Free Rising Tides by Emilie Richards Page A

slower to exit. He bent his head to Dawn’s for a moment, then shook it after she opened the box, as if to say he agreed with his wife. He took one last, assessing look around the room before he followed Cappy.
    Ben kept his eyes on Dawn. She had opened her box, and the contents seemed to fascinate her. The box was the size a jeweler might use for a necklace or a brooch. Like his, it didn’t appear to have been wrapped or marked with any emblem.
    “So what are you planning to do?”
    Ben realized Phillip was at his side. “What should I do?”
    “Open it, and see what’s going on.”
    Ben flipped off the lid. A key, old and tarnished, lay inside. “How did Mrs. Gerritsen know what I’d always wanted?”
    Nicky and Jake came over to examine the key. Ben glanced at Dawn and was surprised to find her looking at him. She held up another key, smaller than his.
    Phillip stepped aside so that Ben and Dawn were looking straight at each other. “Do you suppose the two keys are related?” he asked her.
    Dawn rose. “Maybe they’re related, and maybe they aren’t.” She strolled toward Ben. “Would you like to see mine? Or does the fact that it’s been in my hand make you squeamish?”
    “You’d be surprised what I can tolerate.”
    Dawn dropped her key in his hand. “Mean anything to you?”
    He glanced down. “No more than mine. Was your grandmother some sort of a practical joker?”
    “Never.”
    “Does my key look familiar to you?” He held out his hand.
    She took back her own and stared at his for a moment. “A key is a key.”
    “It usually leads somewhere.”
    “Not in Aurore’s Wonderland,” she said. “Mine’s too small to go to a door. And yours is too old to go to any of the doors in this house. All the locks were updated years ago.”
    “All?”
    “I think so. Peli?” She motioned for Pelichere to join them. “Would Ben’s key fit any of the locks in the cottage?”
    Pelichere squinted, then shook her head. “No.”
    “Maybe the keys are symbolic.” Ben cushioned his in the palm of his hand. “The old and the new?”
    “Mine’s not new,” Dawn said. “It’s small, but it’s old.”
    “The large and the small? Does this mean anything to you?” When she shook her head, he shrugged. “It appears we have two keys to nothing.” Ben dropped his in his shirt pocket.
    “No. My grandmother had a reason for this. I know she did,” Dawn said.
    Silently Ben congratulated her. As awkward as the situation had to be, she was trying to make sense of it. “We share some history. Maybe the keys are related to that.”
    “There’s nothing between us,” Dawn said. “Except that once you called me a murderer.”
    “Do you really want to talk about that now?” Ben asked.
    Dawn glanced at Nicky, who had silently been taking in the conversation. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Reynolds,” she said. “This must seem crazy to you. Apparently this has nothing to do with you and your family.”
    “I think you and Ben might need some time to cool off. Don’t you?”
    Nicky might be a stranger to the Gerritsens, but she was already taking charge of the situation. As Ben watched, Dawn nodded. Then she turned to him. “You pride yourself on getting the facts straight. Tell Spencer I’m going for a walk, will you? God knows I wouldn’t want to be forced to give back my key.”
     
    The garconnière was one of the few original out buildings still left on the Gerritsen property. Once the house and land had belonged to Pelichere’s great-uncle. Dawn wasn’t entirely certain now if a story her grand mother had told about riding out a childhood hurricane inside its walls was fact, or a fiction she had embroidered over the years. But she did know that her grandmother had purchased the property in the twenties.
    As a child, Dawn had not been allowed to play in most of the outbuildings, some of which had been torn down to protect her. But the garconnière, like the house, was built of bousillage, an adobelike