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Chapter 1
Chapter One: The Key and the Obituary
The morning Whitlow turns the color of pewter, my editor sends me to write about a dead locksmith. I’ve written obituaries for people loved loudly and for people no one claimed, but Ephraim Bell doesn’t fit either. He kept a shop on Anvil Street, a slim slice between a pawn dealer and a shuttered diner. The sign still swings: Bell & Cinder Keys. The bell in the frame doesn’t ring when I push the door; it’s sealed in yellow tape.
Filomena Cardoza waits on the stoop with a grocery bag of flannel and gossip. “He fell,” she says low, as if the morning might overhear. “Reached for a ledger, fell from the stool. Poor man.”
“Was anyone with him?”
“Who would be?” Filomena tips her head toward the window, where metal glints in rows like weathered teeth. “He kept strange hours. He once said locks understand solitude.”
She studies my notebook, then rummages in her bag. “He asked me to hold his mail when he worked overnight. Yesterday, hours before they took him, he gave me this to pass on if anything happened.” She offers a small tin the size of a deck of cards, dented, painted with a sparrow—the old, careful kind of paint done by hand.
Across the tin, in slanted ink: To the Sparrow.
“I’m not the Sparrow,” I say.
Filomena shrugs. “Neither am I. But you write the good deaths, Miss Vallo. Maybe you know what to do with a last request.”
I slip the tin into my coat pocket. The metal is warmer than the air.
