by hosta and tall rubber plants. The fog had faded by the afternoon, and now the air was warm, windless, nearly sticky. Frank, Louise’s preternaturally inoffensive husband, had bought a bottle of champagne and four dozen Point Reyes oysters to celebrate Kate’s first day at work. Kate had tried oysters before once or twice, but only on beds of ice and lettuce. These were different, raw and wild, so fresh they were practically squirming in their shells. They slid down her throat in a slip of salt and brine.
“So,” Louise said, clapping her hands together. “Tell us about the house.”
“The house? It’s a house.” Kate dropped an empty shell into the discard bowl. “A living room, a dining room, a kitchen.”
“Katie, come on.”
“I assume there are bedrooms, too. I didn’t see those.”
“You know what I mean.”
“There’s not anything to say,” Kate said, reaching over to refill her aunt’s glass. “It’s pretty boring.”
It was true, sort of. After that first uncomfortable meeting, Theo had disappeared upstairs and she had spent the rest of the day alone in the dining room, sneezing dust and pushing boxes around. In addition to the massive quantities of papers and documents, the dining room was full of random objects. Already Kate had found eighteen Lego pieces, four melted lipsticks, three staplers, two rolls of masking tape, a nail gun, and a weird china marionette with a broken arm. More than once, she had put something down only to discover that her fingers were coated in a mysterious sticky substance. Her back ached from bending over. Her eyes were red from squinting. She had spent half an hour going through a thick stack of bent notecards, only to determine that they were indeed all blank and could be safely set in the discard pile.
Yes, it was boring. Boring, repetitive, and way less fun than watching reruns of Vanderpump Rules on her parents’ sofa.
But. But. Boredom was like pain. When it was gone, it no longer felt real. Six hundred notecards took up the same mental space as sixty as six as one. That half hour had already become a millisecond in Kate’s memory.
The money helped smooth the rough edges. Kate’s contract said that on top of her hourly rate, she would receive 0.5 percent of the proceeds from the sale of any art. Online auction records said Miranda’s prints went for anywhere between $60,000 and $900,000. Before entering the Brand house, Kate had assumed she might find a couple prints, max, and get a nice little bonus of a few thousand dollars. But it was quickly becoming apparent that the dining room, crammed as it was with trash, was also full of valuable material. Shortly after setting aside those infuriating notecards, she had found a small photograph in decent condition: the ink dense and shiny, the paper unwarped. It was one of Miranda’s nature photographs, a close-up of a leaf’s corded vein.
That was how it was sometimes, in the archive. Big discoveries sandwiched between trash. The day-to-day touching the phenomenal.
Now she felt drunk on the knowledge that she had earned money. Real money for real work. She had felt so worthless for so long that the mere fact of employment was as sharp a relief as taking off a heavy backpack at the end of a long hike. Even if her boss was a dickwad.
“It can’t all be boring,” Louise said. “Everyone wants to get inside that house. Now you’re there. Give us some details.”
“Honey, leave her alone,” Frank said. “She can’t tell us anything. She signed that agreement.”
“The agreement doesn’t apply to family,” Louise said.
Frank was swallowing oysters like a happy hour special was about to end. Like Louise, he had taken to retirement with gusto, spending his days tinkering with CB radios and kayaking around the lagoon. Instead of a tan, his skin had adopted a permanent pinkish sheen. Even now, in the lilac dusk, he wore his wraparound sunglasses hooked on backward, like they were shielding another set of eyes in the back of his head.
“You’ll get your behind-the-scenes sooner or later,” he said to his wife. “Anyway, what do you think the guy’s going to do? Come right out and say he killed his mom?”
Kate spat out a mouthful of champagne.
“Frank!” Louise exclaimed, jumping up with her napkin as Kate coughed and coughed.
“What? What did I do?”
Louise glared at her husband as she pressed the napkin onto the tablecloth. “Have some sensitivity.”
Frank looked bewildered. “You didn’t tell her? I thought that was your