“I don’t understand. Aren’t there keys?”

“Yeah, I guess there are somewhere, but I don’t think anybody knows where.”

“What do you mean? Don’t the people who put their stuff in here have a key?”

“Not always. Sometimes people die and no one ever finds the key. But that ain’t the problem.” He grinned like it was an inside joke.

“What’s the problem?”

“Problem is, the bank fired everybody so fast when they shut down, they lost track of the master keys!”

“The master keys?”

“Yeah.” Ramone pointed to a door. “You see, you need two keys to open the box: the key they give to the person who rented the box, and the master key for the box.”

Iris stared at the two keyholes and noticed one hole was larger than the other. She looked at the box and then back at Ramone. He seemed to know an awful lot about it.

Ramone pointed to Box 1143. “I got to watch them drill this one. It took ’em forever to find the sweet spot. That little old man was pissed. Said it took him two years to get all his paperwork approved.” He laughed a raspy belly laugh like it was yesterday.

“How long ago was that?”

“Must’ve been ten or fifteen years ago. No one’s been down here in ages.”

There were rows and rows of locked doors inside the vault. Her eyes widened as she processed what he had said. “Do you mean there’s still stuff in these boxes?”

“Yeah, a few of ’em. Hard to say how many. At least, for the time being anyway.” He tapped on a door.

“What do you mean?” Iris asked.

“Well, the owner’s going to gut it and sell the place, last I heard. I don’t know what they’re going to do with all of this stuff, but time is running out.” He waved his hands at the walls as if he’d be glad to be rid of them. From the looks of his hands and crooked back, he had been stuck in the building for decades.

“But don’t the people want their stuff back?”

“Beats me.” Ramone shrugged. “Lot of ’em are probably long gone. Dead or moved away. After all the years I spent working in this place, I keep my money in a coffee can.”

Iris looked again at the doors that had been forced open. There were ten. She quickly scanned the rows and columns of doors. They were stacked twenty high and over thirty deep on each side. That was at least twelve hundred boxes, she calculated, and only ten had been drilled open. That left hundreds of boxes that might still contain God knows what.

Brad emerged from around the corner, holding his tape measure. “Hey, let’s see if we can’t get this basement laid out today.”

Iris heard a note of irritation in his voice. She jumped to attention and grabbed her clipboard. A few steps down the hall, she glanced back. Ramone was still standing in the vault, studying the boxes.

CHAPTER 7

Monday, November 6, 1978

The head of Human Resources led Beatrice up the elevator to the ninth floor, down a hall, and into a large room. There were eight desks paired into four rows. The desks were surrounded on three sides by a ring of closed office doors. There were no windows to the outside. The room was lit only by buzzing fluorescent bulbs and the occasional green desk lamp.

“Ms. Cunningham will be in charge of you,” the woman in the polyester suit explained.

“Oh, I thought I was working for Mr. Thompson.” Beatrice scanned the seven women corralled in the room, each at her own desk.

“Honey, all of these ladies work for Mr. Thompson. He’s the head of the department.” The HR lady rolled her eyes. “Ah, here’s Ms. Cunningham now.”

A powder keg of a woman barreled toward them. She was short and round, and her stockings rubbed together loudly as she went. She had an exasperated look in her eyes and a worn-down pencil in her hair.

“Is this the new girl?”

“Yes, this is Miss Baker.” She turned to Beatrice. “Ms. Cunningham will show you the ropes around here. Let me know if you have any problems.”

Ms. Cunningham nodded in agreement and marched back toward her office. Beatrice had to run to catch up.

She pointed Beatrice to the chair and slid her large girth behind the desk. “Where are you from, Miss Baker?”

“I’m from Marietta originally.” Beatrice crossed her fingers that that would be the end of the inquiries regarding her past.

“What brings you to Cleveland?”

“I came to stay with my aunt in Cleveland Heights two years ago.”

“Interesting.”

Ms. Cunningham examined Beatrice intently. The woman must have been at least sixty, but there was nothing grandmotherly about her. It became clear to Beatrice that this was going to be the real interview for the job.

“Why did you leave home, Miss Baker?”

“My father died and my mother . . .” Beatrice took a moment and let her voice break. “My mother became very . . . um . . . ill.” She lowered her eyes to the floor as if shamed by her mother’s mental health. “I had nowhere else to go.”

Aunt Doris had insisted that her story had to reveal something terrible, humiliating even, to satisfy her interrogator. When Beatrice glanced up, she could see that Ms. Cunningham’s eyes had softened.

“Can you type?” she asked.

“Eighty-five words per minute.”

“Excellent. Let me give you one word of advice, Miss Baker. I take everything that happens in my department personally. If you have any concerns or observe anything that doesn’t meet our standard of excellence here at the bank, I need you to report it to me immediately.” She looked Beatrice hard in the eye, and then smiled. “Let’s get you started.”

An hour later, Beatrice sat at a small metal desk in the third row of the secretarial pool, staring at her shiny, new electric typewriter. It must have cost a fortune, she thought, as she turned the switch on and off, fascinated by the low hum of the motor as it whirred to life. She ran a finger over the soft button keys. They felt like the control panel of a spaceship compared to the long claws of Doris’s old Remington.

Standard-issue stapler, tape dispenser, steno pads, pencils, pens, paper clips, binder clips, and scissors all gleamed in their wrappers under the fluorescent lights. She hadn’t received any assignments from Ms. Cunningham yet, so Beatrice slowly unwrapped and studied each one. She opened the drawers of her desk one by one, inspecting the insides before carefully placing every item in its proper place.

Years earlier, organizing her dollhouse had given her the same giddy satisfaction. Even though every little chair and bedside table she’d collected was mismatched and came to her dirty or broken, Beatrice meticulously cleaned each one and positioned it perfectly in its proper place. Her mother would mock her for caring more about the insides of that little three-foot box than her own house. But the house she grew up in wasn’t really hers. She was just a guest in it—that’s what her mother would say. It turned out the dollhouse wasn’t really hers either. One day when she was thirteen, she came home from school and it was gone.

Beatrice was lining her pencils up in a tight row when the polished black phone on her desk rang. The sound made her jump, and for a moment she just stared dumbly at it. No one had taught her the correct procedure for answering outside calls. It was her first test in her new position. She straightened herself in her seat and picked up the phone. Summoning her most formal voice, she said, “Good morning, First Bank of Cleveland.”

“You need to relax. You’re making me nervous,” a woman’s voice whispered into the phone.

Beatrice blinked at the rotary dial on her desk for a moment. “Wha—? What do you mean?”

“It’s just your first day. Take it easy. Your obsessive organizing is making the rest of us look bad.”