Locked Out of Gran's Secret Room, I Wore What Was Inside novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Lock
At her engagement dinner the key to her grandmother's secret room will not turn, her aunt calls the dead woman confused in front of twenty guests, and Octavia drops her ring in her cousin's champagne and asks the launch captain to take her to the rocks.
The key my grandmother left me would not turn.
I stood in the library of our house on the cliff.
The third bookcase was swung open, and the new brass lock looked back at me.
Someone had changed it.
I had promised her I would not touch that door until the night of the ball.
I had kept the promise for nine months.
Then yesterday a locksmith's van parked in the drive, and nobody in my family would tell me why.
A week ago I had told three people the last thing she ever said to me.
She said the family emeralds were never sold to mend the roof, whatever everyone believed.
She said they were in the room behind this door, and I was to wear them to the ball.
She said I was to tell no one until I stood in the room.
I told my aunt Lavinia, my fiancé Crispin, and my cousin, who was going to be my maid of honor.
I told them because I was tired and grieving, and I thought they were mine.
Now the bolt wouldn't move.
I put the key back in its velvet pouch, beside the small brass thing I kept in there with it.
Then I went upstairs to dress for my engagement dinner.
There were twenty guests at the long table, under the chandelier Gran had never liked.
Lavinia sat at the head, where Gran's chair had been.
She raised her glass and said Windward had survived two wars and a hurricane, and would survive a wedding.
Crispin squeezed my shoulder.
My cousin Bea, in a blue dress cut lower than the occasion needed, smiled into her champagne.
I put down my fork.
"Aunt Lavinia," I said. "Who changed the lock on Gran's door?"
The table went quiet down to the end.
Lavinia did not even blink.
"I did, dear. The insurance appraisers come Monday, and I won't have strangers wandering the house."
"They don't need that door."
"That door," Crispin said, laughing, and looked down the table for company, "is a coal cellar, Tavi. It's damp and it's empty."
A few guests laughed with him.
"Gran told me what's in it," I said.
"Your grandmother was ill at the end," Lavinia said, gently, so everyone could hear how gentle she was.
"The emeralds were sold fifteen years ago. I signed the papers myself."
She looked around the table, sorrowful and patient.
"Whatever she said to you, Octavia, she was not herself."
Somebody at the far end put down a glass.
Somebody else looked at the tablecloth.
I looked at my aunt's face, and I knew two things.
She had never believed the emeralds were sold, or she would not have changed a lock.
And she had known, from the first minute, exactly how to make me sound like a grieving girl who had lost her mind.
My cousin was still smiling.
I turned the ring on my finger.
Fourteen months it had sat there, a square diamond Crispin had picked with an eye on how it would photograph.
I took it off.
Nobody moved.
I held it over Bea's champagne flute, and I let go.
It dropped through the bubbles and rang once against the glass.
"Tavi," Crispin said. "Don't."
"I'm done, Crispin."
"You're upset. Sit down."
"I'm done," I said, "and I'd like Bea to have a souvenir."
Bea's smile held, but her hand went flat on the cloth.
Lavinia stood.
"Sit down, Octavia. This is a family dinner, and you have nowhere else to go."
I pushed back my chair.
Twenty faces turned with it.
"Watch me," I said.
I walked out through the pantry and the kitchen.
The cook looked at me, and then, very carefully, at the stove.
I went out the back door and down the lawn in my good shoes.
The sun was long gone.
The stone dock lay below the garden.
The dinner launch was tied up at the end of it with its lamps on, rocking in the dark water.
A man stood on the stern with a line over his shoulder, coiling it in even loops.
He was the captain who had been carrying guests across from the yacht club all evening.
I had spoken to him twice, both times about the weather.
His name was Tiago Raposo, and he looked up when my shoes hit the planks.
"Miss Tillinghast," he said. "Dinner's over early."
"Yes. Is the tide still dropping?" I asked.
"Another hour."
"Then take me around to the rocks below the library, and don't ask me why."
He looked at me, and at the lit windows above us, and back at me.
He didn't ask.
I stepped over the gunwale before he could offer.
My heel caught the wet edge, and his hand closed around my wrist and held me upright.
It stayed there longer than the step needed.
I did not pull my arm away.
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