Chapter 17: The Safe

The Cape house looked the same, which was the worst part.

Gray shingles, white trim, the wicker chair on the porch where Gran used to sit with her sketchbook open on her knee.

Clayton was waiting at the gate at two o'clock, in jeans, with a phone in his hand.

"Camera's off," he said. "Come on."

He didn't hug me, and he didn't say hello.

He unlocked the front door with a key on a ring I remembered from childhood, and he held it open.

Inside it smelled of salt and lemon polish.

"It's upstairs," he said. "Chloe's room. It was Gran's."

The room had been painted pale pink.

There was a white desk and a bed with a ruffled spread, and a closet with a steel safe bolted to the wall at knee height.

"The code's the date," Clayton said.

"I know the date."

"Say it."

"The sixth of June."

He crouched and pressed the keys, and the safe door swung open with a soft click.

Inside lay a small stack of envelopes, a velvet jewelry box and a worn cloth sketchbook with a pencil clipped to its spine.

I knelt on the carpet and took it out with both hands.

It was Gran's.

I opened it, and a smell of peppermint came off the paper, faint and old.

The first pages were drawings I had loved as a child: a gull on a piling, the Cape house at dusk, my father at twenty-five, laughing.

Near the back, the drawings stopped, and there were three pages of handwriting.

I knew the hand before I read a word.

Clayton read over my shoulder.

Gran had written the date of my ninth birthday at the top, and under it:

I am writing this the same night, because I will not trust myself to remember it kindly.

Lawrence drank four bourbons on the porch.

Mr. Daley asked him twice to put the keys down.

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