Chapter 19 of 20The Plate in the Lid

"It doesn't turn," Daniel Murphy said. "Not one lock in this building."

Marianne Abbott turned the brass key over in her palm. Somewhere in Harmony Creek was the box it opened, and if she could not name that box before the library board took up her termination again, Owen Pritchard would have her out of the building and Thaddeus Westwood's letters buried where he wanted them.

She set the key on the workroom table of the Harmony Creek Public Library, between her coffee and his. Silver frost still lay on the north side of the front steps, though the radiators had been knocking since the doors opened.

"You tried the map case," she said.

"Twice." He turned his cup a slow half-circle on the saucer and left it crooked. "And the workroom door, and the supply closet, and every drawer in your office."

"Eleanor's filing cabinet?"

"That one sticks, but the key's the wrong shape for it. It wants a flat key, not a barrel."

He picked the brass up again and tipped it toward the window light, and Marianne watched his thumb find the small worked knot at the top of it.

"Look at the bow," he said. "That knot of leaves isn't decoration a door would ever need."

"It came from a cardigan pocket," Marianne said. "Someone carried it around."

"Someone carried it around for years, judging by the tarnish. But it isn't a door key. The shaft is too short."

He laid it down and slid it across the table until it sat an inch from her hand.

"This is made to pass through a plate in a lid and catch a ward inside a lock about an inch deep."

"Say it plainly."

"A strongbox," Daniel said. "A document case. The kind a bank kept, or a lawyer, or a courthouse."

Marianne set her cup down and did not answer him at once.

"How do you know that?"

"I spent a summer at a museum in Staunton, cataloguing hardware." He shrugged and reached for his coffee. "Least glamorous internship in Virginia."

"Fascinating," Marianne murmured.

She said it without noticing she had said it. Then she stopped, the cup halfway to her mouth.

"Say that again."

"Least glamorous internship in Virginia?"

"The courthouse."

She carried her coffee to the shelf where the town council volumes sat and pulled down the one from the day before. She had left it there unphotocopied because she had decided the entry was legal posturing and nothing more. The spine cracked when she opened it.

"Listen," she said. "Westwood's own hand, in the minutes. After a neighbor's barn burned, he lodged all his sensitive family papers in a secure deposit box at the County Courthouse, where they would be safe from fire and from curious eyes."

"You read that on Thursday."

"I read it and dismissed it."

"Why?"

"Because Eliza Sparrow wrote that she buried his bitter words where the winter cannot reach," Marianne said. "I wanted her to be right. I wanted the letters under a floorboard at the Manor, where I could point at a room and say, there."

Daniel leaned against the shelf and folded his arms. "Nobody buries a thing in a courthouse."

"No," Marianne said. "They lock it in one."

The desk phone rang under her hand before she could dial, which made them both jump.

"Sofia."

"Marianne. How are you standing? That's my whole question. How are you standing?"

"The vote held."

"The vote held," Sofia said. "Ruth Ellery moved to defer until the circuit court rules on the deed, Hollis Dean went with her, and Wilkins abstained, which I did expect." A breath. "You have a job until the next agenda, and the county is watching now. Whatever you found this morning, I need it in writing by the end of the day. Not the key. I can't file a key."

Marianne pulled the key toward her and turned it over again.

"I know what it's for."

She switched the phone to her other ear and told her. Sofia was quiet long enough that Marianne looked at the handset.

"The library has the courthouse photographs," she said at last. "The county gave us the glass plates decades ago. Nobody has touched them since Eleanor started the finding aid and stopped."

"Why did she stop?"

"Ask the photographs."

She hung up.

The photo archives sat in a narrow room at the back of the second floor, colder than the rest by several degrees, smelling of dust and old glass. Daniel had brought a cardboard tray with two coffees and a paper bag of biscuits from the drive-through out on Route 11, and the biscuits sat going stiff while they worked. Marianne handled the plates by the edges and laid each one on the felt. Most of the courthouse images had been taken for the county's insurance file, and every sleeve carried a strip of tape along the bottom with an inventory mark in ink.

They went through the file plate by plate. The limestone face first, and the bell tower, and the lawn crowded with men in hats. Then the interior rooms. Then, near the bottom of the third box, a wide plate of a vaulted space with an iron door standing open and row after row of black metal boxes along both walls, each one with a brass plate and a brass lock.

Daniel put his finger on the glass beside the nearest box.

"That's the shape. You slide the key through the plate and turn it inside."

"Every box identical."

"They made them in sets, so one locksmith could service the lot. Owners had their own, and the building kept a master." He straightened and moved along the row. "Second row, the fourth one down. The plate around that keyhole is a leaf pattern. Same as yours."

Marianne sat down on the stool.

"So this is not a key to Westwood Manor," she said. "It's a key to a county box. Laura Pritchard didn't hand me something out of her husband's study. She handed me something out of his family's holdings in a public building."

"Except it isn't public now," Daniel said. "That room is gone. The courthouse was renovated in the sixties. There's a snack bar where the vault was."

"Can the county just hand over a box to a librarian?"

"No," Marianne said. "They'll want a request in writing, on library letterhead, with a reason attached. Sofia will have to sign it."

"Will she?"

"She'll want the photographs with it."

Marianne took out her phone and called Jamal Washington, who answered on the first word.

"Mrs. Abbott."

"Jamal, when they renovated the courthouse, what happened to the old records?"

"Now, you have to understand something about that building," he said. "The county never threw anything out. They moved it."

Marianne found the edge of the worktable with her free hand and held on to it.

"Where?"

"There's a room in the basement they call special collections, and the boxes went down into it, and the boxes are still in it, because I have sat in that room and nobody has ever offered me one."

"Under what name?"

"The story goes like this," Jamal said. "Years back the county filed the whole lot as a gift from the family, and it's listed under Westwood Family Papers."

Marianne looked at the key lying on the worktable, at the small knot of leaves worked into the bow.

"Then we've been searching the wrong house," she said.

She turned the key once more in the light. It was eight minutes' walk from her own front door to the courthouse steps, and the box was in the basement there, filed under a name that belonged to the family that had lied.