by D. M. Pulley
“Was she admitted?” the nurse asked without looking up.
“I’m not sure. They said she was taken in an ambulance.”
“You need to check with admitting. Go out those doors and walk two blocks that way,” the nurse said, pointing the way with her pencil. “Next!”
Beatrice wanted to protest, but her eyes filled with water. She backed away from the counter and ran out of the waiting room. Outside, her stifled tears became sobs. She leaned against a light pole and shook with them.
“Are you okay, miss?” a voice asked.
Beatrice didn’t bother to look up at whoever was talking. She waved them away and stumbled down the sidewalk, wiping her wet face with shaking hands.
Doris had been taken to the intensive care unit. The lady behind the counter directed Beatrice to a bank of elevators. She reached the fifth floor and found her way to another desk.
“M-my aunt was brought here tonight in an ambulance. She fell at work.”
The night nurse looked up at Beatrice’s red eyes and smeared mascara, and her face softened a little. “What’s her name?”
“Doris Davis.”
“Let me see what I can find out.” The nurse walked away, leaving Beatrice alone in the ICU lobby. Beatrice could hear the muted whirring and beeping of machines just beyond the reception desk. The air smelled like industrial cleaner and urine. The thought of Doris spending the night there made her nauseous, and she collapsed into a chair, rocking back and forth.
Under her breath she hummed, “Hush-a-bye . . . Don’t you cry . . . Go to sleep my little baby . . . When you wake, you shall have . . . All the pretty little horses.”
It was her lullaby growing up. She couldn’t recall anyone ever singing it to her, but it must have happened. She couldn’t remember how old she was when she started singing it to herself.
The nurse finally returned to the lobby, carrying something. It was Doris’s purse. The nurse set it down on the front desk and walked over. Beatrice stopped breathing. She was sure Doris was dead.
“Your aunt had a stroke.”
The purse on the sterile desk was the end of a tunnel. Beatrice felt herself sinking.
“She’s in a coma,” the nurse continued. “Dr. McCafferty has gone home for the night, but he’ll be back tomorrow to answer any questions you might have.”
Coma. The word registered slowly. She sucked in a breath. Doris wasn’t dead. “Can I see her?”
The nurse led Beatrice down a narrow corridor flanked with glass doors. They reached the last door on the right, and the nurse cracked it open. Inside, a woman lay motionless on a stark white bed. Tubes laced in and out of her nose and right arm. Beatrice hardly recognized the body on the gurney, but it was Doris. Beatrice backed away from the open door and staggered toward the lobby with her hand over her mouth. She’d almost reached the elevators when the nurse’s voice stopped her.
“Wait. Don’t forget her purse!” she called, and carried the brown bag over to Beatrice. “We never recommend leaving personal items like this here at the hospital. We can’t be held responsible for them.”
Clutching the purse, Beatrice walked the half mile home from the hospital alone. The cold wind tore through her coat as she climbed the hill, but she could barely feel a thing. When she finally reached the apartment, she let herself inside and sank onto the couch, still gripping Doris’s purse. The leather was soft and worn.
Her eyes circled the room. What now? What was she going to do now? She tossed the bag onto the coffee table in front of her. It fell, spilling everything to the floor—seven dollars, a hairbrush full of gray snarls. Her aunt’s pack of Kools was half-empty and wrinkled. She put the pack to her nose and smelled the cigarettes. Her eyes filled with tears again.
She tenderly picked up her aunt’s key chain and cradled it in her palm as if she were cradling Doris’s hand. She hadn’t touched her hand in the hospital. Instead she had run away.
Beatrice gripped the keys until they hurt. She recognized the apartment key and the key to the basement laundry. There was another key that she figured must be for work. The last key was strange. It was smaller and more intricate than the others. It looked older. She turned it over and saw that it had a number on it. It read “547.” She stared at it until her swollen eyes fell shut.
CHAPTER 17
Beatrice walked into the office on Monday still in a trance. The doctor had given her a long explanation involving bursting blood vessels, smoking, and bad luck, but she could barely make sense of any of it except that Doris may never wake up.
“You look awful!” Max mock scolded her. “Were you out drinking last night?”
Beatrice didn’t dare speak. Tears burned the corners of her eyes. She couldn’t cry at work; she couldn’t afford to lose her job at a time like this. There was rent, bills, and food to pay for all by herself. Alone. A tear spilled down her cheek.
“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 Carmichae
l 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.”
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 ligh
t 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?”