hit her hard in the arm, but Iris hardly noticed. Beatrice was the reason the vault had stayed locked. She had hid the keys. Somehow a lowly secretary had beaten the most powerful men in town. Beatrice had brought down the bank.

Iris dumped the pieces of birth certificate and the keys into the trash can he’d thrown next to her, unable to tear her eyes from the yellow paper. Beatrice was born in 1962. The petite clothes in the lost suitcase flashed in her mind. Beatrice had only been sixteen when she disappeared. Or was killed.

Killed. The thought snapped Iris out of her trance. When the filing cabinets on the cart blocking the entrance were full of gold, she would be killed. Just like the detective. The thought hit her like a bullet.

“Goddammit, Iris! We’re on a schedule. Box 933.”

No, thought Iris. She slid Box 256 back and closed its door. Her jaw tightened as she staggered to the next lock. She wouldn’t just let it happen. She stole a glance at him as he impatiently tapped his foot. He might have killed Beatrice.

Then she saw it. A key was still stuck in a hole six doors down. Detective McDonnell had said the pins might be set to break if the wrong key was forced in. That must have happened when the man in the blue shirt lost his keys. It had been him, she realized, looking at the gunman. He was that stupid.

She clicked past the correct key for Box 933 and grabbed a different one. She slid it into the lock and heard something tiny snap. Then the cylinder wouldn’t budge. She rattled and wrenched it until she was sure the key was bent and then banged on the door.

“Damn it!”

“What? What’s wrong?”

“It’s stuck!” She wiggled and bent it some more. She gave it a gentle tug and bit the inside of her lip as her pulse quickened.

“Unstick it!” he yelled.

“I can’t!” she yelled back, and made a show of trying.

“Goddammit! I do not have time for this shit!” He slammed the gun onto the counter and shoved the cart of gold out of the way. Iris shrank against the wall of the vault as he pushed past her and yanked at the small piece of metal. As he wrestled with the key ring, she silently slipped out of the vault.

Iris raced through the lower lobby toward the daylight streaming down from behind the elevators. The marble staircase emerged as she rounded the corner, and she scrambled up the steps two at a time to the main entrance. She could see the street through the glass down the hall and sprinted toward the light.

She only remembered the chains on the doors when it was too late. She crashed into them and pulled at the handles frantically, screaming and banging on the glass, hoping someone might hear. The midday sun glared brightly off cars as they passed in front of the old bank. A man was strolling across Euclid Avenue with a coffee in his hand not forty feet away.

“Help me!” she shrieked, banging on the glass. The man didn’t flinch.

“There’s nowhere to go, Iris!” the gunman bellowed from the stairs.

She turned and ran through another set of doors.

CHAPTER 74

Thursday, December 14, 1978

Beatrice lowered Box 544 onto the floor of the vault with a soft thunk. It was the box in Max’s name, and it contained all the damning evidence against her—diamonds and thousands of dollars in cash. Money for Mary, Beatrice thought as she emptied her large handbag to make room. All of the keys Max had stolen, her files, a leather book, a cracked photograph, and three red candles tumbled out onto the bronze floor. She’d taken the candles from the church as a reminder that above all else, she had to do the right thing.