They shuffled sideways into the dressing room doorway, shoulders burning. The mattress blocked the light for a moment, a white wall with a dark wet stain blooming along one seam. June's arms trembled. She was thinking of nothing but corners and balance when the strap gave its small, dry snap.
It was not loud. In a room full of dripping water and straining people, it should have vanished. But June heard it because it came from under the bed, from the place her hands had been forbidden to go. A second sound followed, wooden and intimate: something flat sliding against slats. Then, as the mattress cleared the frame and tipped the barest inch despite all their care, paper sighed.
"Down," Aggie said sharply. "Down, down—"
They lowered the mattress to the dry boards with more haste than grace. It landed safe. That was the important thing, June told herself at once, because she already knew the other thing was about to become important forever.
The cedar box had been strapped flat against the slats beneath where the King's body slept.
It was not a treasure chest. It was not a banker's case or a gun box or anything shaped for the stories men told about Vittorio Salerno. It was a plain cedar box, long and shallow as a hymn book, the wood pale where hands had polished it and dark at the corners where time had worried it. One leather strap had rotted or been strained by the lift; the other still held, buckled tight. The lid had jolted half an inch open.
Envelopes had spilled across the slats and onto the bare boards of the bed frame.
June counted without deciding to count, the way nurses count pills and debtors count days. Twenty-nine. Some were thick, some thin. Some had yellowed at the edges; some were so new the white still had a blue brightness. Every one was in the same hand, strong, slanted, black ink made careful by effort. Every one was addressed with a single name.
Anna.
No surname. No street. No city. No stamp in any corner, no postmark, no return address. Just Anna, again and again, as if the name itself were a place the writer could not enter. One envelope near June's knee had its flap unsealed. It lay a little apart from the others, its mouth open by no more than the width of a fingernail. She could see the folded sheet inside, pale as a held secret.
For a heartbeat no one spoke. Water dripped from the ceiling into the empty bed frame: tick, tick, tick, too much like a clock and too much like a pulse.
Theo whispered, "Lord."
Aggie moved first. Of course she did. Her face had gone the color of wet ash, but her hands were steady as she began gathering envelopes by the edges, not reading, not turning them over beyond the name that was already there to be seen. "Eyes on your work," she said, and the sentence had the crack of a ruler on a desk. "Ruth, fetch the dry towel from the dressing room. Ellis, door. Theo, if you breathe a word of furniture beyond this room, I'll know the sound of it."
Ellis shut the door. Ruth brought the towel. They laid the letters in it as if they were birds with broken wings. June's own hands joined the work before her mind gave permission. She picked up envelopes by their corners. The paper felt ordinary, which somehow made it worse. Gangsters in the newspapers hid ledgers, cash, photographs with faces circled in red. Kings hid guns. Vittorio Salerno hid birthday cards he had never sent.
She knew they were birthday letters only later. At that moment she knew the years by the paper, by the ink, by the small differences in the hand that age had introduced: the earlier envelopes firmer, almost defiant; the later ones just as firm but slower, the letters standing a little apart from one another as if each had required its own decision. The name Anna never changed. It did not grow formal. It did not add Miss, or darling, or any of the decorations strangers use when they are trying to claim a person. It simply waited.
Among the envelopes, half hidden under the box's lid, was a sheet of heavier paper folded once. When Aggie lifted the lid the last inch to fit the letters back, the sheet slid and showed a corner of color: crayon, red and green and a violent hopeful yellow, the unmistakable sun of a child who has not yet learned that suns are not usually drawn with faces. June looked away so quickly her neck hurt.
"Box goes back where it was when the bed's dry," Aggie said, to everyone and no one. "Straps replaced. Nothing said. Nothing—" She stopped. For the first time since June had met her, Aggie Pryor ran out of rule in the middle of making one.
Benny arrived then, rain still on his coat though he had come through the house, carrying a tool bag he did not need. He took in the stripped frame, the cedar box, the towel of letters, the faces of the staff. Whatever he saw did not surprise him enough. That was how June knew, before any confession, that at least one man in the house had known there was a heart under the mattress and had guarded the door to it for years.
Benny set the tool bag down very gently. "All right," he said. "Now we do this right."
He did not ask who had touched the box, or whether anyone had read a word. That restraint told its own story. Whatever had to be confessed in this house would be confessed later, to the man whose name was not on the envelopes because it was in every line of the hand that wrote them.
The unsealed envelope lay on top of the towel where June had placed it, separated from its brothers by the tiny open mouth of its flap. She could feel it looking at her, though paper has no eyes and secrets have no weight except the weight people give them. She covered it with the towel's corner, carefully, as if tucking in something that had been cold for a very long time.
Chapter 5: Three Lines
They put the King's room back together in the order of people who understood that disorder itself could be a kind of evidence. The ceiling was braced and bucketed. The wet rug went down to the laundry in Ruth's arms like a drowned animal. Fresh boards were laid where the dressing room floor had taken water. The mattress, dried along its surface and pronounced savable by Aggie with the authority of a field surgeon, was carried back by the same hands that had lifted it, and this time no strap snapped and nothing spilled. Only the cedar box remained on the towel in the corner, waiting to be strapped beneath the slats where it belonged.