On the fourth floor, she got off the elevator and slowly walked down the corridor to her grandmother’s apartment. Tears came to her eyes as she thought of the countless times her grandmother had been waiting with the door open after having seen her cross the street. Swallowing the lump in her throat, Jenny turned the key in the lock and opened the door. She reminded herself that, at eighty-six, Gran had been ready to go. She had said that twenty years was a long time without her grandfather, and she wanted to be with him.
And she had started to drift into dementia, talking about someone named Sarah … how Barney didn’t kill her … Vincent did … that someday she’d prove it.
If there’s anything Gran wouldn’t have wanted to live with, it’s dementia, Jenny thought. Taking a deep breath, she looked around the room. The boxes she had packed were clustered together. The bookshelves were bare. The tabletops were empty. Yesterday she had wrapped and packed the Royal Doulton figurines that her grandmother had loved, and the framed family pictures that would be sent to California.
She only had one job left. It was to go through her grandmother’s hope chest to see if there was anything else to keep.
The hope chest was special. She started to walk down the hallway to the small bedroom that Gran had turned into a den. Even though she had a sweater on, she felt chilled. She wondered if all apartments or homes felt like this after the person who had lived in them was gone.
Entering the room, she sat on the convertible couch that had been her bed there ever since she was eleven years old. That was the first time she had been allowed to fly alone from California and spend a month of the summer with her grandmother.
Jenny remembered how her grandmother used to open the chest and always take out a present for her whenever she was visiting. But she had never allowed her granddaughter to rummage through it. “There are some things I don’t want to share, Jenny,” she had said. “Maybe someday I’ll let you look at them. Or a maybe I’ll get rid of them. I don’t know yet.”
I wonder if Gran ever did get rid of whatever it was that was so secret? Jenny asked herself.
The hope chest now served as a coffee table in the den.
She sat on the couch, took a deep breath, and lifted the lid. She soon realized that most of the hope chest was filled with heavy blankets and quilts, the kind that had long since been replaced by lighter comforters.
Why did Gran keep all this stuff? Jenny wondered. Struggling to take the blankets out, she then stacked them into a discard pile on the floor. Maybe someone can use them, she decided. They do look warm.
Next were three linen tablecloth and napkin sets, the kind her grandmother had always joked about. “Almost nobody bothers with linen tablecloths and napkins anymore, unless it’s Thanksgiving or Christmas,” she had said. “It’s a wash-and-dry world.”
When I get married, Gran, I’ll use them in your memory on Thanksgiving and Christmas and special occasions, Jenny promised.
She was almost to the bottom of the trunk. A wedding album with a white leather cover, inscribed with Our Wedding Day in gold lettering, was the next item. Jenny opened it. The pictures were in black and white. The first one was of her grandmother in her wedding gown arriving at the church. Jennie gasped. Gran showed this to me years ago, but I never realized how much I would grow to look like her. They had the same high cheekbones, the same dark hair, the same features. It’s like looking in a mirror, she thought.
She remembered that when Gran had shown her the album, she’d pointed out the people in it. “That was your father’s best friend … That was my maid of honor, your great-aunt … And doesn’t your grandfather look handsome? You were only five when he died, so of course you have no memory of him.”
I do have some vague memories of him, Jenny thought. He would hug me and give me a big kiss and then recite a couple lines of a poem about someone named Jenny. I’ll have to look it up someday.
There was a loose photograph after the last bound picture in the album. It was of her grandmother and another young woman wearing identical cocktail dresses. Oh, how lovely, Jenny thought. The dresses had a graceful boat neckline, long sleeves, a narrow waist, and a bouffant ankle-length skirt.
Prettier than anything on the market today, she thought.
She turned over the picture and read the typed note attached to it:
Sarah wore this dress in the fashion show at Klein’s only hours before she was murdered in it. I’m wearing the other one. It was a backup in case the original became damaged. The designer, Vincent Cole, called it “The Five-Dollar Dress,” because that’s what they were going to charge for it. He said he would lose money on it, but that dress would make his name. It made a big hit at the show, and the buyer ordered thirty, but Cole wouldn’t sell any after Sarah was found in it. He wanted me to return the sample he had given me, but I refused. I think the reason he wanted to get rid of the dress was because Sarah was wearing it when he killed her. If only there was some proof. I had suspected she was dating him on the sly.