A Heavy Find

I didn't plan on going into Marty's Taxidermy & Rare Books. I planned on getting a coffee and maybe getting a tattoo I didn't need, which is what I do now that I'm thirty-five and divorced and nobody's waiting for me at home. The coffee shop was closed for some kind of plumbing thing, so I kept walking, and there was Marty's, with a hand-painted sign in the window that said CLOSING TODAY. EVERYTHING MUST GO. NO REFUNDS, NO WHINING.

So I went in. You kill a Saturday however you can.

The place smelled like dust and formaldehyde, which I guess is what happens when you sell dead animals and dead authors under one roof. The front half was books, shelves and tables and stacks on the floor, everything marked down in pencil. The back half, past a bead curtain that had seen better decades, was the taxidermy. A two-headed calf. A squirrel in a tiny cowboy hat. A pike on a plaque with glass eyes that followed you around like a guilty conscience.

Marty himself, or who I assumed was Marty, a man somewhere north of seventy with a mustache you could lose a nickel in, sat at the register reading a paperback and ignoring me. Fine by me. I wasn't buying anything. I was just a guy killing time, which is a phrase I'd used a lot this past year, ever since Diane told me I lived in a fantasy and moved out. One year ago last month. I'd been filling the time ever since, badly.

That's when I noticed the woman.

She was back by the bead curtain, near a shelf of local history books nobody had opened since the Jamison years, and she was lifting a cardboard box as if it weighed nothing. I mean nothing. The box was full of iron, shelf brackets by the look of them, the old ornate kind with scrollwork, and she hefted it, tested its weight in one arm, and set it aside with the casual air of somebody who lifts heavy things for a living. Her forearms had the kind of definition you don't get at a gym. She had a plain black t-shirt, work boots, hair tied back, and she was, I want to be careful with the word here, she was built. Solid in a way that made me think of bridges.

I'm thirty-five and I was staring. So sue me.

Then she did the thing that actually hooked me. She picked up a bowling ball. A dusty, dull maroon bowling ball with three finger holes and a name engraved above them, and she handled it like it was made of eggshell. Like it mattered. She turned it over twice, ran a thumb across the engraving, and frowned at it in a way that had nothing to do with shopping.

I drifted over, pretending to browse the local history shelf, which is how I learned this town once had a collar factory. Riveting stuff.

"That ball's not for sale," she said, without looking up. She'd caught me. Fair.

"I wasn't going to buy it," I said. "I don't even bowl. I was wondering why you're holding it like it's a relative."

That got a short laugh out of her. She finally looked at me. Mid-thirties, I'd guess. Sharp eyes, a little tired, a ring line on her finger that had been scrubbed clean recently, same as my own hand. There's a look people get, and we were both wearing it.

"It belonged to my bowling partner," she said. "Dot. Dorothy. She died two years back, and her kids sold off the house, and somehow this ended up here of all places. Marty's had it sitting on a shelf with the taxidermy, if you can believe that. Like it's a stuffed pheasant."

"That's a hell of a place to end up."

"Right? She bowled in the Tuesday night league at Ridgeline Lanes for forty years. I bowled with her for eight of them, before she moved, I mean. She moved to be near her grandkids and I stayed and the league folded and that was that." She shook her head. "Sorry. You asked a polite question and now you're getting a eulogy."

"I don't mind eulogies," I said. "I've got nothing but time today."

She looked at me again, the second look, the one where a person decides whether you're worth another sentence. Apparently I passed, because she held the ball up so I could see the engraving. DOROTHY K. BRADY. Below it, smaller, in different lettering that somebody had added later: THE KEY'S IN THE EYES.

"What key?" I asked.

"That's the mystery," she said. "She used to tell me this joke, all the time, for years. She'd say, Nora, honey, the key's in the eyes, and when you finally figure it out, you'll know what it's for. And I never figured it out. I checked the eyes on her pheasant mount, I checked her glasses, I checked her cat, God help me, I looked in that cat's eyes like a lunatic. Nothing. Then she died and I figured the joke died with her."

"And now there's a bowling ball." She turned it in her hands again. "Eyes could mean the finger holes. Three holes, like a little face. Or it could be the engraving. Or it could be nothing, just Dot being Dot, which is honestly the most likely answer."

"Or," I said, "there's a key taped inside one of the finger holes, and Dot has been laughing at you from the great beyond for two years."

Nora looked at the ball. Then at me. Then at the ball again, and I could see the exact moment the idea landed, because her grip changed and her whole posture shifted forward.

"I can't stick my fingers in there in a store," she said, mostly to herself. "What if there's a spider. What if there's a key and a spider."

"You could tip it and look," I suggested. "Science."

"I own a forge," she said. "I know about tipping heavy things and looking. I'm stalling because I'm scared of a bowling ball, which is a sentence I never thought I'd say out loud."

Before I could answer, a lighter flicked behind us. A little flame, a cigarette smell, and Marty, who had apparently abandoned his paperback, shuffled past us toward the back with the cigarette hanging off his lip like it was 1974. He didn't acknowledge us. The flame caught for one second on a brass fitting behind the counter, and the light hit the ball in Nora's hands.

I saw it. Or I thought I saw it. Deep in the middle finger hole, something pale, a curl of something, maybe tape.

"You saw it too," Nora said. Not a question. She'd been watching my face instead of the ball, clever woman. "Don't lie to me, tattoo guy. I clocked the sleeves the second you walked in. You saw something."

"Maybe," I said. "Maybe I saw the edge of something."

"If you're messing with me, I'll be very disappointed. I own a forge. I have opinions about honesty." She readjusted her grip on the ball, and then, after a beat, she looked up at me with an expression that was half suspicion and half invitation. "Well? Are you going to help me or just stand there being decorative?"

"What do you need?"

"Extra hands. Another set of eyes. Somebody to call an ambulance if there's a spider." She said it deadpan, but she held the ball out toward me an inch, like she was serious. "Come on. Dot would've liked you. She liked men who stood around being useless but willing."

"I'm not useless," I said. "I'm just here to kill time."

"Then kill it with me," Nora said. "There's a lamp over by the taxidermy counter, and if there's a key in this thing, I want to know before Marty locks the doors on the whole mess forever."

So I followed her past the bead curtain, past the two-headed calf and the squirrel in the cowboy hat, and I remember thinking that this was already the strangest Saturday I'd had in a year, and that was before either of us knew what the key was for.

The lamp over by the taxidermy counter turned out to be one of those banker's lamps with a green glass shade, and it worked, which surprised me, because nothing else in the store seemed to have worked in decades. Nora set the ball on the counter next to the cash register, right on top of a stack of Marty's unsold paperbacks, and tilted it so the middle finger hole faced the light.

There it was. A curl of pale tape, way up in the hole, past where any finger could reasonably reach. The adhesive had gone amber and brittle with age, and whatever was under it sat in shadow.

"Of course it's deep," Nora said. "Of course. Dot wouldn't make it easy. Dot once hid my birthday present inside a tire she knew I'd have to pay to dispose of."

"We could ask Marty for a coat hanger," I said.

"Marty has been ignoring us for twenty minutes and I respect that too much to interrupt it." She chewed her lip for a second, then looked at her own hands like she was negotiating with them. "Okay. Fine. I'll do it. If a spider gets on me, tell my forge I loved her."

She pushed her index finger into the hole, slow, wincing the whole way like the ball might bite. Her nail scraped the bottom. Nothing. She went deeper, which involved a kind of commitment I don't think either of us expected, her whole hand disappearing into a dusty maroon sphere on top of a dead man's paperbacks, and then her face changed.

"Got it. Got it, it's stuck, it's..." She twisted. Her jaw set. Then the tape let go with a sound I could actually hear, a tiny dry tearing, and she pulled her hand out holding a small rolled-up wad of yellowed tape pressed flat around something hard.

She set it on the counter and stared at it for a good five seconds without touching it. I didn't blame her. Two years of a dead woman's joke will do that to a person.

"You do it," she said finally. "I found it. You open it. That's how this works, that's the deal I'm making right now."

So I peeled the tape apart. It came away from a tiny brass key, maybe an inch and a quarter long, the kind that fits a padlock from a dime store, with a paper tag looped through the bow. The ink on the tag had faded to brown but it was still legible, in a cramped old-lady handwriting that slanted hard to the right.

For Nora. About time, honey. You owe me a beer.

Nora made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh and wasn't quite anything else, and then she picked the key up like it might dissolve, turning it under the green light. "I owe her a beer," she read out, and then she had to stop talking for a while, and I did the polite thing and looked at the pike on the plaque while she got her face back in order.

When she spoke again her voice was steady. Mostly.

"Okay. So. Here's the part where this gets weird, and I need you to understand that the weird part is not the key." She held it up between two fingers. "This fits something. I know it fits something, because Dot gave me something years ago, told me to keep it safe and not ask questions, and I kept it in a drawer as anyone would and never asked. It's a lock. Small, brass, no key. I've had it for eight years. It's been sitting in a drawer in my kitchen through most of a marriage and a whole divorce and I never once connected