The find of a lifetime.

My wife Janette and I have been married for about two years and decided it was time to buy a house. So we went and got approval from a local bank for a mortgage loan and started the hunt. We have been all over Chicago looking for a nice home to start a family in. My wife found out that she was pregnant last week so it is time to leave the loft apartment.

Just for the record my name is James and I am a pretty average man. I work for a small firm and code and debug all of our software and handle the technical side for the office. I rarely need to report in at the office. I handle everything remotely and have a lot of free time to invest into other projects.

We decided to start looking just outside of Chicago in one of the smaller towns that would be close enough should I need to go to the office but far enough away to enjoy the good life. We found an old farm on the outskirts. The house was in need of some repairs but it came with 10 acres of land, had a small forest with a nice size stream running through the property. We closed rather quickly and were moved in within two weeks.

The floors in the bedrooms and the bathroom were in rough shape so we decided that we would go ahead and rip them out and replace them with some nice hardwood floors.

I began in the bathroom and finished it up in record time. Next was the master bedroom. I ripped up all the old floor boards and started hauling out the old lumber. My wife went behind me cleaning up the little pieces and getting ready for the new floor. She discovered an old rusty metal box lodged in between the floor boards. It had been there for a long time by the looks of it and it was not easy to get it out of the floor.

We didn't know what to expect from the inside of the box. We quickly found a chisel and a hammer and pried it apart. Inside we found two little books bound in black leather. They were wrapped in what must of been a deer skin. It was very fragile and came apart the instant we touched it.

The wife started flipping through the books and found one to be a journal. The woman's name was Shelly. She told of her adventures up until 1930 where it just ended. The second book was some sort of simple ledger. The wife went off to the other room reading journal and the ledger. I kept on working on the floor.

A week had passed and the wife was still reading on the journal every chance she had, so I was curious. I asked her what the deal was, what is so interesting in that journal. She started going through it and said Shelly was a girlfriend to a gangster from Chicago. I haven't found his name yet but they left Chicago after a big bank heist. Her boyfriend was shot up bad but he did live. They held up here off the beaten path and lived off the land.

My wife continued and laid out the rest of the journal. They had took a ton of gold and a lot of cash from the heist but could not use it because the local law was always poking around asking questions about how he was hurt and what they did for a living. Shelly started sewing and doing small odd jobs in town to make ends meet. She kept that ledger so she could track their money. She says that they had to bury the heist money and not use it for a while till the heat was off. Shelly says it is near the old fishing cabin in a homemade storm shelter.

Both our eyes lit up and we both said lets go look for the cabin maybe it is still here. We gathered up a prybar and some tools. Put some sandwiches in a cooler along with some drinks and headed out toward the woods. We made it to the creek but still no sign of a cabin. We walked along the edge of it and found an old metal chair rusted away, only the back of it resembled a chair. We walked up the bank and saw a lone chimney in an open area just a little ways away. Next to the chimney was a very old delivery truck, buried up to the bumpers in dirt and was overgrown from being in the woods so long. It had a chain and an old lock on the hood of it.

We went ahead and managed to get the lock broke off as it was just a big ball of rust. We pried open the hood and instead of a motor in it we saw an old ladder sticking out of the hood. It looked like it did not weather to well so I ran back to the house and got a new ladder and grabbed our camping lantern as it looked very dark in the opening.

We climbed down nearly eight feet when the light reflected off of something shiny. A dugout hole nearly the size of the truck had about twenty old bank bags on top of a mound of gold bars.

We found the heist money Shelly was talking about. The paper money would not be of any use to use as it was out dated but the gold had to worth a ton of money.

We both went back to the house and talked over what we should do with it. I was all for selling a little at a time but it marked with the logo of the bank and would be easily identified so we decided to get in touch with the bank and see if we would or could get a finders fee if it was returned.

We worked out a great deal, the bank would cover all the expenses of recovery and they would give us a finders fee of 20,000 dollars as well as take care of our mortgage on the home. Janette was so happy.

The bank sent a letter after about a week stating that the gold with today's prices was worth over five million dollars. The old bills were donated to a museum and they themselves at face value was 100,000 thousand dollars but since they were so old were worth so much more.

Me and the wife are happy with the finders fee and the free home. We used the finder's fee to remodel the home and now have a wonderful place to bring our family into the world.

The End.