Chapter 16: The Key Ring

The elevator doors closed on her wet, brave face.

I stood in the lobby with her key ring cutting into my palm.

When Ambrose got back from Cambridge at nine, I was sitting by Gran's bed with the ring in my lap.

He looked at it and then at me.

"Your mother's," he said.

"Do you trust her?"

"No." He sat on the end of the bed. "The lab director looked at the bowl while I waited. The soup on top is clean."

"And the bottom?"

"A white paste under the last spoonful. Crushed tablets, stuck to the glaze." He held my eyes. "Somebody did the bowl before the soup went in."

So it hadn't been the ladle.

It had been whoever held that bowl before we sat down.

"I'm going to the house," I said.

"I'll drive you."

"If your car's on the street, she'll know by morning."

Gran opened one eye.

"Go," she said. "He'll sit with me. He doesn't sleep anyway."

Ambrose took the chair I'd been in.

"Text me every ten minutes," he said. "If you miss one, I'm coming."

At half past nine the Beacon Hill house was dark except for the lamp the housekeeper always left on in the hall.

My father's car wasn't on the street.

I let myself in with my mother's key and stood in the front hall, listening.

Nothing.

The grandfather clock.

The fridge humming in the kitchen at the back.

Sabine's room was on the third floor, across from my old one.

It smelled of hairspray and gardenia.

The closet door had a little brass lock, and the little brass key on my mother's ring fit it.

Inside, behind a rack of dresses still in dry-cleaning plastic, was a shoebox.

Three amber pill vials with the labels scraped off.

Two empty, one half full of small white tablets.

The black phone from the centennial, plugged into a charger behind the shoes.

And on the floor of the closet, folded in a dry-cleaning bag, my camel coat.

The horn buttons.

A blonde hair caught on the collar.

I photographed all of it without touching anything.

Then I picked up the black phone and woke the screen.

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