The Smoky Corridor

65

Now Daphne DuBois unlocked a second filing cabinet drawer.

She pulled out the bundle of musty old letters she had found in her grandmother’s attic when she was a child.

The letters that had sent her and her brother on their lifelong quest to reclaim their family’s honor.

And the Confederacy’s stolen gold.

There was the original handwritten letter from John Lee Cooper, who had first tracked the villainous Captain Pettimore to North Chester, Connecticut, in 1873. Letters from other Coopers who had journeyed north from Georgia and Tennessee, seeking the gold.

And then there was the letter.

The one written on an old-fashioned typewriter by the hero teacher who, one hundred years earlier, had taught mathematics in that very room.