The office at the Dunmore County Sheriff's Department had a smell all its own: stale coffee layered over paper, the faint chemical tang of the copier, and something underneath both, something older, like the ghost of a thousand cigarettes smoked by deputies long retired. Deputy Carla Jessup had grown accustomed to it. Some mornings the smell meant safety, routine, the slow unspooling of paperwork and small-town complaints. This morning, the smell was just a smell, and the coffee in her mug was going cold.
She sat behind her desk with the incident report open on her screen, fingers resting on the keyboard, not typing. Across the bullpen, the radio muttered to itself in static and codes she had stopped hearing years ago. A ceiling fan turned in lazy circles overhead, stirring the air without cooling it. Through the plate glass window at the front of the building, Main Street lay in that suspended state between breakfast and lunch, when the only people out were the ones with nowhere particular to be.
Her phone buzzed. Velma Tatum, the county clerk, had a habit of texting in the precise moments Carla was trying not to think about anything.
"Got a hit on the Dunmore Lane ashes. Dental. Come to records when you can."
Carla read the message twice. She reached for her coffee, took a sip, grimaced at the temperature, and stood. The legs of her chair complained against the linoleum as she pushed back. She pocketed her phone, took her cap from the corner of the desk, and settled it on her head without checking the mirror.
The records office sat at the back of the building, past the booking area, past the small kitchen with its microwave and its that nobody had updated since 2019. Velma was at her desk when Carla knocked once on the doorframe, a courtesy more than a request. The woman had a face that suggested she had been expecting Carla since before the text was sent, a slight upward curve at the corner of her mouth, her reading glasses perched low on her nose.
"Sit down," Velma said, and the way she said it left very little room for negotiation.
Carla sat. The chair across from Velma's desk had a broken spring on the left side that she always forgot about until it caught her by the small of the back. She shifted, adjusted, and let the discomfort settle.
"Dental match came through this morning," Velma said, turning her monitor so they could both see. The screen glowed with the image of a dental chart, a maze of circles and lines, the universal language of teeth. Below it, a name. Carla read it once, then read it again, slower.
Birdie Lou Pemberton. Age seventy-four. Last known address, a pink cottage on a side street in Dunmore, a town so small it did not even have its own post office. The case notes were sparse. A retired schoolteacher. Lived alone. No immediate family in the county. Had been reported missing three months ago by a neighbor who had noticed the mail piling up and the porch light burning, day after day, without variation.
"Everybody figured she wandered off," Velma said. She removed her glasses and folded them with the slow deliberation of a woman who had been folding the same pair of glasses for twenty years. "Got dementia, they said. Probably walked into the woods and never found her way out. That's what the town thought. That's what the old sheriff filed."
"The old sheriff," Carla said, "was a lazy man who liked his naps."
Velma gave her a look that was not quite a smile and not quite a reprimand. "Be that as it may. The file says she wandered. No foul play suspected. The neighbor found the door unlocked, a pot of beans still on the stove. Case closed pending a body, which they never found." She paused, turned her glasses over in her hands. "And now we have found her, Carla. On Dunmore Lane, in your jurisdiction, in a burn pile that somebody tried to pass off as a brush fire."
The words sat between them. Carla did not pick them up. She had been at the scene two days ago, the smell of charred wood and something else, something that made her step back and pull her shirt over her nose, something she had not been able to name. She had been the one to bag the remains, label the bags, seal the evidence locker with her own hand. She had written in her own report that the fire was suspicious, that the bones did not look like the bones of any animal she had ever seen, that the dental work embedded in the jaw fragment was human and expensive and old.
She had not slept well that night. She rarely did, when the dead found their way to her desk.
"Seventy-four years old," Carla said. "Lived alone. No family."
"Not no family," Velma said. "No family in the county. There's a nephew somewhere up north. Cleveland, maybe. Or was it Akron? The neighbor, a Mrs. Cornelia Doss, she might know. She was the one who found the cottage. She was the one who called it in."
Carla nodded. Mrs. Cornelia Doss. She knew the name, had seen it on the original missing persons report, had not yet made contact. Small towns had a way of letting time pass over the elderly, the way a pond collects a skin of dust. Birdie Lou Pemberton had been a name in a file, a paragraph in a ledger, a mouth without a face. Now she was a set of charred remains in a bag in Carla's evidence locker, and a name in a dental database, and a question that was beginning to itch.
"Run the nephew," Carla said. "And pull everything we have on Dunmore. The town itself. Any priors in that zip code, any calls we ignored. Anything."
Velma nodded. She had already started typing before Carla finished the sentence. The clatter of her keyboard was a familiar percussion, almost musical in its rhythm.
Carla stood. The broken spring caught her again, and she made a mental note to requisition a new chair, a note she would forget by lunchtime. She turned to go, then stopped, one hand on the doorframe.
"Velma."
"Deputy."
"The neighbor. Mrs. Doss. I need to talk to her today. If she knows more than she put in that initial statement, I want to hear it from her."
Velma looked up. The look she gave Carla was the look of a woman who had watched a lot of deputies come and go, and who had learned to read the difference between a man who wanted to close a file and a man who wanted to open one. "She'll be at the pie shop," Velma said. "Cornelia Doss and Eugenia Crick are thick as thieves. The two of them and their morning coffee. If you want Mrs. Doss, you go to Crick's."
Carla nodded, and left the records office with the name of the dead woman tucked into the back of her mind where she kept the names of the dead, a small and growing collection. Birdie Lou Pemberton. She let the name settle in her mouth as she walked, the way a person tastes a word they have not yet learned to pronounce. She had never met the woman. She had seen her only in a photograph attached to the original report, a small black-and-white snapshot taken at some long-ago church function. Birdie Lou had been smiling in the photograph, a wide and unbothered smile, the smile of a woman who had lived long enough to stop minding the camera.
Carla had not yet learned to mind the camera either. She walked back through the bullpen, past the radio, past the kitchen, past the calendar that had not been updated, and stopped at her own desk long enough to grab her keys. The office was quiet. The morning shift had dwindled to a single deputy at the front desk, a young man whose name Carla could not remember at the moment, who was filling out some paperwork of his own and did not look up as she passed.
She went out the front door, into the heat of the day, and felt the sun on the back of her neck like a hand.
The road out of town unspooled in a long, dust-colored ribbon, the kind of road that asked nothing of a driver except patience. Eugenia Crick drove it the way she drove every rural route, with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on a stack of letters she had yet to deliver, the envelopes fanning against her palm like a hand of cards. Her mail truck, a white Jeep with the Crick Pie Shop logo faded on the door, rattled over the first cattle guard and settled into its familiar hum.
The morning was already warm. Cicadas droned in the hedge rows, and the air smelled of cut hay and something sweeter she could not name, something that had been blooming all week along the back roads and had not yet faded. She had left the shop before six, earlier than usual, because the list of stops was longer today and because Birdie Lou Pemberton's absence at the Wednesday quilting circle had started to bother her in a way she did not want to examine too closely.
Birdie Lou had not missed a Wednesday in eleven years. Eleven years of pie and gossip and the soft clatter of needles, and now, on a Wednesday in late June, her chair had been empty. Eugenia had not wanted to say anything to the other women. She had poured the coffee and sliced the lemon pound cake and passed the cream, and she had watched the door, and the door had stayed closed, and by the time she locked up the back room she had made up her mind to go and see about Birdie Lou herself.
The first stop on the route was the Smiley place, a trim clapboard house with a screened porch and a garden out front so immaculate it looked combed. Eugenia pulled the Jeep into the gravel drive and cut the engine. From inside the house, she could hear the blow-dryer running, a steady mechanical sigh, and after a moment the front door opened and Reba Smiley came out onto the porch with a towel around her shoulders and a mug of something in her hand.
"Well, if it isn't the mail lady," Reba said. "You're earlier than sin and twice as welcome. Come up here and let me look at you."
Eugenia climbed the porch steps. Reba was wearing a pink housecoat the color of cotton candy, and her hair was still up in pin curls, and the mug in her hand gave off the sharp green smell of fresh mint tea. Eugenia set the stack of letters on the porch railing and slid the Smiley mail from the top of the pile.
"Reba, I need to ask you something about Birdie Lou."
Reba's expression did not change so much as settle, the way water settles in a glass when the hand carrying it stops moving. She took a slow sip of her tea, and her eyes, which were a pale, watery blue, fixed on a point somewhere over Eugenia's left shoulder.
"I was wondering when somebody was going to ask," Reba said. "Sit down. No, don't sit on that chair, the cat's been on it. Here, this one."
Eugenia sat. The porch boards were warm beneath her, and the screen door banged once, softly, in a breeze that had not yet decided which direction it wanted to go.
"Has she called you?" Eugenia asked. "Since Wednesday?"
"Birdie Lou? Lord, no. Birdie Lou does not call, Birdie Lou appears. That's the whole point of Birdie Lou. You don't have to call her, you just leave a door unlocked and she's in your kitchen before the kettle boils." Reba lowered herself into the rocker across from Eugenia, and the rocker gave a long, wooden creak. "I called her Thursday morning. Let it ring fifteen times. Called again Friday. Nothing. I told my husband, I said, that woman is either dead or she's won the lottery and can't decide which relative to call first."
"What do you think happened?"
Reba was quiet for a moment. She set the mug down on the small table beside her, and the mint smell drifted up between them, sharp and clean. "I think something is wrong," she said. "I think that woman would no more leave her rose garden than she would leave her right arm. You know what she did last summer when the Japanese beetles came through? She sat out there with a jar of soapy water and picked them off one at a time for six weeks. Six weeks, Eugenia. She canceled bridge. She canceled church. She sat out there in that garden like it was her child in a hospital bed, and she did not come in until the last beetle was dead."
"She canceled bridge," Eugenia repeated.
"Birdie Lou Pemberton canceled bridge. If that is not a sign of the apocalypse, I do not know what is." Reba picked up her tea again, and her fingers, Eugenia noticed, were not quite steady. "She would not leave that garden. Not willingly. I don't care if the King of England himself come knocking on her door and asked her to come to London. She would have said, you go on now, I'll be along directly, and then she would have gone back to pruning."
Eugenia turned the stack of letters in her lap. The top envelope was addressed to Reba in Reba's own looping hand, a bill she had paid online and was now receiving a confirmation for, and Eugenia set it aside to give to her last. "When was the last time you saw her?"
"Tuesday. Last Tuesday, the day before we were supposed to meet. She came into the salon for her standing appointment, two o'clock, and she sat in my chair and she told me her feet hurt and her grandson was a fool and the new minister at the Baptist church was too young to shave, and I did her hair and she left, and that was the last I saw of her." Reba's voice thinned, just slightly, on the last word. "She looked fine. She looked like Birdie Lou. She did not look like a woman who was about to disappear."
"Did she say anything that struck you as odd? Anything at all?"
Reba considered this. The rocker creaked. A mockingbird landed on the porch railing, considered the two of them, and flew off again with a sharp, burbling call.
"She did say one thing," Reba said slowly. "She said, and I remember because I thought it was strange at the time, she said, 'Reba, if anything ever happens to me, you make sure they look at the husband of that nice young widow down the road.' And I said, what husband, what widow, what are you talking about, and she just laughed and changed the subject to the price of fertilizer."
Eugenia felt a small, cold finger touch the back of her neck, though the morning was warm. "What did she mean?"
"I have not the faintest idea," Reba said. "I thought she was just being Birdie Lou, you know how she gets, all the time making little comments that don't add up to anything. Half the time I think she just likes the sound of her own voice raising questions she has no intention of answering." Reba picked up her tea, then set it down again without drinking. "But now that you're sitting here asking me about her like this, I am not sure I like the sound of it."
Eugenia stood. The porch board gave a little under her weight, and the screen door banged again. "I'm going to see Fern next," she said. "And Gertie June. And then I'm going to drive out to Birdie Lou's place and see for myself whether she's there or not."
"Take the pistol out of the glove box," Reba said. "The one your husband left in there. I know it's there. I saw you put it there two years ago when that boy was making trouble at the post office. Take it with you."
"Reba."
"I am not joking, Eugenia Crick. You go out to that woman's house alone, you take the pistol. I will not have you disappearing the same week your friend did. I will not have it."
Eugenia smiled, though she did not feel like smiling. "I'll think about it," she said, and she took her letters and walked back down the porch steps, and the gravel crunched under her boots, and Reba sat in her rocker and watched her go with her tea going cold in her hands.
The road to Fern Applewhite's nursery wound through a stretch of woods that smelled, even from the truck, of pine sap and damp earth. Eugenia drove with the windows down and let the air move over her. She had known Fern for thirty years, since before she had married Hap, since before the pie shop, since before any of it. Fern was the sort of woman who said what she meant and meant what she said and never once in her life had felt the need to apologize for either.
The nursery was a long, low building with a tin roof and rows of potted herbs set out on wooden benches in the front. A hand-painted sign over the door read APPLEWHITE HERBS SUCH, EST. 1973, and a cat Eugenia had never been able to name slept in the window box among the rosemary. Eugenia parked and went in, and the bell above the door gave its small, familiar chime, and the interior smelled of dirt and lavender and the dry, peppery scent of dried chili peppers hanging in strings from the rafters.
Fern was in the back, repotting something. She came out wiping her hands on a rag, and her face, which was brown and creased like an old leather glove, did not change when she saw Eugenia. Fern's face never changed. It was one of the things Eugenia had always liked about her.
"Mail's early," Fern said. "You want tea? I just put the kettle on."
"I'd love some, Fern. And I need to ask you about Birdie Lou."
Fern stopped wiping her hands. She stood very still for a moment, the rag bunched in one fist, and then she resumed, slower, and walked toward the small stove in the corner. "I was wondering when you'd come," she said. "Sit down. Don't touch that flat of basil, I'll have it priced by tomorrow."
Eugenia sat on the wooden stool by the counter. The cat from the window box had followed her in and was winding between her ankles, purring like a small, furry motor. She reached down and scratched its ear, and it arched into her hand.
"When did you last see her?" Eugenia asked.
"Last Tuesday, like Reba. I was at the hardware store in town, picking up a new nozzle for the hose, and she came in for her fish food. We stood in the aisle and talked for ten minutes, maybe longer, about the rain we'd had and whether it was going to hold. She said her tomatoes were coming in early. She said her roses were the best they'd been in years." Fern set a chipped enamel mug in front of Eugenia and poured from the kettle. The tea was black and strong, and it smelled of something Eugenia could not quite place, something herbal and faintly bitter. "She was fine. She was the same old Birdie Lou. Talking too much and listening too little."
"Did she say anything strange?"
Fern pulled up the other stool and sat. She did not look at Eugenia so much as past her, at some middle distance only Fern could see. "She asked me if I ever thought about selling the place. I said, Fern Applewhite does not sell. She said, no, I didn't think so either, but I wanted to ask. And I said, why are you asking, and she laughed and said she was just making conversation, and she took her fish food and left."
Eugenia turned the mug in her hands. The enamel was chipped along the rim, and the chip was rough under her thumb. "That doesn't sound like Birdie Lou," she said.
"No," Fern said. "It does not. Birdie Lou asks questions because she wants answers. She does not ask questions to hear herself talk. She is a woman who knows what she wants to know, and she finds it out, and that is the end of it." Fern picked up her own mug, then set it down again without drinking. "I have been thinking about it since Wednesday. Something was on her mind. She did not say what. But something was."
"Did she say anything about leaving? About going anywhere?"
"Birdie Lou does not leave," Fern said, as if that were the end of the matter. "Birdie Lou has not been past the county line in fifteen years, and she was not happy about that. She has her garden, she has her house, she has her cats. She has her Wednesday circle. She is a woman who is exactly where she wants to be, and if you tried to move her, you would have to come with a crane."
Eugenia nodded. The cat had stopped purring and was sitting at her feet, looking up at her with wide green eyes that seemed, for a moment, to be asking a question of their own. She finished her tea, set the mug down, and stood.
"Fern, I'm going out to her place after I see Gertie June. Will you keep an ear out? If she calls, or if you hear anything, you call me at the shop."
"I will," Fern said. "And Eugenia." She waited until Eugenia was at the door. "Watch yourself out there. Gertie June has been in a state all week. She came by yesterday and bought four pounds of garlic and a bundle of sage, and she would not tell me what for, and I have known that woman since she was in pigtails. When Gertie June Boggs is buying sage, something is wrong."
The road to Gertie June's place followed the railroad tracks for half a mile before turning off into a stretch of scrub oak and red clay that the county had long since stopped pretending to maintain. Eugenia drove slow, the old truck's shocks groaning over every rut, and she thought about what Fern had said about sage and garlic, about a woman who had been in a state all week, about the way Birdie Lou had not been in church last Sunday when Eugenia had looked up from the third pew and seen, for the first time in months, the space where Birdie Lou usually sat.
The property announced itself before the house did. A fence made of mismatched boards leaned inward at drunken angles, strung with bits of reflective tape and aluminum pie plates that clicked and turned in the morning breeze. An old Buick sat up on cinder blocks in the front yard, its hood missing, a tangle of dried morning glory vines crawling through the engine compartment. A flock of guinea fowl scattered at the truck's approach, their clatter sharp and offended, and a dog that was mostly teeth and suspicion trotted out to the end of its chain to bark twice before deciding Eugenia was not worth the effort.
Gertie June Boggs came around the corner of the house before Eugenia had even turned off the engine. She was wearing a man's plaid shirt over a flour-sack dress, her gray hair pulled back in a knot so tight it looked like it might be holding her whole head together. She had a pair of garden shears in one hand and a smudge of dirt across her cheek, and she stood at the fence with the shears pointed at the truck like a bayonet.
"Well," she said, before Eugenia had even opened the door. "If it isn't the pie lady. You lost, or you buying, or you wanting something I ain't got."
"Got a minute, Miss Gertie June?"
"I got a minute. I got several, as a matter of fact. Time is the one thing I got a surplus of. You want to come in or you want to stand out here and let the gnats eat you alive."
She turned and walked back toward the house without waiting for an answer, and Eugenia followed, latching the gate behind her, stepping over a sleeping cat that did not bother to open its eyes.
The inside of the house was exactly what Eugenia had expected and exactly what still made her catch her breath every time she saw it. There was the smell first: dried herbs, woodsmoke, something sweeter and older underneath that she could never quite name. Bundles of sage and rosemary and lavender hung from the rafters. Jars of pickled things lined every shelf, each one labeled in Gertie June's cramped, careful hand. A black iron pot sat on the woodstove, and a cat, a different cat, was curled inside a basket of clean rags on the counter, watching her with the resigned patience of a creature that had seen a great deal and expected very little.
"Sit," Gertie June said, pointing at a kitchen chair with the shears. "Don't touch nothing. I'll make tea."
"You don't have to do that."
"I know I don't have to. That's why I'm doing it."
She moved around the kitchen with the quick, sure movements of a woman who had been in it for sixty years, filling a kettle, setting two enamel cups on the table, dropping a spoonful of something dark and fragrant from a jar into each one. The kettle went on the stove. She sat down across from Eugenia, the shears laid between them like a paperweight, and fixed her with a look that was half challenge and half curiosity.
"Fern sent you," she said. It was not a question.
"Fern mentioned she'd seen you this week."
"Fern talks too much. Always has. Even when we was kids. Couldn't keep a secret if you nailed her shoes to the floor. I remember once she told Mama about the time I put a frog in her bed, and I didn't speak to her for a week. A whole week. Frog was fine, by the way. Seemed to enjoy the linens."
"She said you bought sage."
"I buy sage every week of my life. Sage keeps things out. You put a bundle by your door, you put a bundle by your bed, you put a bundle by the window, things don't come in. Things think about it, and they decide it ain't worth the trouble, and they go on somewhere else."
"What kind of things, Miss Gertie June?"
Gertie June looked at her for a long moment, the kettle beginning to whisper behind her. When she spoke, her voice had lost some of its edge, or maybe just shifted it into a different register, a lower one, a one that came from somewhere further back in her chest.
"Them kind of things you don't talk about in polite company," she said. "The kind that come in the night and sit on your chest. The kind that follow you home from places you shouldn't have been. The kind that wait at the end of a road and watch you come closer, and you know you ought to stop, and you don't."
The kettle began to sing. Gertie June got up, poured the water into the two cups, and set one in front of Eugenia. The smell that rose was chamomile and something darker, something Eugenia did not recognize.
"Drink," Gertie June said. "It'll settle you. You got that look Fern gets when she's trying to figure out if she ought to tell you something. You got it bad."
Eugenia wrapped her hands around the cup. The enamel was chipped at the rim, and the warmth of it felt good against her palms, against the chill that had settled into her sometime between the shop and here.
"I want to ask you about Birdie Lou," she said.
Gertie June did not move. She sat back down in her chair, picked up her own cup, and held it without drinking.
"What about her."
"Have you seen her this week."
"Thursday. No, Wednesday. Wednesday evening. She come by here about suppertime, which is unusual, because she don't usually come by here at all, on account of a disagreement we had in nineteen eighty-six over a quilt pattern that I am not going to get into at this late date, except to say I was right and she knew it and it has cost us both considerable sleep over the years."
"What did she want?"
"She wanted to give me something." Gertie June set her cup down. She reached into the pocket of the plaid shirt and pulled out a small cloth bag, drawstring, dark blue, the color of a bruise. She set it on the table between them. "She said she wanted me to keep it for her. She said she didn't want it in the house. She said if anything happened to her, I was to give it to you."
Eugenia stared at the bag. "To me?"
"That's what she said. By name. Eugenia Crick, she said. Not Eugenia at large, not the pie shop lady, not the widow. Eugenia Crick. Like she was making sure I had it right."
"Did she say why?"
"She did not. And before you ask, I did not ask. Some people, when they ask you to do a thing, they have already decided what they are willing to tell you, and the rest is none of your affair. Birdie Lou is like that. Always was. Even when we was girls. She would tell you exactly what she meant to and not one syllable more, and you could stand on your head and it wouldn't change."
"Did she seem upset? Scared?"
Gertie June considered this. She picked up a strand of her gray hair that had come loose from the knot, wound it around one finger, unwound it again.
"She seemed like Birdie Lou," she said finally. "She seemed like a woman with something on her mind. She seemed like a woman who had made up her mind about something and was going to go ahead and do it whether the world liked it or not. She was not crying. She was not carrying on. She was Birdie Lou Pemberton, and if I had to put a name to the look on her face, I would call it settled."
The word sat in the room like a third person had joined them. Settled. Eugenia thought of Birdie Lou in the shop yesterday, the way she had stood at the counter with her hand on the doily, the way she had laughed at her own joke about Catfish, the way she had said, I want to ask you something and then asked something else entirely. Settled was not the word she would have used. But she was not Gertie June, and Gertie June had known Birdie Lou for sixty years, and maybe settled was the right word after all, maybe settled was the word for a woman who had decided something and was not going to be moved.
"She gave you that," Eugenia said, nodding at the bag, "and then what?"
"And then she left. We had a cup of coffee. We did not discuss the quilt. She petted the cat. She told me my fence was a disgrace and that the county ought to do something about it, and I told her the county could mind its own business, and she laughed, and she went home. That was Wednesday evening. I have not seen her since."
Eugenia reached for the bag. Her fingers had just brushed the cloth when Gertie June's hand came down and covered hers, quick and dry and surprisingly strong.
"You sure you want to open that here?" Gertie June said. "You sure you don't want to take it home, where it's quiet, where you can think. Because whatever is in that bag, Birdie Lou did not want it in her own house. And she did not want me to know what it was. And she wanted you to have it. That is a particular kind of gift, Miss Eugenia. That is the kind of gift that carries weight."
Eugenia looked at her. "What kind of weight."
Gertie June removed her hand. She picked up her cup, drank, set it down.
"The kind you find out about when you find out about it," she said. "Take it home. Open it when you're ready. And when you find out, you come back and tell me, because I have been turning it over in my mind for three days now and it is wearing a hole in me."
Eugenia picked up the bag. It was lighter than she expected. Whatever was inside was small, and it shifted against the cloth as she moved, a faint dry sound, like seeds, or like something brittle wrapped in tissue.
She put it in her pocket. She finished her tea. She thanked Gertie June for her time, and Gertie June waved her off as if thanks were a kind of weather she had no patience for, and walked her to the gate, where the guinea fowl had reassembled and the dog was pretending to sleep.
"One more thing," Gertie June said, before Eugenia could climb into the truck. "You ask around. You ask Reba. You ask Fern. You ask that mother-in-law of yours, if you can get a word in edgewise. And you find out who Birdie Lou talked to last, who she called, who come by. Because something was on her mind, and she did not bring it to me, and she did not bring it to you in time, and whoever she did bring it to, that is the one you want to talk to."
Eugenia nodded. She climbed into the truck, and the bag in her pocket shifted again as she turned the key, the dry faint sound of it almost lost under the engine's cough and the guinea fowl's offended clamor as she pulled away.
She did not open it at home. She set it on the kitchen table, beside the sugar bowl, and she looked at it while she made a sandwich she did not eat, and she looked at it while the cat jumped up and sniffed it and then jumped down again with the particular disdain of a cat that has been unimpressed. She poured herself a cup of coffee. She sat down across from it. She pulled the drawstring.
Inside the bag, wrapped in a square of waxed paper, was a key. A small key, brass, the kind that might open a desk drawer or a strongbox or a post office box. Tied to the key with a piece of red thread was a folded slip of paper, and on the paper, in Birdie Lou's unmistakable hand, were three words:
In the back.
Eugenia sat with the key in her palm until the coffee went cold, and then she got up, and she got her coat, and she drove back to the shop, where the lights were off and the sidewalk was empty and the sign said CLOSED, and she let herself in through the back door, and she stood in the dim quiet of the storeroom, and she looked at the old wooden cabinet that had been in the Crick family since before her husband was born, the one with the lock that had not been opened in thirty years, the one her husband had always said was empty anyway.
She fit the key into the lock. It turned, smooth and certain, as if it had been waiting.
She opened the door.