Chapter One: The Chest in the Attic
Claire Bennett had promised herself she would clear out her grandmother’s attic in a single weekend, and she had been wrong about that promise by nearly a month.
It wasn’t the size of the house that had slowed her down — a modest brick colonial on a quiet street in Alexandria, Virginia, three blocks from the river, the kind of house that had belonged to the same family for four generations without anyone quite deciding to modernize it. It was the sheer, accumulated weight of what a life leaves behind. Eleanor Voss had been ninety-one when she died, and ninety-one years of letters, photographs, church programs, and carefully pressed flowers did not sort themselves into donate and keep piles on any reasonable schedule.
Claire had retired from teaching classics at the community college eight months earlier, a decision she still hadn’t entirely made peace with, and told herself that clearing her grandmother’s house was simply the next responsible thing on a list that no longer had a syllabus at the end of it. She did not examine, too closely, the possibility that she had been in less of a hurry to finish than she claimed.
Her husband Paul had died two years before that, and her grandmother Eleanor had been, in the strange arithmetic of grief, the person who’d made the year afterward survivable — Sunday dinners, unhurried phone calls, a standing invitation to sit on the porch and not talk about anything at all if talking felt like too much. Losing them both inside of three years had left Claire with the unsettling sense of having outlived the two people who’d known her the longest, and she suspected, if she were honest, that finishing the attic meant finally admitting that chapter of her life was closed.
The chest was pushed back into the eaves, behind a trunk of old curtains, and she might have missed it entirely if the afternoon light hadn’t caught the brass corner fittings at exactly the right angle. It was small — not much larger than a breadbox — locked, and carved with initials she didn’t recognize: E.J.V.
“Edmund,” she said aloud, to the empty attic, when she finally placed them. Edmund James Voss. Her grandmother’s older brother, dead for decades, a man Claire had known only from a single photograph on the upstairs landing — a lean young man in a pith helmet, squinting into an Egyptian sun.
The key, when she found it taped beneath the lid of her grandmother’s jewelry box, was small and simple, and it turned without much resistance for a lock ninety years old.
Inside, wrapped in a square of yellowed silk, was a fragment of something that made Claire’s classics-trained hands go very still before she’d even consciously understood why: a scrap of papyrus, perhaps eight inches across, its surface dense with Greek characters in a careful, ancient hand, and beneath it, a leather field journal, its pages brittle and its ink faded to the color of weak tea, dated in a firm hand: Alexandria, Egypt — 1932.
She read the first line by the attic’s single bare bulb, and did not move again for a long time.