I'm Nora Whitaker, 53, and I never expected to spend my mother's funeral gripping a stranger's key so hard it left a mark in my palm. We buried Ruth Alder on a gray Monday in October, on the hill above Lake Wren, in the town I left at eighteen and swore never to live in again. My brother Gordon stood beside me in a suit that no longer fit him. I had expected to feel nothing. Mom was a hard woman to love, and she had never once explained why my father ran off with the inn's money and left us to pick up the pieces.

When the last hymn ended, a woman in a green wool coat stepped out from behind an oak tree. I had never seen her before. She took my hand in both of hers, her fingers ice cold, and pressed something small and hard into it.

"Not a word to Gordon," she whispered. "And whatever Vivian Prescott offers you, say no."

Then she was gone between the headstones. I opened my fist. A brass key, with a paper tag tied to it in my mother's handwriting: BOX 214. OPEN BEFORE THE WILL IS READ.

The will was being read at ten o'clock tomorrow morning.