"Miss Bennett? Clara?" A man's voice, careful, northern-edged, not young and not old. "My name is Noah Wren. I'm a journalist, but that is not why I'm calling, or not only why. I saw the photograph from your engagement party — the one of your mother."
"Everyone saw it," Clara said wearily. "It's a very popular photograph, Mr Wren. I'm told it travels well."
"I'm not everyone." A breath, taken and held. "Thomas Wren was my uncle. My mother Miriam's brother. Miss Bennett, I have spent my whole life being told there was nothing left of him but ashes and a closed file. And then last week, your mother's locket opened on the internet, and there he was, alive, with a woman who was carrying his child."
Clara sat down slowly on Priya's blue couch, in the sag that was hers now, with the locket in her free hand and her whole dismantled life listening.
"Say that again," she said. "Slowly. Starting with your name."
Chapter 10: The Tiny Key
They met, because Clara insisted on it, in daylight, in a public place, with Priya at the next table pretending to read a brief and actually reading Noah Wren the way a guard dog reads a weather report.
She knew them at once, and the knowing stopped her just inside the door. They were the eyes in the locket and, if the comments were right, the eyes she shaved her legs and paid her taxes with. Green-brown, serious, with a painter's habit of looking at a face as if it were a thing being made. He stood up when he saw her, too quickly, and knocked his coffee sideways, and swore under his breath in a way Priya later said she found "reassuringly unrehearsed."
"Miss Bennett. Clara. Thank you for not hanging up the second time either."
"My mother is Miriam Wren," he began. "Thomas's older sister. She was twenty-six in December 1993, teaching school in Columbia, when the police came and told her her brother had died in a fire in his studio off Spring Street, the week before Christmas. There was a body. There was a ring of his, and his watch, and a dental record the coroner said matched. There was a funeral with a closed coffin, which in our family we were told was mercy."
"But your mother never believed it," Clara said. Priya's pen, at the next table, went very still.
"My mother believed the coroner," Noah said. "What she never believed was the story around it. Thomas was going to leave Charleston. He'd told her so, the Sunday before the fire, in her kitchen. He was in love — recklessly, catastrophically in love, her words — with a woman who was engaged to be married into one of the big houses. He said they were going to run. He said, and I have heard this sentence my entire life, 'If anything happens to me, Mim, it won't be an accident, and it won't be me choosing it.' Then he burned to death, conveniently, six days later, and the woman married her fiancé in June, in the biggest wedding Charleston had seen in a decade."
"My mother," Clara said.
"Your mother. Rose Sinclair. Engaged to Judge Bennett — he wasn't a judge yet — and pregnant, if your locket is telling the truth, by my uncle, by November." He let that sit in the air without pushing it. "I grew up with a ghost at every table, Miss Bennett. You grew up with a father at yours. One of our families has been lying, and I have a professional deformation, which is that I would rather know."
"And a newspaper would rather publish," Clara said.
"Yes." He did not flinch from it. "I won't insult you by pretending otherwise. But I have sat on this for nine days, since the photograph leaked, while every stringer in the state has been trying to buy your doorbell footage. I called you, not my editor. That has to be worth something in your accounting."
"There was something else in it," she said. "Not just the photographs and the birth record. Behind the lining, when it sprang. I've been carrying it in my purse like a — I don't know. A tooth. Something the body of my life produced that I can't digest."
She took out the little twist of tissue, unwrapped it on the café table between the sugar and his ruined coffee, and set down a key no longer than her thumbnail. Brass, old, hand-cut, with a bow shaped like a tiny treble clef and teeth too delicate for any door she had ever owned.
"Where," he said, very quietly, "did you get a key to the Sinclair House music box?"
"The what?"
"That is not a door key, Clara. That's a winding-and-lock key for a nineteenth-century Swiss music box, the kind built into a cabinet." He was already pulling the worn notebook towards him, flipping past pages of handwriting with a speed that told her the page he wanted was a page he had visited often. He turned it around. A pencil sketch filled the sheet: a rosewood cabinet, inlaid, its lid open on a painted Charleston harbour, and in the margin, in handwriting younger and looser than Noah's, a key drawn three times its size — treble-clef bow, delicate teeth — and beneath it, two words: Rose's heart.
"My uncle drew that in the autumn of 1993," Noah said. "In my mother's kitchen. She kept the notebook in a drawer for thirty years because it was the last thing of his that wasn't evidence. The box was your mother's. It stood in the music room at Sinclair House. He wrote music for it — no, he had a tune cylinder made for it, in Geneva, of all extravagant, penniless gestures. He told Miriam it was an engagement present no one would ever be allowed to see."
"If there's a box," she said slowly, "and a key, and a man who had a present made for it that no one was allowed to see—"