“Shhh… shhh, Bette,” Tom whispered, as he stroked her hair, kissing the top of it, trying to soothe her.   “I have no idea about what you and mom have been working on, but one thing is certain.  She trusted you like she’s never trusted anyone.”

“I think her heart just gave out … these things happen ….”

He tried to smile at her encouragingly as he held her away from him, wiping her tears with his thumbs.  “Besides, you underestimate yourself.  You have the keen, incisive, steel-trap mind to do this – that’s all you need to remember.  Mom believed in you – one of the last things we talked about was how close she thought you were to cracking something wide-open.  Something historic — so big that it would help her put to bed a case that she told me that she regretted never having been able to solve.”

“You can do this, Bette.  Be the one.”

She sighed now, as she continued to go over in her mind what she’d worked on over the past week.  Actually, what she needed was to be was sharper, stronger.  But …  could she forge ahead alone?

One thing she was now fairly certain of: Phillip had been half of the latest pair of the custodians.  Who was the other half?  And where did that person move the gold to, after Zurich in 2009?  Phillip hadn’t been able to hand the papers and the leather notebook to a hand-picked successor.  What did that mean?  Would the other custodian know?  What was going to happen, now that the chain of custodians had partly been broken?  Were there any instructions in the pages missing from the small leather notebook in Phillip’s office?

So many questions. 

And people on “the other side” were just waiting to pounce.  Just as the secret to the gold had been passed on from one generation of custodians to the next, on the “opposite” side of this story, the legend of the gold had been passed from generation of crime lords to another – or at least from one group who knew about the gold to the next.  Based on the information documented by each pair of custodians concerning the effort to move the gold, or else the stories about how a new cache of gold was added, such as in Sylvia’s report and in the various reports concerning the gold meant for the “trust” in 1924, there had been enough close calls for those doing the chasing to know that it was highly likely that the legendary cache of gold did exist.   That this wasn’t an urban legend people passed on.