“Meet me in the bathroom. Go now,” Max commanded.

Beatrice obeyed. She made her way to a stall and sat down. She couldn’t remember the last time she had eaten.

Max came barreling in. “Hey, what’s going on with you?”

“My aunt’s in the hospital. She had a stroke. I . . . I don’t want to talk about it.”

“When did it happen?”

“Thanksgiving. I found out after your brother dropped me off.”

“My God! I’m so sorry. Is there anything I can do?”

There was genuine concern on Max’s face. The sight brought Beatrice to sobs. Max was the first person to offer her help since her aunt’s stroke. The nurses were cold. The doctor talked about her aunt as if she were a broken car. She buried her head in her hands.

Max handed her toilet paper to wipe her eyes. “We need to get you out of here. Take the elevator down to the lobby. I’ll meet you there in five minutes.”

“But what about . . . ?”

“You let me worry about Cunningham. She can’t see you like this. Just go.”

Beatrice nodded. She stood on shaky legs and caught a glimpse of her red, puffy face in the mirror. Max was right. She couldn’t go back to her desk this way.

Five minutes later, Max stepped out of the elevator, grinning. “Old Cunny was feeling very generous today. We both have the day off to help you cope with your family tragedy. Christ, it looked like she might cry herself. How ’bout a drink? You look like you could use one.”

Beatrice didn’t care where they went as long as she wouldn’t be alone anymore. She followed Max out the front doors and up the street to the pub.

Carmichael was behind the bar, prepping for the day, when Max pounded on the glass door. It was locked. The Theatrical Grille didn’t officially open until 11:00 a.m. “Bellas!” he sang out from behind the door. “What can I do for you?”

“Open up, Carmichael! We have an emergency,” Max shouted.

“But you know I can’t serve you until I open. The police will give me all sorts of headaches.”

“My brother and father insist.” Max pushed her way into the bar. “Bring us two gin rickeys.”

Carmichael paused to consider the argument and eventually nodded. Max pulled Beatrice to a booth and sat her down. “Tell me everything.”

Carmichael rushed over with the drinks, and Max pushed one to Beatrice. Beatrice took a long, slow sip and let out a little gasp as the liquor burned down her throat. She took another sip and the story poured out, from her car ride with Tony, to the beeping machines at the hospital. Max listened and handed her tissues from time to time.

“Then they told me to take her purse home because it wouldn’t be safe there. The purse wouldn’t be safe there, but I was supposed to leave a whole person. A purse is not as important as a . . . person.” Beatrice sniffed. The tears were welling again.

“Of course not.” Max patted her hand. She finished her drink and waved Carmichael over with another round. “So did you find anything interesting in it?”

“In what?”

“The purse.” Max grinned.

Beatrice stared at her incredulously. It was a wholly inappropriate question, wicked even, but that seemed to be the point. After an hour of weeping, the shot of humor made Beatrice smile just a little.

“You know, I did find something sort of interesting.” She pulled her aunt’s key chain out of her handbag and set it on the table. “There’s a really weird key here.”

“It’s a safe deposit box key.”

“How do you know?” Beatrice picked it up and studied it again.

“Well, it has a number for the box, and it’s from our bank. See, it says ‘First Bank of Cleveland.’ ”

“I wonder why Aunt Doris has a safe deposit box.” Beatrice squinted and reread the tiny engraving. What she really wanted to know was whether the key had anything to do with the strange letters she had found in her aunt’s bottom dresser drawer.

“Oh, you’d be surprised. People put all sorts of things in them. Money, jewelry, legal stuff, you name it.”

“What sort of legal stuff?” Beatrice was fairly certain her aunt did not have money or jewelry.

“I don’t know. Wills. Birth certificates. Deeds. Hospital records. That kind of thing.” Max shrugged. “That’s what I’ve been working on with Bill, you know.”

Beatrice shook her head. There were so many things she didn’t know.

Max lit another cigarette. “Safe deposit boxes. People stop paying for them. They forget about them, or they get sick or die, and the bank is stuck holding their stuff.”

“So what does the bank do with the stuff?”

“Well, they have to keep it for five years by law, but then if no one comes to claim the contents, the bank is supposed to turn everything over to the state.”

“What does the state do with it?”

“They sell off the stuff and keep the cash. They supposedly keep a record in case the next of kin comes forward, but they hardly ever do. It’s a racket!”

“That’s horrible!” Beatrice wiped her nose with a bar napkin. “What if the people realize what happened and want their stuff back?”

“That’s what happened a few years back!” Max said with big eyes. “It must have been about four years ago. This little old lady called up my line and wanted to know what had happened to her son’s baby shoes and a bunch of other stuff. It took me forever to get a straight answer out of Bill. When I finally told the lady that the state probably threw it all away, she lost it. She came to the bank a few weeks later and threatened to shut the place down. She claimed the State of Ohio had never heard of her or her box. She wanted to go to the newspapers. You should have seen it! You could hear her screaming in Bill’s office plain as day!”

“What happened?”

“Nothin’,” Max said, stirring her drink with a little red straw. “We never saw the lady again. I got curious, you know? I decided to go look for her.”

Beatrice sat waiting. Finally, she asked, “Did you find her?”

“She had died. Car accident.” Max puffed on her cigarette. “You know, it didn’t feel right. It happened like two days after she came into the bank. It just seemed, you know, strange. I talked to Tony about it. I tried to make him open an investigation. He thought I was nuts. Of course, he wasn’t a full detective yet.”

“What? You think the bank had something to do with the car accident?” Her voice had dropped to almost a whisper even though the bar was empty. Max shrugged and tugged at one of her brassy curls.

“I’d never seen the office so quiet after that lady left. There were all sorts of meetings. The vice presidents came down and spent hours in Bill’s office. He looked like he’d seen a ghost at the end of the day. Tony thinks I’m just imagining things.”

“Did you ever tell Bill what you thought?”

“God, no! I did ask a lot of questions. He said I showed ‘initiative.’ He decided to put me on a new project the next day. I’ve been auditing the safe deposit boxes ever since.” When Beatrice looked at her blankly, she added, “You know, calling the owners, checking the records, that kind of thing.”

“Why is it such a secret? That doesn’t sound so unusual.”

“Well, Bill says he wants to keep it under wraps so that the Deposits Office doesn’t get wise they’re being audited.” Max paused and said in a lower voice, “Besides, every once in a while I find out that some record’s gone missing.”

Beatrice nodded. Max’s mother had mentioned missing records at Thanksgiving. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Doris was involved in all of this somehow. The letter she had found was about a safe deposit box. Then she remembered something Max’s brother had said. Max should have been the detective. “Would it be possible for me to find out what’s inside my aunt’s deposit box?” Beatrice realized how it sounded and added, “I’d never steal anything from it, but maybe there’s a will . . . or something she needs.”

“No. Not legally. Not while she’s still alive.” Max paused and slowly grinned. “But rules sometimes get broken.”