There was no use for it. It was too small to function, too big for decoration and too weird to give to someone as a present. Even if it was big enough to work, small enough to ornament or normal enough to turn into a gift, its colours didn’t match any possible item in the house, or in anybody else’s as far as I was concerned.

                When I finally got Maggie to agree, we put it in a cardboard box and threw it away. It wasn’t until hours later that we realised why that useless thing had come to us in the first place.

                Maggie’s grandfather was one of those very traditional farmers who spent years working day and night in the fields to get the money to start coming and the business to keep growing. He was just a boy when he received a small piece of land from his wealthy godfather, one of those millionaires who had a godson in every single one of their employees’ homes. Ever since then, he had given his body and soul to that piece of land until one day he was about as rich as his long gone godfather had been. Coming from a very humble family, though, he was an eccentric among his business relations, having no social skills, no table etiquette and no trust in the modern system. While all his competitors stored the full income of the month in their bank accounts, dealing with taxes, transferences and interests, Maggie’s grandfather was adept of the hiding system, meaning the money could be literally anywhere within the  farmhouse area. The old man would keep its location even from his wife and his eleven kids.

                It turns out he passed away last year. A couple of months later, there was a reading of his will. We decided not to come, as Maggie couldn’t see why her grandfather would leave her anything, having she barely met him in life. Weeks later, however, a package arrived in the mail and we were informed we had inherited it from the old man.

               You must be thinking we threw all the guy’s money away, but that’s not what happened. At least, not entirely. As no one in the family had told us anything about the will and the thing we had inherited wasn’t a regular thing, we never considered breaking it open to see what was inside. The night we threw it in the garbage we got a phone call from Maggie’s cousin Fiona, one of the thirty two grandchildren the man had left. She claimed to have received a very old chest, not bigger than her thumb, from the lawyer responsible for Grandpa Earl’s will. Maggie told her about our thing and Fiona asked whether there was more. She explained she had found a small piece of paper inside the little chest. As she unfolded it, she could see it was part of a map.

                After that unexpected call, we tried to get our thing back, but the garbage truck had already taken it away. We got disappointed at the time, but soon forgot about it as the days went by. Of course, less than a week later, we got another call.

               Grandpa Earl’s oldest grandson, Little Earl, which was an ironic nickname for the seven feet man with huge feet and an enormous belly, had also got something from his grandfather, an old clock which Little Earl tried to fix and found a piece of paper instead of batteries. He had been tracing the whole family since then, hoping to put all the pieces together and rebuild the map that should obviously lead to the old man’s money.

             Maggie explained she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to help, as she hadn’t had the chance to take any piece of paper off the thing before she threw it away. Little Earl got quite nervous, but said it was okay, that they would probably still be able to do it without her part.