Free Death on a Silver Platter by Ellen Hart Page B

padlock on the front.
    “It is. Uncle Eli died forty years ago.”
    “What’s a box that belonged to your great-uncle doing in the subbasement?” asked Bram.
    “I’ve been thinking about that. I figure it must belong to my mom.”
    “Then why wasn’t it in your parents’ storage locker?”
    “Beats me,” said Sophie. She’d wondered about that herself.
    Bram studied it a moment, then said, “Well, maybe I’m way off base here, but it seems pretty obvious to me. Your mother was trying to hide it. Most likely, from Henry.”
    “Why would she do that?” asked Margie.
    “Simple. She’s got a secret.”
    “My mother doesn’t have secrets,” said Sophie indignantly. “She’s . . . my mother .”
    Bram cringed. “Careful, Soph. You’re playing with universal karma. As soon as you say something like that, it’s almost a statistical certainty that you’ll learn some deep, dark, dastardly secret about your mom. Like maybe Pearl was a bank robber in her youth. Or, hey, what if she had a secret love affair with J.F.K.? Or what about—”
    “You are so off base.”
    “Maybe. But I’ll bet you money that there’s something juicy hidden inside that box.”
    “Those locks are easy to pick,” said Margie, bending over to get a better look.
    “I am not a lock picker,” said Sophie. If she’d had time last night, she might have opened it. But she’d changed her mind this morning. The lock was there for a reason. She had no business messing with her mother’s private life.
    “It doesn’t look very sturdy,” said Bram, giving it a yank.
    To everyone’s surprise, it came off in his hand.
    “Oops,” he said, looking guilty.
    “Maybe we can glue it back together,” said Sophie, grabbing it away from him.
    “But, I mean, it almost fell off,” said Bram, assuming a soul-of-innocence expression. He started to raise the lid.
    Sophie slammed it shut. “It still doesn’t give us the right to look at something that was obviously meant to be private.”
    “I am suitably ashamed of myself,” said Bram with an undisguised smirk.
    They all looked at one another, then watched Sophie place the box back on the table.
    “Time to hit the walking machines,” said Sophie, snapping off the overhead light.
    “But you are going to open it,” said Bram. It wasn’t a question. “Maybe not now, but before your mom gets home.”
    “No,” said Sophie, her tone resolute.
    “Betcha will,” he said, grinning.
    “Stop looking so superior.”
    “I can read you like a book.”
    “Not always.”
    “Come on, Margie,” said Bram, slipping his arm around his daughter’s shoulder and walking her out the door. “Let’s us morally reprehensible chickens leave the righteous hen to her ethical dilemma.”
    “I’m right behind you,” said Sophie, closing and locking the door. She refused to entertain the idea that she would look inside.
    And that was the end of that.
    Pearl’s Notebook March 29, 1972
    I remember the next few hours with a vividness that will never leave me. My regrets will follow me as well, because, as I said, I could have stopped what happened. I could have prevented a tragedy. But the cost, oh how terrible it would have been—for me and my husband, for Carl’s children, and for my dear daughter, Sophie. How could I betray them all?
    With the note Carl had received safely tucked into my evening purse, I scanned the crowded living room to find Henry, not that I needed to worry about him. Henry is in his element at a party, the louder the better. He was seated on one of the sofas, talking to several people I’d never met. I waved at him and he waved back, but he went on talking. That was good. I was free to find Carl.
    I waded into the crowd and finally located him standing next to the bar, the one that his staff had set up in the conservatory off the living room. He was facing away from me, so I couldn’t see his expression. He held a drink in his hand, but didn’t seem to be talking to anyone.