CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Paige had the house to herself for another hour before Jack got home, which was usually enough time to get bored twice over.
She'd finished her homework at the kitchen table, texted a few friends about nothing in particular, and scrolled through her phone until the apps stopped being interesting.
It was the hallway console that finally caught her attention, mostly because she remembered her mom closing that drawer a little too carefully last night.
It had looked almost sneaky of her. In other words, it was the kind of closing that made a thing worth checking.
She sat on the stairs for a minute, working out whether it was worth bothering with.
Snooping through her mom's stuff felt like an intrusion.
There was an element of trust there that was keeping her from acting right away.
This was different than pulling public records from online sources to piece together the elements of a case.
This was a drawer in her own house that her mom clearly hadn't meant for her to notice, and there was a version of this where Paige just went back to her room and let it go.
But that wasn't really an option once she'd started thinking about it.
She wasn't going to be able to sit still upstairs wondering what her mom hadn't wanted her to see.
It nagged at her the way an unfinished thread on one of her boards nagged at her—small and specific and impossible to leave alone once she'd noticed it was there.
She told herself she'd just look. Looking wasn't the same as taking and turning it into a big deal.
She opened the drawer slowly, as if she feared her mother might somehow be able to hear it from miles away.
She found the key sitting toward the back, behind a tangle of dead batteries and a rubber band ball that had been there longer than Paige could remember.
The key was small and brass, worn dull along the shaft, with a short row of teeth that didn't match anything she'd seen before.
She turned it over in her fingers the way she'd seen her mom do without noticing she was doing it.
She held it up to the kitchen light and tilted it back and forth until the teeth caught the glow properly.
She stood there for a second with it in her palm, feeling a little bit guilty and a little bit justified at the same time. Then she carried it to the kitchen table instead of putting it straight back.
After staring at it for a minute or two, her analytical brain took over and she let it take the controls without much of a fight.
She got a ruler from the junk drawer and measured it against the table before she really decided to commit to anything.
The key was just shy of two inches long, with a narrow bow and a thin blade.
She wrote the measurement down on a sticky note and stuck it to the edge of her laptop, the way she'd seen the evidence photos labeled in the Delacroix case files she'd been collecting. It felt a little silly doing it for something that had come out of her own house, but it also felt like the kind of small discipline. She’d never truly come out and admit it to herself, but it made her feel professional.
She photographed the key from three angles, propping her phone against a cereal box to keep the shots steady, then pulled the pictures up on her laptop and cropped them until the key filled the frame.
She adjusted the brightness on one of them so the worn spots along the shaft stood out more clearly.
She then set all three side by side in a blank document.
The reverse image search gave her nothing useful at first, just a scattering of unrelated hardware listings and a diagram for a padlock that looked nothing like what she was holding.
She tried again with different phrasing, adding "small brass bow key" and then "vintage lockbox key.
" From here, the results started narrowing into something more familiar.
Several images matched the shape almost exactly: short blade, simple single-bit cut, the kind of key that came stamped into old cash boxes and the smaller lockboxes people kept in closets or filing cabinets before anyone trusted a keypad to hold anything valuable.
She ruled out house keys first, since house keys had longer blades and more complex cuts.
They also usually had grooves running along both sides to work a pin tumbler lock.
She ruled out padlocks next, since most of the padlock keys she found had a rounder bow and a completely different tooth pattern.
Storage unit keys tended to be larger, too; most of them were stamped with a manufacturer's logo somewhere on the bow, and this one had nothing stamped on it at all.
It was just smooth brass gone dull with age and handling.
She made a simple chart in the same document, three columns labeled HOUSE, STORAGE, and LOCKBOX.
She checked off which features matched and which didn't. By the time she got to the bottom row, LOCKBOX had every box checked and the other two didn't have a single one.
It wasn't complicated once she'd laid it out that way, but the process had taken almost forty minutes. It was both cool and kind of scary that she hadn’t even been aware of the time passing by.
She was truly enjoying the act, putting pieces of a puzzle together in a logical and easy-to-follow way.
She felt a small satisfaction at having done it properly instead of just guessing out loud the way she might have a year ago.
By the time Jack's car pulled into the driveway, she had a folder on her desktop with six saved images, the comparison chart, and a note at the top that read: NOT A HOUSE KEY.
NOT A STORAGE KEY. PROBABLY A LOCKBOX OR SMALL SAFE.
She put the key back exactly where she'd found it as quickly as she could. She took a moment to make sure it was angled the same way, and had the drawer closed just as she heard Jack’s keys sliding into the lock of the front door.
She was sitting back behind her laptop, with her threads board pulled up with her notes on the latest podcast case she’d been listening to.
She didn't mention the key during dinner—which was difficult because she was stoked out of her mind about the work she’d done and the mystery to be solved.
It wasn't that she meant to keep it a secret exactly, more that she wanted to have something solid before she brought it up to Jack or her mom.
She knew her mom would be distracted when she got home anyway; she usually was right after a case, and it usually took two or three days for her to process it all and come down from it.
After a lazy dinner of what Jack called Noodles in White Sauce (which was just spaghetti noodles in a jarred alfredo, which was one of Paige's favorites), Paige retired to her room and lay across her bed.
With her laptop open, she thought about where the key had actually come from.
She knew it had belonged to Eleanor, the old woman her mom used to visit at hospice, the one who'd died a few weeks back.
Paige remembered going to the funeral more out of politeness than grief, since she'd never met Eleanor herself, only heard about her from her mom's stories about the two of them working through a stack of old novels neither of them had ever quite gotten to.
She remembered one person from that day more clearly than the rest. A woman near the back of the room who'd approached her mom afterward, older, thin, with a cardigan that looked a size too big for her.
Paige had caught only pieces of the introduction at the time.
But she knew it had been Eleanor's sister. Eve something. Whitcomb, maybe, or Whitehall, she wasn’t sure which.
She hadn't paid close attention because thirteen-year-olds at funerals mostly wanted to be somewhere else.
But she remembered the woman's hands shaking slightly when she'd shaken her mom's hand, and there had seemed to be something quiet and urgent in the way she'd spoken close to her mom's ear.
If anyone would know what a small brass key belonged to, it was probably someone who'd grown up in the same house as Eleanor.
A sister might remember an old cash box from decades back, something that had sat on a dresser or in the back of a closet since before either of them left home.
Paige turned the thought over, testing how far she could actually take it.
She could probably find the sister's full name without much trouble, and an address wouldn't be much harder.
She could maybe find it all in the same way she'd tracked down property records and old court documents for her podcast notes.
She got as far as opening a new tab and typing Eve into the search bar before she stopped and closed the laptop.
Finding a name and an address for a case board about a decades-old unsolved murder was one thing.
Nobody in that case was still walking around to be bothered by a thirteen-year-old showing up with questions.
This felt different. This was her mom's actual life, something private enough that she'd hidden the key in the back of a drawer instead of leaving it out on the counter.
Paige understood, in a vague but real way, that adults kept things tucked away for reasons. Usually good reasons.
She sat with the laptop half-closed for a long moment, weighing how much she wanted to know against how much trouble it might cause if her mom found out she'd gone looking on her own.
She thought about just asking outright when her mom got back home.
She pictured her mom's face doing that thing it did whenever a question landed somewhere she didn't want it to go.
It was sort of a careful blankness that Paige had learned to recognize a long time ago.
In the end she didn't open the tab again.
She saved her folder, closed the laptop fully, and set it on her nightstand.
But she didn't clear the search bar's memory of the name either, and long after she'd turned off her light, she lay in the dark running through what she knew: a key that fit nothing in their house, a woman with shaking hands at a funeral, and a mother who'd tucked something away without mentioning it.
There was absolutely a mystery there. And Paige wondered how long she’d be able to pretend she was unaware of it before it drove her to do something she might regret.