CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
She lay there a moment longer, letting the details settle back into place.
She’d gotten home the day before around four, and she'd had almost no memory of the drive itself, just the sense of arriving and being pulled gently into the routine of her home. She recalled Jack's arm around her shoulders in the kitchen, Paige asking questions about the case that Rachel had answered in the vaguest terms she could manage—not because she’d wanted to avoid them but because she’d been so damned tired.
Dinner had been simple, something Jack had thrown together without much fuss.
She’d hung in there as long as she could but by the time she’d finally made it to bed a little after eight, she’d been awake for nearly forty hours.
She’d been asleep before her head had fully settled into the pillow.
She’d gotten almost twelve hours, unbroken.
She couldn't remember the last time she'd managed that.
She showered and dressed in something soft and forgiving: sweatpants and one of Jack's old academy shirts.
Then she padded downstairs toward the smell of coffee that Jack must have started before leaving for his Saturday morning run.
What she hadn't expected was to find Paige already at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal in front of her.
The Fruity Pebbles had gone slightly soggy around the edges, suggesting she'd been sitting there a while without eating much of it.
"You're up early," Rachel said, crossing to the coffee maker and pulling a mug from the cabinet.
Paige reached over and tapped her phone, cutting off the podcast that had been murmuring quietly from a speaker propped against the sugar bowl.
It was, of course, some true crime host rambling on about a case Rachel didn't recognize.
She did it without being asked, which struck Rachel as its own small data point. A good one, at that.
"Couldn't sleep," Paige said, shrugging in the specific way she'd perfected sometime around age twelve. “I mean, I slept okay. I woke up when Jack left for his run and couldn’t get back to sleep.”
Rachel poured her coffee and leaned against the counter, watching her daughter push a spoon around the bowl without actually eating. "Anything on your mind, or is this just a general teenage thing where mornings are suddenly interesting?"
"General teenage thing," Paige said. “Trust me, I’d much rather be asleep.” She glanced up, then back down at her cereal, and Rachel recognized the wandering quality of her eyes. She’s come to know it well; it meant she was on the verge of asking about something, but was hesitating for some reason or another.
Rachel took a sip of coffee and let the silence do some of the work for her. After another few seconds, she finally said, “What’s on your mind kiddo?”
“Nothing.”
“Yeah, there is. I know that look.” She grinned as she recalled Novak saying something similar to her yesterday morning at the Waffle House.
Paige set the spoon down. "Okay, so. Don't be mad."
"That's usually a good way to guarantee I'll be mad."
"I checked out the key," Paige said, the words coming faster once she'd committed to them.
"From the drawer in the hallway…the one Eleanor gave you.
Yesterday, actually, not just now. I know it wasn't really mine to go through, and I know you probably had it in there for a reason, but I saw you close that drawer weirdly one night and it just sort of stuck with me.
I was curious and…come on, Mom. I mean, a dying lady hands you a weird-looking key right before she passes! That's like…like movie stuff."
Something tightened in Rachel's chest, a reflexive protectiveness over a thing she hadn't even fully examined herself yet. "Paige."
"I know." Paige held up both hands. "I know, Mom. But just, before you get mad, can I show you something?"
Rachel opened her mouth to say something about boundaries, about the difference between a case board for a documentary and a piece of her mother's actual life.
But the look on Paige's face stopped her, an eagerness that had nothing defiant in it. Plus, she found that she really wasn’t all that upset about it, anyway.
Rachel exhaled and pulled out the chair across from her instead.
"Show me."
Paige ran to the living room and came back seconds later with her laptop.
She opened the lid, clicked around for a bit, and then angled the screen so that Rachel could get a better view.
The screen showed three photographs of the key from different angles, cropped close enough that the worn brass filled most of the frame.
Beneath each photo, there was a comparison chart Paige had apparently built by hand.
There were images of house keys, padlock keys, and storage unit keys lined up in neat rows.
Little notes and details had been typed beneath each one.
"It's not a house key," Paige said, sliding her finger down the screen like she was presenting evidence in a courtroom.
"House keys have longer blades and grooves on both sides for the pin tumblers.
It's not a padlock key either; the bow's wrong, too square.
And it's definitely not a storage unit key, because those almost always have a manufacturer's stamp on them somewhere.
But this one's just smooth. I measured it against a ruler.
It's a little under two inches, single-bit cut, which basically only leaves one real option. "
Rachel was beyond impressed but wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to show it. Hell, she was more than impressed. She was proud. And she wasn’t sure how to feel about that. So to push all of that to the side, she simply pushed her daughter forward.
"And what option is that?"
"A lockbox key,” Paige said simply. “Or a small safe…but the old kind like people used to keep in a closet or a filing cabinet before keypads were around." Paige looked up at her, something bright and a little nervous in her expression, waiting for a reaction.
Rachel stared at the screen a moment longer, feeling something shift loose in her chest that had nothing to do with irritation anymore.
She'd spent weeks turning that key over in her hands without doing a fraction of this work herself, too distracted by the case, too unwilling to admit how much not knowing had been bothering her.
Her daughter had built a research file on it in what looked like a single evening.
"This is really good work," Rachel said, and meant it completely. “How long did you spend on this?”
She gave that same little shrug and said, “A few hours.”
“This is really good work,” she said again, not sure what else to say without being too encouraging.
Paige's shoulders came down slightly. "Yeah?"
"Yeah. This is better than good work, actually.
This is the kind of thing I'd want from somebody on my own team.
" Rachel scrolled back up to look at the photographs again, feeling the strange, specific pleasure of watching her daughter's mind work in a way she recognized from her own.
It was an odd thing to bond over, she knew—a dead woman's secret and a lockbox key—but she wasn't about to pretend she didn't love it.
"So if it's a lockbox key, and it's not for anything in our house, and it's not for anything Eleanor's niece recognized either—"
"Then somebody else has the box." Paige finished the thought before Rachel could, leaning forward now.
The hesitation from a few minutes ago was fully gone.
"That lady from the funeral. The one who talked to you for a really long time and looked kind of nervous the whole time.
I think her name was Eve, right? You said she was Eleanor's sister. "
"I remember," Rachel said quietly.
"You should call her." Paige said it simply. Now that she had gotten over the initial nerves, it seemed she was unstoppable. "I mean, if you want to know what it opens. She probably knows."
Rachel didn't answer right away, turning the coffee mug slowly between her hands.
The truth was she'd thought about exactly that more than once in the weeks since the funeral. She’d even gone so far as to look up Eve's name in the bureau database. She’d had no record of any kind.
But she had, in fact, found a phone number and address.
"I've thought about it, too," she admitted.
"So do it!" Paige nudged her laptop shut, some of her earlier nervousness replaced now with something closer to confidence. "What's the worst that could happen? She doesn't know either, and you're back where you started. At least…at least you tried, right?"
Rachel looked at her daughter for a long moment, struck by how easily thirteen could sometimes see past the self-imposed obstacles that thirty-eight got tangled in. "You're annoyingly persuasive, you know that?"
"I learned it from you," Paige said, grinning now.
“Oh, God, do I know that.” Rachel laughed despite herself, and pushed back from the table before she could think of another reason to put it off. "As it turns out, little miss detective, I already have Eve’s number.”
***
Eve Whitehall lived in Poquoson, a little under an hour southeast from Richmond.
She lived in a modest single-story house with white siding gone slightly gray at the edges.
The yard was just a bit overgrown, but the landscaping showed that someone was paying attention and care to it.
A wind chime made of mismatched silverware clinked softly along the edge of the porch as Rachel and Paige came up the drive on Sunday afternoon.
Yesterday, Rachel had told Eve on the phone only that they had something Eleanor had given them.
She didn’t say what it was, just that it might be something Eve would want to see.
She wasn't entirely sure why she'd held that detail back, only that some instinct told her it would land better in person than over the phone.