The Cedar Chest

Margaret found the key at two in the morning, because she could not sleep and because her mother had always hidden important things in plain sight.

It was taped to the inside lid of the recipe box, underneath the card for peach cobbler, written in Ada’s slanted hand. A small brass key on a faded blue ribbon. Margaret held it under the kitchen light for a long time before she climbed the attic stairs.

The attic smelled of mothballs and summer. The cedar chest sat beneath the round window exactly where it had always been, though as a girl Margaret had been told it held nothing but winter quilts. She knelt, turned the key, and lifted the lid.

There were quilts. Under the quilts there was a shoebox, and in the shoebox there were letters, dozens of them, tied in bundles with kitchen string and arranged by year. The oldest postmark read 1962. The newest read December 1993.

Every single one was addressed to Evelyn Carter.

None of them had ever been mailed.

Beneath the letters lay a photograph Margaret had never seen. Her mother, young and laughing, standing on the porch of Willow Gate with a baby in her arms. On the back, in pencil, someone had written a single name and a date: Lily, April 1962.

Margaret was born in 1964. Thomas in 1966. Ray in 1968. There had never been a Lily.

She heard the stair creak behind her and turned too fast, the photograph still in her hand. Ray stood in the doorway in his undershirt, his face pale in the light from the window.

“I was going to tell you,” he said quietly. “Mother made me promise not to. Not until she was gone.”

“Tell me what?”

Ray looked at the photograph, and then at the letters, and then at his sister, and for the first time in thirty years Margaret saw him look afraid.

“Evelyn isn’t a stranger, Maggie,” he said. “She’s Lily’s daughter.”