The name in Grady’s book wasn’t Momma’s. It was my mother’s maiden name, a name she hadn’t used since she married my father in 1954. I asked him if he could tell me where the other five keys went. He said he could give me the addresses because the orders were old, but he couldn’t tell me who currently lived there. The first four were ordinary houses in towns we’d never lived in. The fifth was a duplex. The sixth address was on the same road as the cemetery where my father was buried.
I drove there the next morning. It was a small house behind an old church, and an elderly man answered the door. I hadn’t said my name yet, but he looked at the key in my hand and asked where I’d found it. I told him it had been in my mother’s things. He said my mother had given him a key in 2009 and told him never to use it unless she called first. I asked what the key opened, and he pointed across the yard to a detached shed. Then he said something that stopped me: “Your mother wasn’t the only one who had a key.”
He unlocked the shed and let me inside. There were boxes stacked against the wall, all marked with dates, and the oldest one was from 2009. Inside were copies of letters, photographs, and a folder with my mother’s name on it. I opened the folder and found six copies of the same key order, each with a different address and the same date. At the bottom was a handwritten note in my mother’s handwriting. It said she’d made the keys because she was afraid someone would come looking for what she’d hidden. I asked the man what she had hidden. He looked at me for a long moment and said, “She told me you’d ask that after she was gone.”
