Chapter 7

He gave her his keys. He did it slowly, because everyone was watching, and because there was nothing else in the room to do.

There were four on the ring. The car. The office. The estate's number one muniment key, which was logged in the register and in the gate book every time it moved. And a fourth key, brass, unlogged, its bow stamped ASHWOOD 1928 - No. 4, its bitting bright with fresh file marks.

Bunny held it up to the lamp, looked at the crack in the 8, and set it down on the table next to its twin.

"You are removed as trustee of this estate," she said. "Effective now. In this room. I'll sign it in the morning and the lawyer can argue with me about it."

Renata Buhl had her tablet open. "Keystone voids the trustee's indemnity," she said. "The loss is established on the record as of tonight. I'll have the letter out before nine."

The auctioneer put the gavel down and walked out to the terrace to make a phone call.

The police came at nine forty and were polite, and Ward was polite back, and he asked for his phone call in the library because he had spent his whole life in that room. Delia stood by the window and watched the two cruisers turn around on the gravel, past the tents that were still up from June because nobody had taken them down.

The September eighteenth auction was cancelled the next morning.

Corinne Dabney's gallery on Market Street in Wilmington cooperated fully, which is what galleries do when an insurer, a district attorney and a ninety-year-old life trustee arrive in the same week. The original Pell portrait of Colonel Edmund Ashcombe came out of a private viewing room on the second floor, still on its 1928 stretcher, still in its 1928 frame, and it came home to Ashwood on a Tuesday in a crate with a condition report taped to the lid.

Delia wrote that condition report herself. Two pages. Nothing ruled through.

The rest took longer, and it took Al Cerrone to start it.

He came up to the house three days after the preview with the lodge drawer in both hands - the unclaimed key drawer, forty years of keys to things that no longer existed. Delia went through it on the refectory table with a magnifier and the second opinion, and at the bottom, under a rusted padlock and two hotel keys from a hotel that had burned down in 1981, she found it.

Brass. Four inches. Dark with ninety years of handling, worn smooth at the bow, no file marks at all.

ASHWOOD 1928 - No. 4.

She put it on the fourth mount in the front hall case that afternoon, and the velvet took it back the way it takes a thing that has been away a long time.

Bunny told her the rest that evening, in the library, with the fire lit in September because Bunny was seventy-eight and did as she liked.

In 1928 the Philadelphia locksmith Emil Sattler had cut four keys to the muniment room and struck a set of dies and left them with the family. The fourth key went to Ada Rennick, Ashwood's first curator, the only member of staff ever trusted with daily access to the deeds. She held it for forty-six years.

In 1974 the estate was broke. Rhodes Ashcombe sold three crates out through that door to a Market Street dealer called Pryce & Marlow and logged them as loans that never came back - Anne Ashcombe's pendant portrait, the estate's 1928 survey and plat books, and the family silver. Then he sealed the room so the record would stop, ruled through the fourth line in the register, and had his son Langford lift Ada Rennick's key off the display board.

Langford kept it in his desk until he died in 2016. Bunny found it when she cleared the drawer, didn't know what it opened, and gave it to the lodge with the rest of his keys.

"It was never destroyed," she said. "It was just put down."

Delia pulled the crate log the following week. Three more entries, all marked out, all dated the winter of 1974, three crates gone and nothing ever logged back - and every one of them, she found when she called Wilmington, bought by the same house on the same street that had bought the portrait eighteen months ago. Pryce & Marlow, which became Corinne Dabney's gallery in 1998. Fifty years of the same family's things going out the same door to the same room.

The pendant portrait came back in October. It hangs now where it hung in 1928, on the library's south wall, to the left of Colonel Edmund, and the two of them are the same size, the same hand, the same year, and nobody had seen them together in fifty years.

The family voted Delia Fontaine director of the Ashwood collection on the first of November, in the library, with Bunny presiding and the register open on the table.

She finished the season's last tour herself, on a cold bright Saturday, with forty people and a docent badge she had made for herself because she thought it was funny.

She took them through the front hall first, past the case on the mahogany console, four brass mounts, four keys, and she let them look as long as they wanted.

Then she walked them into the library and stopped in front of the painting, and she told them the truth about it - the 1771, the copy, the crate, the key, the eight months - in the dry, exact voice she had used for nineteen years, and the room went quiet the way rooms do when the story is real.

At the back, near the door, Teo Marchetti stood with his cap in his hands.

Behind him, through the open door, in the glass case across the hall, the fourth key sat on its velvet mount in the small dark bow-shaped hollow it had left behind, and it fit.