“…a small brass key,” the curator said in a whisper, and her finger trembled as it pointed to my painting. “Mrs. Olsen, in the public police photographs of Vera Lindqvist, she is never holding anything. But the original report mentions a key, found missing from her mother jewelry box after she vanished. No newspaper ever printed it. No picture ever showed it. And yet it is here, in your painting, in the woman right hand, painted in thin gold, exactly where a person might hold it up to the light.” The gallery hummed with conversation. I stood before my canvas, with my heart hammering, and a glass of white wine untouched in my hand.
I had painted that picture over three winters. It showed a woman in a pale blue dress, standing on the edge of a still lake at sunset, her face half turned from the viewer. The water behind her was ablaze with orange and violet. Her hair was pinned up, with one dark curl falling loose. In her right hand she held something small that caught the light. I had dreamed of her since I was seven years old, over and over, in the same silent landscape. My husband had called the painting childish. The curator, a thin, intense woman named Ms. Brandt, was staring at it as if it were a ghost.
“Mrs. Olsen,” she said, “would you mind coming to my office? I would like to show you something.” We walked through the crowd, past the smiling couples and the waiters with their trays, to a small room with a green lamp and a wall of filing cabinets. She opened a drawer and drew out a yellowed folder. Inside was the report of a missing person, dated June of 1959. Vera Lindqvist, aged twenty four. Last seen by the lake at Pine Hollow. A photograph of a young woman with a soft face and a dark curl falling across her cheek. I could not breathe.
A painting of a woman by a lake, a curator in a hurry, and a small object that no photograph had ever shown.
“That is the woman in my dream,” I said. My voice sounded very far away. Ms. Brandt nodded slowly. She said she had been a historian of local missing persons for twenty years, and that the Lindqvist case had troubled her more than any other. Vera had been a bookkeeper at the mill, married to a man named Carl Dunning who was known to drink. One June evening, she walked to the lake, and was never seen again. The police assumed she had drowned, but no body was found. Her husband told the neighbors she had left him. He remarried within the year, and he passed away in 1981.
I drove home in the dark, my mind churning. I did not tell my husband. I parked in the garage, took a flashlight, and climbed to the attic. My mother had passed the previous spring, at eighty seven, and I had not yet had the heart to sort through her things. In the corner, beneath a pile of quilts, was her old hatbox, a round blue cardboard thing with a ribbon. I had never opened it. She had always told me it held only hats. I knelt in the dust and lifted the lid. Nestled in tissue paper, beside a straw bonnet, lay a small brass key.
I held it in the flashlight beam. My mother, Annelise, had been Vera younger sister. That was the first thing I understood, sitting cross legged on the attic floor. She had been fourteen the summer her sister vanished. I had known that she had an older sister who was lost young, a sad, quiet topic that was never discussed. Beneath the key, in a folded paper, was a note in my mother careful hand. It said: If anyone ever asks about Vera, tell them she is alive. She is free. And she is happy. She gave me this key. Box 114, Union Savings.
The bank still existed. I was waiting on the steps at nine o clock the next morning. The manager, a polite young man, took me down to the vault, and returned with a long gray box. Inside lay a stack of letters, tied with a faded blue ribbon, and a handful of photographs. The first was dated 1960. It showed a young woman in a headscarf, standing on a snowy street in a town I did not recognize, smiling at the camera. On the back, in a bold, looping hand, she had written: Dear Annelise, I made it. Tell no one. I will write when I can.
I read them all, sitting on a bench in the bank lobby, until my eyes blurred. Vera had fled her husband, with help from my mother and a church friend, and crossed the border into Canada. She had changed her name. She had remarried, and raised three children in Nova Scotia. She had written to my mother every year, until my mother passed. The last letter was dated that spring. It said: Dear Annelise, I am ninety one now, and the lake is calling me home. I would like to see your daughter before I go. The address was at the bottom.
I called the number that afternoon, with a trembling finger. A woman answered, a niece, I learned, and I explained who I was. There was a gasp, and then a long silence, and then the sound of a door closing, and footsteps. Then a thin old voice spoke, in the faintest accent. “Is it little Nancy?” I could not speak. “I knew you would come,” said Aunt Vera. “I have been dreaming of you since you were seven.” I laughed, I wept, and I thought, so this is what the dream was. It was not a ghost. It was a woman, waiting at the edge of a lake.
I flew to Halifax in June. She was waiting at the door, small and bent, with silver hair and a lilac shawl, and she opened her arms. We held each other for a very long time. She told me that day about the lake, the last night, the long walk through the dark. I told her about my mother, my dream, the painting. The museum, I should add, did not buy it. I gave it to Vera. It hangs in her sitting room by the window, and on clear evenings, when the sun goes down over the harbor, the light falls across the canvas, and the little gold key seems to glow.
