Albert held up the key. “I guess we open it,” he replied. “We’re both here. We have it. What can it hurt to open it and look inside? Maybe we’ll figure out what it all means.”
Brandy held onto the box, still not sure. She looked at the key for a moment, then looked up at Albert and said in a voice that was nearly a whisper, “What if it’s a bomb or something?”
Albert hadn’t considered a bomb. He stared down at the box, his thoughts whirling. Why would it be a bomb? But why not? Why crash airplanes into the World Trade Center? There was no end to the number of horrors that could be hidden in a box like this. He could almost imagine turning the key and watching it fly open as some hellish creature burst from within, its vicious jaws tearing the flesh from his body before he knew what was upon him.
He shook these thoughts away and met Brandy’s eyes. “If it is,” he decided at last, “we probably won’t feel it.”
Brandy’s face paled at the thought of such an abrupt and brutal end. “I guess that’s true,” she said after a moment.
“With or without you,” Albert said. “I think I have to open it. I have to know what’s going on.”
Brandy gazed back at him. “Why?”
“It’s just who I am. I’ve always loved a good mystery. I read mysteries, I watch them, I can almost always figure out who did it.” He looked down at the box. “This is the first real mystery I’ve ever come across. I guess I feel like, even if it’s dangerous—stupid even—to open it, I want to.” He shrugged and lowered his eyes. He felt foolish. “I feel like, above all else, I want this to be something real, you know?”
Brandy stared at him, surprised. “Yeah. I guess I do.”
“I’m not saying we should. I don’t know. Probably we shouldn’t. I’m just saying I want to.”
She nodded. “Okay.” She moved the box closer to him, resting it on her knees, and then turned it so that the keyhole faced him. “I guess I do too.”
He looked up at her, relieved that she understood him. He wanted to ask her if she was sure, but he didn’t dare tempt her to reconsider. “Ready?”
Again, she nodded.
Slowly, Albert slid the key into the lock and began to turn it. For a moment he could feel the key searching for the slot—he still did not know which end was up—and then it fell into place and he felt the lock begin to turn. It moved sluggishly, as though stiff with age. When he had turned it a complete ninety degrees, a firm click announced that the lock was sprung and the key stopped in his fingers.
The two of them sat there for a moment, staring at the box. It was unlocked now, or at least they could only assume that it was, but they still didn’t know how it was supposed to open.
“Now what?” Brandy asked, looking at Albert.
He did not know.
“I heard it unlock.”
“So did I.”
“So how does it open?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t figure that out before when I was looking at it.” He began to pull the key from the keyhole and after a moment of fumbling, the box began to open. It was now that it finally made sense to him. The box appeared seamless when he first examined it, except of course for those seams that one would expect to find in a wooden box, those where the wood was glued together. There were no hinges because the box did not have the kind of lid he’d been looking for. Instead, it consisted of two separate pieces, one inside the other. As he pulled the key out, the entire front side slid outward from the rest of the box.
“I see,” Albert said. “It’s like a drawer.” It quickly became obvious that the box was lying on its side and he picked it up and turned it. Brandy’s name was carved on the top of the box while part of the map made up the bottom.
“How’d you know to pull on the key like that?”
Albert glanced up at her. “I didn’t. I was just trying to take it out.”
She did not respond and Albert felt an odd sense of guilt. He could almost read her thoughts as she wondered if perhaps he’d been aware of how the box worked all along. “It’s a really good fit,” he observed, trying to keep her attention on the box itself. “You couldn’t tell that the wood wasn’t glued there, but it wasn’t stuck closed, either.” This was true. More true, in fact, than he cared to elaborate on. He pushed the box closed again for a moment and examined the seams. The fit was so perfect that there was not even the slightest movement when they were together, especially when the lock was turned. As he pulled it open again, he saw that there were small but formidable bolts on all four sides of the keyhole side of the inner box, and four no-doubt perfectly sized holes to receive the bolts in the outer box, like the deadbolt on a door, but four times as secure.
Still Brandy said nothing. Her silence felt like an accusation of some heinous crime for which he did not have an alibi.
Albert opened the box and peered inside. It would do no good to try and talk his way out of any suspicion. If she intended to blame him, there was nothing he could do to change her mind. The more he tried, the guiltier he would be perceived.
Besides, he knew he was innocent.
He hoped that opening the box would lead him to some answers, but as he gazed in at the contents, he quickly realized that there were only more questions within.
Random junk was all he found. There was a flat piece of rusted metal, a small stone, a dull metal object that he realized after a moment’s consideration was a brass button, a dirty black feather and a silver pocket watch that might have been an antique, but was corroded far beyond any real value.
“What is all that?” Brandy asked, leaning forward until their foreheads were almost touching. “Does it mean anything?”
Albert shook his head. He did not know. He reached in and removed the watch. Its lid was loose, but still intact. Carved into the front was an elegant letter G. It was dirty, as were all the objects in the box, as though they had been dropped in mud at some point, and he used his thumb to clean the dirt from the design. Did the “G” indicate the owner of the watch, he wondered, or the company that manufactured it? Maybe he would look it up on the Internet sometime. He opened the cover and was surprised to find that the glass was still intact. Except for its apparent age, it was in surprisingly good condition. He found the stem and tried to wind it, half expecting it to start working again, but the insides had apparently not aged as well as the rest. The hands would not turn.
“Is it broken?”
Albert nodded. “Yeah.” He handed it to her so that she could see it and then removed the feather. There was nothing very special about it. It wasn’t from a very large bird. It was dirty and rather ratty-looking, like it was simply plucked from the gutter somewhere and dropped into the box.
Brandy placed the watch back into the box and removed the button. There were no distinguishing markings on it. It appeared to be a simple, old-fashioned brass button.
Albert dropped the feather back into the box and withdrew the stone. It was dark gray in color, about an inch in length, semi-cylindrical, with a strange texture. There were small creases along the sides. He rubbed away the dirt with his thumb and forefinger and saw that both ends were rough, as though it had been broken from a larger object.
Brandy dropped the button back into the box. “Does this stuff make any sense to you?”
“Not a bit.” Albert dropped the stone back into the box and removed the final object. After turning it over in his fingers several times he concluded that it was the broken tip from some sort of knife. It was large enough to be from a dagger or a sword and, looking at the condition it was in, it certainly wasn’t stainless steel. The original blade could have been just about anything.
“It’s just junk.”
“I know.” Albert dropped the blade piece back into the box and fished out the button. As he examined it, four more people entered the room and sat down at the card table by the window. He recognized them immediately as the residents of the suite down the hall from his own. One of them was already shuffling a deck of cards and soon they would be immersed in a game. Albert saw them here often. Hearts seemed to be their game of choice, but he had already seen them play everything from Spades to Poker.