The Pandora Box Read Online Free PDF Page A

stars of evening were already twinkling through dusky skies by the time she finally picked up Interstate Five to head south.
    Five long hours later, she found the little fishing town Peterson had talked about. She pulled to the side of the road, just before a bridge that spanned a river near the end of town, then rolled down her window, as if removing the transparent barrier would help her see better.
    Instead, an intoxicating breath of salt air wafted in. Along with the long, soulful dole of a buoy whistle somewhere on the water. A road wound its way down to the shore, and she could see twinkling lights illuminating a small marina at the end. Right in the spot where he said it would be. Dee remembered Peterson had marked it in the atlas last week. That was the starting place, he had told her.
    Everything began from here.
    She had taken that part of the story with a grain of salt at first because, at that point, she was still having a hard time believing she could even get him out of the building safely. But the plan he had devised was so clever (almost as if he had done things like this before), he finally convinced her it might work.
    All she had to do was steal him a set of scrubs from the hospital laundry (which she had no intention of doing and had purchased a set from a local thrift store, instead) and he would simply walk out through the housekeeping entrance during visiting hours. Ten minutes before they were over, so that most of the staff would be busy cleaning up after visitors and getting ready for the weekend.
    Then she was supposed to drive him here to this little town, where he had money and a passport waiting for him in a safety deposit box at one of the local banks.
    For this help he offered to donate a thousand dollars to any charity of her choice (he knew she wouldn’t take a bribe).
    However, if she agreed to act as a sort of temporary manager and help him with the business end of hiring a team to recover his diamonds, she could earn even more.
    Keep that money or give it away that would be up to her own discretion. Her part of the entire project would only take a couple of weeks, here, in this little town. And she was scheduled for a two week vacation during that same time anyway. Oh, he had thought of everything!
    She had looked into that project from every angle and could find nothing illegal about it.
    Even though Peterson had told her himself what he had done during the war and why he had felt it necessary to hide the jewelry in the first place. Europe was in chaos after it was over. People were desperate. And desperate means called for desperate measures, he said.
    Nazis were stealing heirloom jewelry everywhere they went, and that particular jewelry had been in the Strassgaard family for over two-hundred years. They were well documented and could easily be traced through the inlaid coat of arms. Which she could look up for herself, if she wanted to take the time.
    Well she had, and they were. They were listed as stolen (like so many others) during the Nazi occupation of Holland. And, just as Scott Evans had said, the jewelry was worth a fortune now with not one family member left to make a claim.
    Nels had told her exactly what happened to them. During a very brief cruise off the coast of Holland in the middle of the war, the famous Hermann Goering had hired a boat on which Peterson occasionally served as a deck hand. It was there that he had first seen the Strassgaard jewels. Goering was well-known for traveling with his own personal hoard of stolen jewels. How Peterson had actually come into possession of them he had never elaborated on, but it certainly wasn’t hard to guess.
    It was a crime, lost among thousands suppressed for so long; the Strassgaard jewels were fair game to any treasure hunter that could find them now. Nelson Peterson just happened to be the wayward, desperate youth who had committed it and bore the brunt of guilt all these years. It was the reason he had asked Dee to pray