out of the room, much as she had swept in. Ferris was slower to exit. He bent his head to Dawn’s for a moment, then shook it after she opened the box, as if to say he agreed with his wife. He took one last, assessing look around the room before he followed Cappy.
Ben kept his eyes on Dawn. She had opened her box, and the contents seemed to fascinate her. The box was the size a jeweler might use for a necklace or a brooch. Like his, it didn’t appear to have been wrapped or marked with any emblem.
“So what are you planning to do?”
Ben realized Phillip was at his side. “What should I do?”
“Open it, and see what’s going on.”
Ben flipped off the lid. A key, old and tarnished, lay inside. “How did Mrs. Gerritsen know what I’d always wanted?”
Nicky and Jake came over to examine the key. Ben glanced at Dawn and was surprised to find her looking at him. She held up another key, smaller than his.
Phillip stepped aside so that Ben and Dawn were looking straight at each other. “Do you suppose the two keys are related?” he asked her.
Dawn rose. “Maybe they’re related, and maybe they aren’t.” She strolled toward Ben. “Would you like to see mine? Or does the fact that it’s been in my hand make you squeamish?”
“You’d be surprised what I can tolerate.”
Dawn dropped her key in his hand. “Mean anything to you?”
He glanced down. “No more than mine. Was your grandmother some sort of a practical joker?”
“Never.”
“Does my key look familiar to you?” He held out his hand.
She took back her own and stared at his for a moment. “A key is a key.”
“It usually leads somewhere.”
“Not in Aurore’s Wonderland,” she said. “Mine’s too small to go to a door. And yours is too old to go to any of the doors in this house. All the locks were updated years ago.”
“All?”
“I think so. Peli?” She motioned for Pelichere to join them. “Would Ben’s key fit any of the locks in the cottage?”
Pelichere squinted, then shook her head. “No.”
“Maybe the keys are symbolic.” Ben cushioned his in the palm of his hand. “The old and the new?”
“Mine’s not new,” Dawn said. “It’s small, but it’s old.”
“The large and the small? Does this mean anything to you?” When she shook her head, he shrugged. “It appears we have two keys to nothing.” Ben dropped his in his shirt pocket.
“No. My grandmother had a reason for this. I know she did,” Dawn said.
Silently Ben congratulated her. As awkward as the situation had to be, she was trying to make sense of it. “We share some history. Maybe the keys are related to that.”
“There’s nothing between us,” Dawn said. “Except that once you called me a murderer.”
“Do you really want to talk about that now?” Ben asked.
Dawn glanced at Nicky, who had silently been taking in the conversation. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Reynolds,” she said. “This must seem crazy to you. Apparently this has nothing to do with you and your family.”
“I think you and Ben might need some time to cool off. Don’t you?”
Nicky might be a stranger to the Gerritsens, but she was already taking charge of the situation. As Ben watched, Dawn nodded. Then she turned to him. “You pride yourself on getting the facts straight. Tell Spencer I’m going for a walk, will you? God knows I wouldn’t want to be forced to give back my key.”
The garconnière was one of the few original out buildings still left on the Gerritsen property. Once the house and land had belonged to Pelichere’s great-uncle. Dawn wasn’t entirely certain now if a story her grand mother had told about riding out a childhood hurricane inside its walls was fact, or a fiction she had embroidered over the years. But she did know that her grandmother had purchased the property in the twenties.
As a child, Dawn had not been allowed to play in most of the outbuildings, some of which had been torn down to protect her. But the garconnière, like the house, was built of bousillage, an adobelike mixture of mud and Spanish moss packed between cypress boards. Traditionally, a garconnière was a place for bachelors in Cajun families to live until they were married, usually an attic reached by stairs from the end of the gallery.
Perhaps the architect of the cottage had been wealthier than the typical Grand Isle resident, or perhaps he had been blessed with so many rowdy sons that he was persuaded by a pleading wife to build the structure far away. Whatever the reason, the garconnière perched at the edge of the Gerritsen property. The building was narrow and two-story, with an outside stairway leading to sleeping quarters. The low-ceilinged bottom story had been used as work space, and the remnants of a primitive forge still took up half of it.
Each summer Dawn had escaped to the nineteenth-century bachelor pad to play. There had been armoires full of old-fashioned resort wear, and photographs and mementos to admire. Some of the photographs had been of her grandmother, a doe-eyed young woman with piles of hair and a waist to rival Scarlett O’Hara’s. The photographs had been so significant to the young Dawn. How important to be the one taking them, to steal tiny pieces of life and preserve them forever.
She hadn’t been inside in years. Vines obscured much of the building now, along with overgrown ligustrum and sasanqua, and she thought of it only when a long afternoon of childhood memories threatened to overwhelm her.
The hours after receiving the key had been quiet ones, as if everyone had agreed that peace could be achieved only by silence. After her walk, she had re treated to her room and stared out at her personal smidgen of Gulf. Bits of her childhood had claimed her. The day her uncle had tried to teach her to swim, and she had sobbed in his arms at her own cowardice. The day, the rare and glorious day, when her mother had awakened her for a breakfast picnic, and all the things that had always been wrong between them had disappeared for the morning.
Sometime after noon, she had thought of the garconnière. Sometime after that, she had thought of the lock that had probably never been changed because the building was so well hidden that vandalism was unlikely.
It was nearly four before she gathered her strength to find Ben and ask him to go with her to investigate. She didn’t lack courage, just the desire to be in his presence. Curiosity was stronger.
She didn’t find Ben, but she found Phillip on the front gallery, rocking away his tension. He was a hand some man, with an easy smile and dark eyes that seemed to be taking the world’s measure. She had always ad mired his writing. He didn’t know how to waste words, and he didn’t know how to tell a story that was sentimental or simplistic. Her uncle had been the one to introduce her to his work.
She folded her arms and lounged against a pillar. “I might know what Ben’s key fits. There’s a building on the property, the original garconnière. The top story
