Chapter 4: The Key and the Floorboards
Mr.
Harris drove me to the house after the service.
We didn't speak much on the way.
Bruno sat in the back seat with his head on my shoulder, and I held the small key from the purse between my fingers, turning it over and over.
It was old.
Brass, slightly tarnished.
Too small for a door.
The right size for a lockbox, or a drawer, or something built into a floor.
"Who was sitting in that last pew?" I asked.
Mr.
Harris kept his eyes on the road.
"A man I've seen before.
He used to come by your father's house, maybe two or three times a year.
They'd sit in the garden.
I never knew his name.
Your father never introduced him."
"What did he look like?"
"Older.
Sixties, maybe.
Grey at the temples.
Walked with a slight limp." He paused.
"He always brought Bruno a treat.
Bruno liked him."
Bruno's ears moved at the sound of his name.
We pulled into Dad's driveway.
Laura's car was already there.
I stopped at the front gate.
"She got here before us."
"She lives twenty minutes closer," Mr.
Harris said carefully.
The shed was at the back of the garden, past the apple tree Dad had planted the year I was born.
The padlock was open.
The door was slightly ajar.
I ran.
Laura was inside, on her knees, pulling at a loose board in the far corner.
She hadn't heard me come in.
"Laura."
She spun around.
A section of floorboard was lifted beside her knee.
Her hands were empty — whatever had been there, if anything, was still underneath.
"You had no right to come here," she said.
"This was Dad's house."
"It's mine now."
"We'll see about that." I held up the key.
"What does this open?"
Her eyes went straight to it.
That was answer enough.
"Give me that key."
"Tell me what it opens."
She stood up.
She was taller than me by two inches and had always used it.
"That key belongs to me.
It was in my purse."
"It was in a purse hidden in Dad's shed.
That's not the same thing."
"I put it there for safekeeping."
"You put it there, or Dad put it there?"
She didn't answer.
I stepped closer to the lifted floorboard and looked down.
A metal box.
Green paint, slightly rusted at the corners.
A keyhole on the front.
I crouched down before she could move.
"Don't," she said.
I put the key in the lock.
It turned.
Inside: a manila envelope, thick with papers.
A small leather notebook.
And a USB drive taped to the inside lid.
Laura's hand came down on my arm.
"Those are private documents."
"Private to who?"
"To our family."
"Then I'm family." I pulled the envelope free and stood up.
"So I'll read them."
She grabbed the other end.
We stood there holding the same envelope in the dim light of our father's shed, Bruno watching from the doorway, and I thought: this is what we've become.
Two daughters of a good man, fighting over paper in a garden shed while his funeral flowers were still fresh.
I let go first.
Not because I was giving up.
Because I had already seen the label on the envelope.
In Dad's handwriting.
Careful and slow, the way he wrote in his last months.
*For both my girls.
To be opened together.
Not before.*
Laura read it too.
Her grip loosened.
"He wrote that," I said.
She didn't answer.
"He wrote that, Laura.
Together.
Not before."
She released the envelope.
She walked past me to the shed door, stopped with her back to me.
"You don't know what's in there," she said.
"You think you do.
You think you're the good one and I'm the villain.
But you don't know what Dad asked me to carry for the last three years."
May you like
Then she walked out into the garden and didn't look back.
I stood in the shed holding the envelope with Bruno at my feet, and for the first time since the church, I wasn't sure I was right about everything.
