Uncle Vern left five keys and one ham. The ham was at the funeral lunch, under foil. The keys arrived in a velvet bag, which made them look more expensive than they were.
“One for each of you,” said Ms. Velez, his executor.
Bea tipped the bag onto a paper plate. Every key had the number 14 stamped into its bow. She sorted them by cut while her cousins watched. The cuts matched. Five copies of one key.
“That’s Vern,” said Hal. “Even dead he wants us to play along.”
Hal had rented the big house from Vern for nine years at a rate he called fair whenever anyone else was in the room. Bea had replaced the back-door lock there twice. Vern insisted on keeping a copy of every key, and twice he had locked himself out.
“The property is on the schedule,” Ms. Velez said. “The keys are a separate bequest. He wrote that all five of you should visit Number Fourteen before the accounts are distributed.”
“Fourteen what?” asked June.
Ms. Velez slid a photograph across the table. It showed a narrow brick storefront with the number 14 painted above its door. In the window stood a cardboard sign: V. BELL, CLOCK REPAIR. Half the letters had fallen off.
“He told us that shop burned down,” June said.
“He told me it had mice,” said Hal.
Bea remembered it from childhood. Vern had made her sit on a high stool while he filed tiny brass teeth. She liked the sound until he caught her taking a gear from the scrap bin and told her that wanting a thing did not make it hers. He had charged her mother for the gear anyway.
The shop was three streets from the funeral home. The four relatives walked there after lunch, partly because the ham was dry and partly because none of them wanted to let Hal go alone. The youngest cousin, Pete, counted the cracks in the pavement as if they might be clues. Vern had done that to them when they were children: a riddle for a birthday present, a treasure map for a packet of pencils. You learned to check the answer before you got excited.
Number Fourteen looked smaller than in the photograph. An auction notice was taped to the glass. Hal tried his key first. It turned without resistance. He pushed the door open and looked disappointed that it had not demanded a password.
Inside were six clocks, four chairs, and a long counter with grooves worn into its wood. Bea could tell which drawers had once held tools by the dark rectangles where labels had been removed. At the back stood a steel filing cabinet. It had no lock.
“Maybe he wanted us to share a room,” Pete said.
“He had fifty years for that,” June replied.
There was a letter on the counter addressed to everyone holding a key. Bea read it aloud. It gave no directions. It said Vern had kept records here that belonged to them and to people who were not in the family. He hoped they would read before the shop went to auction. He had underlined people who were not in the family twice.
Hal took the letter. “What does that mean, records belong to people?”
Bea opened the cabinet. The first drawer held receipts and repair slips, each tied in bundles by year. The second held payroll ledgers from a small assembly shop Vern had owned with his brother. They had made clock housings, then door hardware, then nothing. Bea knew the business had failed, but not how many people had worked there. She turned a page. Names, hours, rates, amounts paid. Beside some amounts Vern had written a second, smaller number in red.
“Look at these,” she said.
June took the ledger. Her mother had worked in the assembly shop. She found her name in less than a minute. Hal found his father two pages later. Pete found no one he knew, then pointed to a total at the back. Vern had added the red numbers by year and placed the sums in a savings account. The account statement was clipped to the last page.
“He held back wages,” June said.
“Or he was correcting mistakes,” Hal said.
“Then why keep the money?”
Hal rubbed his thumb over the ink. “Maybe he meant to pay it.”
“Maybe,” June said. She kept reading.
The front door opened. A woman in a blue raincoat came in carrying a folded umbrella though the day was clear. Her key hung from a string around her neck. She was the fifth heir. Bea had seen her at the lunch but had not learned her name.
“I’m Inez,” she said. “I worked here when the clocks were still in the window.” She looked at the cabinet. “He finally showed you.”
Inez had received a letter a month before Vern died. It told her he had kept the ledgers and asked her to help find the workers or their families. She had asked him why he had waited. He had no answer she cared to repeat. He wanted her at Number Fourteen because the family would listen to an heir. She said she had not agreed to that part.
“You came,” Bea said.
“The shop goes to auction next week.” Inez put her umbrella against the wall. “I want the names before somebody buys the cabinet for its paint.”
They spent the afternoon copying pages with their phones. Hal called Ms. Velez, who said the account and the wages were part of the estate review; no one should spend or distribute the money until the records were checked. She offered to arrange a professional accounting. Hal hung up and repeated her words exactly, a habit Bea had never liked more.
At four, Pete found a small box behind the counter. It held five blank key tags and a packet of pencils. On top was a card in Vern’s handwriting: If you cannot agree which one should have the key, make copies.
“He made five,” Pete said. “Then wrote us an instruction to make five.”
“He was thorough about the wrong things,” June said.
Bea wanted to throw the card away. She put it with the ledgers instead. It belonged to the record of how Vern had been, not the version she would have preferred to leave behind.
They locked the shop at dusk. June kept the photographs of her mother’s pages. Inez took a copy of the full name list. Hal asked if anyone wanted to take the clocks before the auction. No one did, except Pete, who chose the one that ran five minutes slow. He said it sounded like rain inside the case.
Bea stayed to check the door. Her key turned easily. Across the street, June was showing Inez the photograph on her phone; the two women were pointing at a name Bea could not see. Hal waited beside his car for them, holding the umbrella Inez had forgotten.
The shop was closed. Five keys still worked. Bea put hers on her ring with the keys to homes and locks she could actually repair. Tomorrow there would be calls to make, names to find, and money to count. Tonight she walked over and told Inez that Hal had her umbrella.