CHAPTER 18

Monday, August 10, 1998

Iris closed her apartment door behind her and rested her head on the wall. What a long friggin’ day. She dropped her bag in the hall and shuffled into her kitchen to hunt for something to eat. It wasn’t until she’d torn through a carton of leftover Chinese food that she could bring herself to look at the answering machine. She rolled her eyes and pressed the button, muttering, “What now, Mom?”

“Iris? Iris, are you feeling any better, honey? Give me a call. I’m worried about you.”

Erase.

Iris sighed and pulled off her dust-covered clothes and heard something clank to the floor. It was the key she’d taken from a secretary’s abandoned desk. It wasn’t abandoned, she corrected herself. Suzanne Peplinski and all of her coworkers had been locked out of the building without any warning.

She picked the key up and bounced it in her hand. The long vault with over a thousand little doors flashed in her head. They were all locked. Ramone had said many of the boxes were still full because the bank had lost the master keys in the sale twenty years ago. But how? How do you lose keys to an entire vault? Why didn’t the public demand that the boxes be drilled open? She turned the key over and over and sank back onto the couch in her underwear. Whoever owned the key might have lost something precious inside Box 547, some little piece of themselves forever locked away and forgotten.

Maybe no one even remembered what was lost. A key is worthless unless you know what it’s for, she thought, running a finger over its teeth. It reminded her of a time years ago she’d gone snooping through her father’s top drawer and found an old leather wallet filled with keys. Iris spent months trying to decipher them. None of them went to the house or either car. Her father never took them to work. Even when he spent weeks away from home on business, the keys never left the drawer. At eight years old she’d invented a hundred twisted scenarios filled with secret rooms and buried treasure chests to explain them. But no matter how hard she looked, she never found one lock the keys opened. She never had the guts to admit to snooping and ask about them. Eventually, she gave up and moved on to something else, but she never quite looked at her father the same way again. He had locked something away. Something she could never see or touch no matter how hard she tried.

Iris spun Key 547 between her fingers. The key had a secret. No one would just throw a safe deposit key in a drawer and forget it. If the key wasn’t important, its owner wouldn’t have opened a safe deposit box in the first place. It wasn’t supposed to be left buried in the building. In a graveyard, she corrected herself. According to Carmichael, the building was a graveyard.

Thoughts of the wandering flashlight in the building made her slap the key down on the coffee table and light another cigarette. It was really none of her business anyway. She blew a wisp of hair off her cheek. Her eye wandered from the dusty TV screen to the blank canvas in the corner and then back to the key on the table.

“Do what you want.” That was Ellie’s advice.

Fuck it. She picked it back up and stomped into the kitchen to find her phone book. It was buried in the back of a cabinet under the soup pot she never used. She wrestled the tome out of the cupboard and to the ground with a thump. Suzanne Peplinski was not a ghost.

There were three Peplinskis listed—Michael, Robert, and S. She glanced at the stove clock and saw that it was almost 10:00 p.m. Her mother would be outraged, but she decided to try calling anyway.

She picked up the phone and dialed S. Peplinski first. The phone rang three times and a young woman answered.

“Hello?”

Iris cleared her throat, realizing that she hadn’t planned anything to say. “Um, hello . . . Uh, you don’t know me, but I’m looking for Suzanne. Suzanne Peplinski. Do you know her?”

“Yes, she’s my aunt.”

“Do you think you could tell me how I might reach her?” Iris asked sweetly. Her heart was racing. She had actually tracked Suzanne down. Take that, Carmichael, she thought. There were no ghosts.

“What is this all about?” The woman sounded annoyed.

“I think I found something of hers,” Iris said, and realized she’d have to give more. “I think I found her wallet.” She hated to lie, but for some reason she didn’t want to divulge anything about the key to anyone but Suzanne. Perhaps because she had stolen it, she reprimanded herself. How was she going to explain that?

“Just a second.” The woman set the phone down, and Iris could hear her shouting. “Aunt Susie! Did you lose your wallet? Your wallet? . . . Your wallet!” Apparently, Susie was hard of hearing. A moment later the exasperated voice returned. “Here, why don’t you talk to her, okay?”

An older, raspy voice crackled on the line. “Hello?”

“Suzanne? Is this Suzanne Peplinski?” Iris shouted into the phone.

Iris heard a high-pitched squeal on the other end of the line. “Damn hearing aid,” the woman muttered, her voice far from the receiver. Then she said, “Yes, this is Suzanne. What is this all about? You know you’re calling awfully late!”

“Sorry, ma’am. I know it’s late, but I think I found something of yours.” She paused, searching for the words, and finally settled on, “Did you by chance used to work at the First Bank of Cleveland?”

There was a pause. “Yes . . . but how do you know that?”

“I’m sorry. I know it’s none of my business, but I’ve been working in the old building—you know, the one at 1010 Euclid Avenue—and I found something odd.” Iris stopped herself before saying, “in your desk.” She guessed the woman wouldn’t take too kindly to a perfect stranger going through her things.

“Something odd?” the woman said, and coughed a little. “What are you talking about?”

“I found a key, and I think it might belong to you. Did you ever rent a safe deposit box at the bank?”

“A safe deposit box? Are you kidding? I didn’t even have a bank account back then. What in the world would I do with a safe deposit box?” There was a long pause, and then she muttered, “Listen, I don’t know what that girl told you, but I’ve never had a deposit box.”

Iris’s eyes bulged. “Excuse me? What girl?”

“I’ll tell you the same thing I told her. I would never trust my money to those crooks!” The sound of smoke blew into the phone. “And I was right, you know. Those bastards chained the doors up tight in the middle of the night. People had to petition the feds just to get their personal things out of their desks! I say that Alistair and those crooks got what was coming to ’em!”

Iris grabbed a pen from the junk drawer and started scribbling on an expired pizza coupon: “What girl? / Alistair got what was coming / Petition feds.”

“Did you go back for your things too?” Iris asked, chewing on her pen.

“What for? I told you, I didn’t keep anything at the bank.”

So maybe the key wasn’t Suzanne’s after all.

“I’m sorry. Did you say you were telling someone else about this?”

“I’m not saying anything. That girl was crazy. Calling me in the middle of the night like that.”

A voice was talking impatiently in the background. Iris didn’t have much more time.

“Who called you in the middle of the night? Do you remember?”

“Of course I remember. I’m not crazy, you know.” More smoke blew against the receiver.

“Of course not. Who was she? Did she work at the bank too?” Iris pressed.

“It was that itty-bitty thing up in the Auditing Department. Beatrice. Beatrice Baker. Don’t believe a thing she says, by the way. She’s a liar.”