Whether or not her father what? Could be trusted? Knew the truth? And what was that? Gabi was no closer to it than she had been when Gram first hinted at her secret. There was no mention of Mathew in the message, and Gram had instructed Gabi to find “someone.” If she had meant for that person to be Mathew, wouldn’t she have said so? Anyway, it was irrelevant. Gabi had discovered nothing. The notion that she might seek out the very knowledge that had terrorized Gram was absurd, given that she’d barely pulled off peeking at a silly old book without getting caught. But at least Gram hadn’t left her completely empty-handed. Was it possible the answers Gabi sought were just down the hall?
THE SUITCASE was smaller than Gabi remembered. When she was little, she’d fantasized about curling up inside of it among Gram’s secret treasures and being transported back in time. It weighed little as Gabi extracted it from between the wooden ribs of the box spring, where a slit had been cut in the sheer material stretched across the bottom. Though Gram had expressly told Gabi to find the suitcase, she felt guilty for the intrusion. For a moment she thought about putting it back and pretending that she’d never read Gram’s final message.
The room was lit only by a small night-light and the sliver of moon hanging outside Gram’s window, but it was enough to reveal the waxy leaves of the rosemary plant in its ceramic pot. From the mantel in the living room, the antique clock ticked. Though Gabi could still feel the dying vibrations of Mathew’s rock music in the hall, her brother slept. His snores met those of her father, who had fallen exhausted onto the couch without taking off his shoes. She didn’t envy them the moment they would have upon waking, when they remembered that the Lowell family had once again become an amputee. Better to stay awake, she thought, than to suffer the false amnesia of sleep.
The pots of soil were rich with the compost Gram cared for as though it were a beloved pet, feeding it food scraps and hair salvaged from their brushes. Whenever Gram let Gabi water the plants, she encouraged her to smell the dark earth, to press her fingertips into it and feel the springy difference between it and the hardpan outside with its pitiful fuzz of algae.
“This is how soil used to be,” Gram would say. “This is what alive feels like.” The dirt was similar in color to the small waxy squares of chocolate they got in their rations at Christmas, but better. It hummed with a deep note like a recording Gabi had once heard of the inside of a beehive.
Gabi lifted the rosemary from its base with a soft scrape. There was nothing there.
She checked the underside of the pot and the other plants as well, but there was no trace of the key. Gabi dug her index finger into each of the pots, wincing as she felt the root filaments tear, her finger wriggling in search of a metallic edge. Her finger sank up to the knuckle in each of the pots before it touched bottom, but there was nothing to find. Perhaps Gram had been delirious from the heart attack and medication or muddled by the jarring noise of all those machines. If there was no key, then maybe there was no story other than the loss of a beloved family member, which would make the message bordering the whale photo nothing more than the ravings of a fatally ill woman. Only the note didn’t read like that, nor had Gram’s demeanor suggested she was off-kilter.
The memory of the way the house had felt and smelled when Gabi and Mathew returned from the Care Center came back to her. Gram’s plants had initially masked the detergent smell, but it was actually stronger in Gram’s bedroom than anywhere else. Gabi lifted the rosemary pot, base and all, from the windowsill and carried it over to the tiny night-light. Holding the pot close to the light, Gabi saw that the inside of the base was coated with a thin layer of soil except for the unmistakable outline of a key.
Could Mathew have discovered it when he came back to the house to pack an overnight bag for Gram? But why would he have gotten anywhere near the pots? Having lived her entire life knowing things that she didn’t know how she knew, Gabi recognized the familiar weight of certainty. The investigators had touched things, moved things. They had toppled the precarious book towers in Gabi’s room, and they had taken Gram’s key.
The thought that every inch of the Lowells’ home had been rifled through made Gabi nauseous. She made a move to replace the suitcase but halted midmotion when she realized no one was left who knew about it. She had no idea what was going to happen to Gram’s things now she was gone, but Gabi couldn’t bear the thought that any of her grandmother’s treasures might get thrown out. They were Gabi’s inheritance, every scrap in that suitcase a testament to the bond of love and trust she and
