Part 3 — Unit 114 Opened
Brent held out his hand for the keys like a man asking for his own wallet. I looked at Lorraine, then at him, and put the whole ring in my coat pocket. Then I told him politely that the police would like to see them first.
He ran. Not far. He was out the back door and halfway down the driveway when the patrol car I had called from the den came around the corner. I had dialed with the envelope still tucked under my arm, while Lorraine thought I was checking my tools.
The detective, a patient woman named Garrity, drove us to the Route 7 storage lot herself. Lorraine rode in the front seat holding her purse and said nothing. The brass key marked 114 turned in the lock on the first try, and the orange door rolled up with a bang.
Inside were Walts coin albums, his Navy footlocker, forty years of tools, and the good silver from the dining room. Every item had gone missing from the house since the funeral, and Brent had told Lorraine the movers lost them. There was even Walts old desk chair, wrapped in a moving blanket.
The photographs were another matter, and the detective was gentle about it. Brent had taken them from the yard to see when Lorraine was home, so he could carry things out without her noticing. It was ugly and cold and a crime, but it was not what I had feared in that den.
He was charged with burglary, theft from an elderly person, and unlawful possession of keys. His wife, Lorraines daughter, learned of it at the station. She came in white-faced and told the detective everything she suspected. Then she sat beside her mother and held her hand for two hours.
The second drawer of the rolltop desk was the last surprise. Beneath a false bottom Brent had never found sat a bundle of envelopes tied in blue ribbon. They were letters from Walt to Lorraine, forty-one of them, one for every anniversary, each unopened until she chose to read it.
Walt had not locked the desk to keep a girl from the Navy hidden, he had locked it to keep forty-one love letters waiting for the right day.
Lorraine read the first one in my van, parked in the sun outside the storage lot. She laughed, and she cried, and she read me a line about a dance at the Elks Hall in 1982. I waited as long as it took.
The court returned everything within two weeks. A judge ordered Brent to repay the rental fees and the cost of the locks, and the daughter, who had known nothing, paid for a new set of keys. I rekeyed the house myself, and I did not charge her for it.
Lorraine read one letter every Sunday night for the rest of that year. When she finished the last one, she called me. She wanted a spare key cut for the neighbor lady, Mrs. Ames, to keep in case of an emergency.
