Chapter 332: Who the Hell Is J.S.?

At twenty past eight, the kitchen was quiet enough to hear the clock over the stove.

Damien had laid the coded journals out in a row across the oak table and was photographing every page. Aria stood at the window over the sink with the key. Out in the garden, the children were arguing over a wheelbarrow, and every so often Séverine’s voice cut through them and the arguing stopped.

Daylight did the key no favors. Rust had crusted over the teeth and packed every groove of the bow, the flat round end you held it by. She tilted it toward the glass, and something under the rust caught the light.

Not pitting. A shape. Two of them, side by side, too regular to be damage.

"Damien. Come look at this."

He came up behind her. One hand settled on her hip, and he bent until his chin rested on her shoulder and his mouth was beside her ear. She ran her thumbnail across the bow so he could see where the edges were.

"Letters," he said.

"I think so. I can’t read them."

"Then we clean it."

He didn’t move. His thumb traced a slow line along the waistband of her jeans.

"Damien. There are fourteen children outside that window."

"They’re looking at a wheelbarrow."

He kissed the side of her neck, just below her ear, unhurried, as if they had all the time in the world and not thirty-five hours. Heat went straight down her spine.

Then he straightened, took the vinegar off the shelf beside the dish soap, and handed her the salt from the shelf above it.

Aria needed a second before she could remember what the salt was for.

She poured a mound into a saucer, wet it with vinegar until it turned to grit, and started to scrub.

It was slow work. The rag went orange, then brown. She rinsed it under the tap and started again. Behind her, Damien went back to his photographs. When he finished the last page, he sent the whole set to Kai.

Jade came in at half past eight. She looked like she had spent the night upright in the window seat on the third-floor landing, and Aria suspected she had. She sat at the end of the table, set her phone face-up in front of her, and looked at it.

Aria glanced at her own screen. A little under thirty-five hours.

Damien poured Jade a cup of coffee and set a brioche from the bakery bag beside it. She didn’t touch either.

"Eat," Aria said.

"I’m not hungry."

"Eat anyway. Leo’s going to need you on your feet."

Jade looked at the brioche for a long moment. Then she tore off a corner and put it in her mouth. Then another. By the time Aria went back to the sink, half the brioche was gone.

By the third rinse, the rust on the bow had thinned to a reddish film. By the fourth, there was dark metal underneath. She worked a corner of the rag into the grooves with her fingernail, rinsed the key under the cold tap, dried it on her jeans, and held it up to the window.

Two capital letters, pressed into the metal side by side. The second one sat a little crooked, as if whoever stamped it had been in a hurry.

J.S.

"J.S.," she read. ℯℯ𝑙.

Damien took it from her and turned it under the light. "Stamped. A maker’s mark. Or a name."

"Who’s J.S.?"

"I don’t know."

"Jessica Simpson."

"No."

"You don’t know that."

He gave her a look and handed the key back.

Aria sat down beside him and laid it on the table next to the photograph of her six-year-old self. She went through the names she had. Her mother had been Eleanor Vale, and before that Geneviève Orpheus. Her father had been Raymond Vale, and before that Marcel Martin.

None of them were J.S.

"Jade? Does that mean anything to you?"

Jade leaned over to look. She shook her head. "No. I’ve never seen it."

"Somebody in the family? A cousin? A house?"

"I didn’t know the family," Jade said. "I knew Madame. And I knew what they told us."

She went back to her phone.

Damien photographed the bow, front and back, and sent it. Then he made one call.

"Antoine." He switched to French, said three sentences, and hung up.

"Who’s Antoine?" Aria asked.

"He runs the locksmiths’ guild archive in Paris. Every registered maker’s mark in France."

"And he answers your calls at eight-thirty in the morning."

"I paid for the archive’s new roof."

She stared at him. "Is there a roof in this country you haven’t paid for?"

His phone buzzed before he could answer. He read the message and turned the screen toward her.

[Antoine: Not a maker’s mark. Not in any register. Private stamp, made to order. Someone wanted this key to belong to one place only.]

Aria looked down at her hands. The vinegar had turned her fingertips pink and raw, and salt had dried in the creases of her knuckles.

Damien had already seen. He took her hand, turned it palm-up on the table, and brushed the salt away with his thumb, one finger at a time.

"You should have used gloves," he said.

"There weren’t any."

"Next time I’ll do it."

"Next time you’re doing all of it."

He lifted her hand and pressed his mouth to her fingertips, one at a time. His eyes stayed on hers the whole time.

Aria forgot about the key.

At the end of the table, Jade cleared her throat. "I’m still here."

Damien lowered Aria’s hand to the table. He didn’t let go of it.

The back door opened.

Séverine came in with mud to her knees and the egg basket over one arm. She was saying something over her shoulder to a child in the garden, sharp and quick, and she stamped her boots on the mat and went toward the stove.

Then she saw the table.

She stopped halfway across the kitchen. The color drained out of her face.

Séverine set the basket on the counter without looking where she put it. She crossed to the table, picked up the key, and found the letters with her thumb at once, as if she had known exactly where they would be.

"Où l’as-tu trouvée?"

"Where did you find it?" Damien said.

"It was in my mother’s box," Aria said. "With her journals."

Damien translated. Séverine didn’t seem to hear him. She stood with the key in both hands and stared at it. Her knuckles had gone white.

Jade had stopped chewing.

"Séverine," Aria said. "What is it?"

Her aunt closed her hand around the key.

"Le Jardin Secret."

The kitchen went still.

Aria had seen those words before, painted on a rain-blurred shop sign behind her mother in an old Polaroid.

"The flower shop," she said.

Beside her, Damien’s grip on her hand tightened. "Rue Saint-Honoré."

Séverine’s head turned to him.

"Qui vous a parlé de ça?"

(Who told you about that?)

Damien met her eyes.

"Ta sœur," he said. "Sur une photo."

(Your sister. In a photograph.)