Chapter 18 of 18A Key With No Letter

Owen Pritchard has the votes to fire her, and the board takes them this morning. Sofia counted twice yesterday in the parking lot, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, and came up with the same answer both times, which was worse than a number. Marianne Abbott walks in the back door of the Harmony Creek Public Library with her coat buttoned to the collar, her scarf wound twice, and the frost of the Shenandoah morning still silver on the Carnegie steps.

The building is cold and keeps its own hours. She hangs her coat, starts the coffee in the staff kitchen, drops a dollar in the honor-system can, and climbs the stairs with the mug warming both hands.

When she pushes open the door of her office, the envelope is lying on the desk blotter, and she stops in the doorway with her coffee still raised.

Plain white, the kind that comes in a box from Food Lion. Her name is typed across the front in capital letters — MARIANNE ABBOTT — and beneath it, smaller, LOCAL HISTORY & GENEALOGY. The type is uneven, the ink heavier on the downstrokes, the way a machine types when the ribbon is old. There is no note inside. There is a key.

She sets the mug down and sits. The key is brass, small enough to close a fist around, dark in the crevices where fingers have worn it smooth. The bow is worked into a knot of leaves, and the bit is cut with more care than any door in this town has ever needed.

"Morning." Daniel Murphy comes in backwards, holding two coffees and a paper sack. "You beat me in. That never happens."

"I couldn't sleep." She holds up the key.

He stops chewing. "Where did that come from?"

"My blotter. In that envelope."

Daniel sets the coffees down and leans over the desk, close enough that she can smell the sausage biscuit and coffee he picked up at the Sheetz out on Route 11 on his way in. "Is there a letter?"

"No letter. No initials." She turns the key in the lamplight, and the leaves catch. "Whoever left it wanted me to have the key and nothing else. Which means they wanted me to guess."

"Or they wanted to be able to deny it later."

"Same thing, said more carefully."

He sits on the corner of her desk, which he knows she dislikes, and she lets him. "Okay, so it's a key to something old. Something worth hiding."

"Possibly."

"Do you have any idea what it opens?"

"None at all."

"Can I look?"

"Gently."

He takes it, holds it up, angles it toward the window. "No tag. Nothing stamped on it. It isn't a library key, and it isn't the courthouse kind either."

"The meeting is in an hour, Daniel."

"I know. I read the agenda." He hands the key back. "Personnel and collection practices. They always put the real thing second."

Sofia Navarro arrives while Marianne is still holding it — red scarf, folder under one arm, and the look of a woman who has already had one argument before breakfast. "Okay, so. Show me."

Marianne lays the key on the blotter between them. Sofia picks up the envelope first, then the key, then the envelope again.

"Who has a key to your office?"

"You do. Daniel does. The custodians."

Sofia sets the key down. "That's half the staff and one retired lawyer's nephew with a master key. Anyone could have walked in at any hour."

"The door was locked when I got here."

"That means nothing in a building this old. Everything sticks, and everything opens." Sofia opens her folder, and it is the agenda, printed, with notes in her margins. "The vote is item two. Four of them are already decided, and Reverend Wilkins intends to abstain, which I cannot fault him for."

"I know."

"What I don't have is a provenance review. That's what I asked you for."

"I know what you asked me for."

"And what you found is a key with no letter attached to it. That's not evidence, Marianne. That's a rumor made of metal."

Somewhere out in the stacks a cart rattles over the seam in the floor, and Sofia does not turn toward it. Marianne does not either.

"It came from somewhere."

"It came from someone. That is a different sentence."

Marianne takes her phone off the desk. "Give me a moment."

Jamal Washington picks up with the crossword page still crackling in his hand, which she has learned means he was already at the window with his coffee. "Marianne. Now, you have to understand, I was about to call you."

"I found something." She describes the envelope, the typed label, the key, the leaves in the bow, and she hears the chair creak and the cane settle against the floorboards.

"Describe the bow to me again."

"Leaves. A knot of them."

"That's not a hardware-store key," Jamal says. "A door key is plain as a penny, and a plain door gets a plain key. You put leaves on it when you want it to look fine, and if the key looks fine, the lock looks fine."

"So?"

"A cabinet. A chest. A strongbox with a brass plate on the front."

"Westwood Manor."

"That's where the papers supposedly went, or that's where they tell us they went." She hears him set the cup down. "If that key came out of a Pritchard drawer, then somebody in that house has decided to help you and does not want to be named for it."

"Laura."

"I didn't say a name. You said a name."

Sofia has been listening with her arms folded. When Marianne hangs up, she says, "Nothing about that on the record. Not yet."

"Agreed."

"The meeting." Sofia stands and gathers her folder. "Whatever that key is, it won't answer for you in that room. Bring the deed. Bring the register photograph. Leave the key in your pocket."

Marianne nods, and Sofia goes.

Daniel stays a moment longer, looking at the key on the blotter. "You drafted a note to the board last night."

"I did."

"The one where you concede the tin box is probably a legend."

"Yes."

She picks up the sheet, reads the first line of it, and tears it in half. Then in half again. The pieces go into the wastebasket under her desk.

"That isn't like you," Daniel says.

"No. It isn't."

Marianne Abbott walks down the stairs with the manila envelope pressed under her arm and the brass key closed in her cardigan pocket, small and cold as a coin, and she still does not know what it opens. The room ahead of her holds people who have already made up their minds, and she has nothing to lay on that table but paper she has already shown them once. But in the dark of this building, before the staff arrived and before the coffee was even hot, somebody from that house put a thing in her hands and left no name behind.

She wants to know who, and she would rather find out than sit still and let a vote decide it.