Ch. 1: The Keys She Never Wanted
The lawyer's office smelled like burnt coffee and old carpet, and Elena Voss signed her name four times before she let herself feel anything at all.
“That‘s everything,” said Mr. Pruitt, sliding a manila envelope across the desk. Inside was a brass ring of keys, worn smooth at the edges from forty years of her father’s hands. “The shop, the apartment above it, and whatever's in the safe deposit box at Alderidge Trust. Your father kept meticulous records, Ms. Voss. Whatever else he was, he was tidy.”
Whatever else he was. Elena almost laughed. She hadn‘t spoken to Thomas Voss in three years, hadn’t seen him in five, and the last real conversation they‘d had ended with her standing in the shop doorway, telling him she wasn’t coming back to Alderidge, not for the shop, not for him, not for any of it.
Now she was back, and he wasn't.
The funeral had been small — a handful of neighbors, two men from the historical society, and a woman named Row who Elena vaguely remembered from childhood, standing at the back like she wasn't sure she was allowed to be at the front. No family beyond Elena. There had never been much family beyond Elena.
She drove to the shop instead of the apartment. Voss & Co. Maps and Antiquities sat on the corner of Kestrel Row like it always had, brick front softened by ivy, gold lettering flaking on the window. She let herself in with the oldest key on the ring, and the bell over the door — the same bell, she was almost sure of it — rang the same note it had when she was nine years old and too small to reach the high shelves.
Inside, the shop held its breath. Flat files stacked to the ceiling. The smell of vellum and pipe tobacco, even though her father had quit smoking a decade ago. A brass lamp burning on the back counter that no one should have left on.
“You‘re not supposed to be able to get in without me,” said a voice, and Elena turned to find Row Okafor standing in the doorway to the back room, a dust cloth in one hand and an expression Elena couldn’t quite place. Grief, maybe. Or something more careful than grief.
“It's my shop,” Elena said, more sharply than she meant to.
“It is,” Row agreed. “Your father would want you to know where everything is. Most of it, anyway.” She set down the cloth. “He was still working the week he died, you know. Cataloguing something in the back. Didn't finish.”
“Cataloguing what?”
Row‘s eyes moved, just slightly, toward the old oak card catalog behind the counter — and then away. “Nothing that can’t wait,” she said. “You‘ve had a long drive. Go on up to the apartment. We’ll sort the shop tomorrow.”
Elena didn‘t move for a long moment after Row left. She looked at the card catalog, at its rows of small brass-labeled drawers, and told herself it was nothing. Her father had always kept secrets. That, at least, hadn’t changed.