“A cashier’s check came with a letter. Your mother kept the letter.”
Claire went still.
“Where?”
“No idea.”
Ruby looked at her mother.
Claire looked toward the third-floor windows.
Their apartment.
Her mother’s apartment.
Eleanor’s apartment.
“We still have Grandma’s boxes,” Claire said.
There were six of them.
They had been stacked behind winter coats in the hallway closet for as long as Ruby could remember.
Claire rarely opened them.
Ruby had always assumed they contained boring grown-up things.
Tax records.
Old dishes.
Christmas decorations nobody liked.
That night, the apartment became an excavation site.
Claire ordered pizza because cooking suddenly seemed impossible.
Mr. Harris joined them.
Mrs. Alvarez arrived ten minutes later carrying lemonade and announcing that Eleanor Bennett would personally haunt all of them if they searched her belongings without proper refreshments.
Ruby was allowed to stay up an hour later than usual.
The search turned up photographs first.
