PART 14 — An unexpected guest on the doorstep
I held my hand still above the paper. Detective Visser furrowed his brow and walked with quick steps to the hallway to open the front door, his hand resting lightly on his coat where his badge and service weapon were.
Mark and Sarah held their breath. Who on earth could still be knocking at the door at this hour, in the middle of a gloomy rainy night?
The front door opened with a creaking sound. We heard a deep, unfamiliar male voice talking to the detective, followed by quick, hurried footsteps heading toward the living room. An old man, draped in a soaked raincoat and with a face deeply grooved by time and emotion, stepped into the room.
He looked around the living room, his eyes gliding past Mark and Sarah, and then rested calmly and full of emotion on me.
“Anna,” the man said with a husky, trembling voice that cut to the bone. “Thank God I'm still on time. I thought I was too late to tell you the truth about Willem's damn safe.”
I jumped up from the chair, the pen falling from my hand onto the floor and rolling away. My breath caught in my throat. The man standing there had been out of our lives for fifty years; he was the only one who knew the true story of the family fund, and the person Willem had always told me had long since passed away.
