Chapter 2

The cup spent the morning in a plastic bin on the office credenza with a strip of masking tape across the lid: EVIDENCE - DO NOT REMOVE. Bitsy's handwriting, all capitals.

At ten past ten, Bitsy decided it should be polished. The christening was at four; the cup would sit on the family table in the ballroom; there would be photographs.

Delphine took it behind the ballroom bar and dried it with a clean towel, and that was when she felt it.

The base was too smooth. She turned the piece in her hands. Every old silver thing she had ever polished - and she had polished a great deal of it, because the club trophies were hers to keep up - had some wobble in it, some small dishonesty where a silversmith's hammer had landed in 1890 and left a dent he couldn't work out. This base was flat as glass.

She held the stem up to the pendant light over the bar. The light went through the metal and showed her a seam. Not a join. A seam - dead straight, from the base up into the bowl, the kind a machine leaves when it turns a piece in one pass.

She wrote it on her clipboard, because that was what she did with things she didn't understand. Base smooth. No hammer marks. Straight seam at stem. Weight light.

Then she carried it into the office, because it wasn't hers, and she wanted someone to tell her she was wrong.

Bitsy sat at the desk with the christening program open in front of her. She looked up and smiled, and Delphine felt stupid before she opened her mouth.

"It's beautiful," Delphine said. "It's just - the base is odd."

"Odd how?"

"Smooth. And there's a seam up the stem. Under the light."

Bitsy put her pen down. "It's always lived in the north cabinet. Always. My mother kept it there. It's never once left this building."

"That's what I mean," Delphine said. "If it never left-"

"It's a hundred and thirty years old," Bitsy said. "It's been polished by six generations of women who didn't know what they were doing. Of course it's smooth."

She said it kindly. She said it twice, which Delphine noticed later, and she took the cup back and set it on the credenza and turned the bin so the label faced the wall.

The key log for the north cabinet lived in the office drawer, because Delphine kept the key log. It was part of her job. When the cabinet lock was replaced in April, two keys had been cut. One went to Bitsy. One stayed in the drawer on a red tag.

There was no third key. There had never been a third key. Nora Belknap's name was not in the log, and neither was anyone else's.

Delphine stood with the drawer open and the log in her hand for a long moment. Then she closed it and went back to work, because she was twenty-six and she had a summer contract and she was not brave yet.

At eleven she carried the box of Nora's things up the drive to the gate, and found Nora standing on the wrong side of it.

The card reader had gone red. Nora tried it twice. The second time she didn't bother taking the card out of her pocket; she just pressed her palm flat against the reader, as if the gate might recognize her hand after thirty-one years.

"It's deactivated," Delphine said.

"I know."

"I can buzz you in. Cass will buzz you in."

"No," Nora said. "Don't do that."

The wind came off the harbor and moved the pines. Delphine stood there holding the box with the jacket and the pencils and the tide tables in it, and then she said the thing she had been carrying since ten past ten.

"Only two keys were ever cut for that cabinet. One's Bitsy's. One's in the office drawer. Neither one was yours."

Nora looked at her for a long time. Her eyes were gray-blue and tired, and there was a small scar through her left eyebrow that Delphine had never asked about.

"Say that again," Nora said. "Slowly."

Delphine said it again.

"Good." Nora took the box. "Remember that you saw it. If I ask you later, say it back to me exactly like that."

She walked away down the drive with the box under her arm, past the flower tent and the rented chairs, and Delphine watched her go and understood, for the first time all morning, that Nora Belknap had not been surprised.