CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT #2
Eve met them at the door before they'd even reached it. The woman was thinner than Rachel remembered from the funeral. She wore a cardigan that hung loose at the shoulders despite the mild afternoon.
"Agent Gift," she said. "And this must be your daughter. I think I remember seeing you at the funeral, as well."
"Paige," Rachel said.
“Cute as a button and, if I might say so, the spitting image of your mom.”
Paige’s cheeks went slightly red and, for once, she was speechless.
"Thank you for having us,” Rachel said.
"Of course. Come on, let's sit out back. It's such a lovely evening."
Eve led them through a narrow hallway lined with framed photographs, most of them faded with age, and out onto a small back porch that looked over a yard bordered by a low wooden fence and a stretch of pine trees beyond it.
She brought out a pitcher of sweet tea without being asked and poured three glasses.
For a few minutes they talked about nothing important—the drive down, the weather, a hummingbird feeder Eve pointed out near the porch rail that hadn't drawn a single visitor all week despite her best efforts.
It was Rachel who finally steered the conversation toward the point of the trip. She did so gently, once the small talk had run its natural course. She reached into her bag and set the key on the table between them.
“This is why we’ve come,” she said. “This is what your sister gave me just a few minutes before she passed away.”
Eve went very still. Several emotions washed across her face in a matter of seconds. She didn't reach for it right away, just looked at it for a long moment. Finally, she reached out and took the key.
“She…Eleanor gave this to you?”
Rachel nodded and watched the play of emotions finally settle into what, to Rachel, looked like grief or recognition. Or maybe some blend of the two. "I think we should go inside," she said, and rose from her chair without further explanation.
The inside of the house matched the outside in its quiet, careful upkeep.
Each small room had clearly held the same furniture for decades.
There were doilies on the arms of a floral sofa, and a curio cabinet crowded with porcelain figurines.
The hallway carpet was worn thin in a path down the center, and the air smelled faintly of lavender and old paper.
A grandfather clock ticked somewhere out of sight, its rhythm the loudest thing in the house besides their footsteps.
They followed her through the house to a hall closet.
She opened it without comment and knelt on the floor with some effort.
She dug around for a few seconds before pulling out a small metal lockbox from behind a stack of old winter coats.
She removed it carefully and carried it into the kitchen.
There, she set it down with a care that suggested she'd handled it many times before without ever opening it.
"She gave me this two years ago," Eve said, sitting down heavily.
"Before she got really sick. She just handed it to me one afternoon and told me to keep it somewhere safe.
I asked what was inside, and she wouldn't say.
I asked where the key was, and she said it would find its way to whoever needed it.
" Eve's hands trembled slightly as she pushed the box toward Rachel.
"I didn't understand what that meant then. I suppose I still don't."
Eve also passed the key to Rachel. It seemed she could not bring herself to do what clearly needed to be done.
Rachel fitted the key into the lock, and it turned. It made an oddly pleasant dry, gritty sound as the lock gave way. She allowed Paige to open the lid and they all peered inside together.
Inside wasn't money, or jewelry, or any of the small sentimental things Rachel had half expected. Instead, it was a large, yellow envelope, the sort with a clasp for the top. She took it out and looked to Eve, as if seeking permission.
“Yes…go ahead.”
She opened the envelope and looked inside.
She found what appeared to be a series of carefully organized newspaper clippings gone brittle and yellow.
There was also a handwritten timeline on lined paper in handwriting that she assumed was Eleanor's.
Most shocking of all was a piece near the back of the stack…
what looked like a copy of an old police report, the kind of document that would have taken real effort to track down and request decades after the fact.
"That's Daddy," Eve said quietly, looking at the top clipping without touching it. Her eyes had started to glimmer with tears. "His accident.”
Rachel felt very weird holding it all now. She looked to Paige and saw that she was equally shocked and starting to look uncomfortable.
“I’m sorry…” Rachel said, not even sure if it was the correct response.
“We…we had a farm back then, out past Windsor,” Eve said, still staring at the newspaper articles and the report.
“I was thirteen. Eleanor was sixteen, seventeen, somewhere in there.
" She paused, her eyes distant now, somewhere back in a version of the yard Rachel couldn't see.
"He drank. Everybody in town knew it, even if nobody said it out loud. That day, he was out working the field with the combine, and something happened. We never really found the whole story, though it’s easy to put it together.
Eleanor was the one who found him. I was in town with Mama, picking up groceries.
The police wouldn't even let us see him afterward, said it wasn't something we needed to carry around in our heads. "
"I'm so sorry," Rachel said. It felt right this time.
"It was a long time ago." Eve's voice had gone thin, worn smooth by decades of retelling or, more likely, decades of not telling it at all.
"Eleanor was never quite the same after, though.
She got quiet in a way she hadn't been before.
I always figured it was just what finding your own father like that does to a person.
I never imagined she was keeping all this.
" She gestured at the file, at the careful timeline in her sister's youthful handwriting.
"If it were me, I'd have wanted to forget every bit of it.
I can't imagine why she'd hold onto something like this for fifty years. "
"I don't know either," Rachel said.
Ah, but is that totally true? The thought came out of nowhere. She could see Eleanor in her hospice bed, talking about some novel or another as their friendship had grown.