at the kitchen table while Evan avoided visiting because, he claimed, he could not bear to see Dad that way.
Now Sloane was telling me Evan had handled documents.
She turned toward the shelves of clocks waiting for restoration.
“The collection will be auctioned first. Grant has spoken to a specialist in Boston. Then we’ll convert this wing into guest suites. Bellweather could become the finest private events property in the Hudson Valley.”
“You have already made plans for my father’s home?”
“For an underused asset.”
My chair scraped against the floor as I stood.
Sloane’s expression shifted, but only briefly.
“Leave.”
“You should hear the rest.”
“I heard enough when you called his life an asset.”
She picked up a small brass winding key from the bench and rolled it between her fingers.
I removed it from her hand.
“Do not touch his tools.”
Her mouth tightened.
“By Friday, they won’t be his tools. They’ll belong to Grant.”
At the doorway, she stopped beneath the railway clock.
“The buyer likes that one,” she said. “Try not to damage it while you’re packing.”
When the door closed, I listened to her footsteps cross the courtyard and fade toward the drive.
I wanted to throw something. Instead, I returned to the mechanism in front of me and reached for my brush.
My father had taught me never to work while angry. Anger made hands careless, and carelessness damaged things that had survived longer than the person touching them.
Then the railway clock clicked above me.
The clock was not running. I had removed its pendulum two weeks earlier because my father had asked me to clean the movement.
It clicked again.
I climbed onto the bench and opened the narrow service panel behind the copper dial. My fingertips found a strip of black cloth tied around the silent mainspring barrel.
Inside it was a small brass key and a folded piece of paper.
My name was written across the front in my father’s cramped handwriting.
Mara—
When they tell you the house is settled, take Celia to Locker 314 at North River Station.
Do not let Evan open it alone.
Trust the date, not the signature.
Dad.
I sat on the edge of the bench with the note in my lap.
During his last weeks, my father had struggled to write even a few words. He must have hidden the message before his hand failed completely.
That meant he had suspected something months ago.
I called Celia Price, his attorney.
She answered immediately.
“Sloane was here,” I said. “She claims Dad amended his estate documents.”
Celia became very quiet.
“What were her exact words?”
I repeated the conversation and told her about the key.
“Do not show it to anyone,” she said. “I’m coming to Bellweather.”
Celia arrived forty minutes later wearing the same black suit she had worn at the funeral. She read my father’s note beneath the railway clock, then examined the handwriting with a magnifying lens from his desk.
“It is his,” she said. “The tremor pattern matches letters he sent me in December.”
“Did he tell you about a locker?”
“No.”
“Did he change his will?”
“Not through me.”
The answer did not reassure me.
My father had trusted Celia for twenty years. If an amendment existed,
