I gripped the heavy brass key so tightly the metal bites into my palm.
“Put your name right there, Walter,” Caroline said. She tapped a yellow sticky note on the thick stack of paper. Her fingernails were short and clean, and she had four black ballpoint pens lined up in a perfect row beside her telephone.
I sat in the green leather chair, my knees stiff from the bus ride from Cedar Falls. The office smelled of old paper and furniture polish, a dry and quiet smell that made the noise of the street outside seem very far away.
“Is that Eleanor’s?” I asked, looking at the silver-plated fountain pen resting on a small velvet tray.
“She left it here the last time we went over her papers,” Caroline said, pushing a heavy glass inkwell aside. “She always preferred to use her own ink.”
I picked up the pen. The silver plating was worn thin near the nib, showing the dull brass underneath where her fingers had gripped it for forty years. It was heavy and cold, and the metal had a faint smell of machine oil.
“I kept a second copy of the will in my personal safe,” Caroline said, leaning forward in her chair. “Just in case the original at Birchwood was ever misplaced.”
“Eleanor did not misplace things,” I said.
“No,” Caroline said. “But she was practical.”
I unscrewed the cap of the pen and held it over the signature line on the deed. The white paper looked very clean against the dark mahogany of her desk.
“This means you are accepting the property and all its current liabilities,” Caroline said. “The outstanding taxes and the maintenance are your responsibility now.”
“I know,” I said.
I pressed the nib to the paper. The blue ink flowed smooth and dark, spelling out my name in the quiet room.
“That makes it official,” Caroline said, taking the document from me. “Birchwood is yours.”
She set the deed in a drawer and pulled out a thin blue folder that had been sitting under her legal pad.
“There are details about your sister’s final weeks that do not align with her usual ledger,” she said.
I looked at the folder, waiting.
