Frank looked down at his hand. The brass key under his palm felt suddenly heavier than the steel blade of his knife.
CHAPTER 4
Frank closed his hand into a tight, leathery fist, the corroded teeth of the padlock key digging hard into the flesh below his ring finger. He didn’t look back toward the road. Down here, belly-level with the boxwood roots, the street was nothing but a strip of heat shimmer over crushed limestone, but the hum of an unhurried, heavy engine idling out near the county culvert had settled into the soles of his boots.
“Get up,” Frank told her. His voice barely rattled the dried spider webs clinging to the cedar joist. “Get out from the dirt.”
Karen didn’t argue. Her knees made a wet, sucking sound as she pushed up from the red mud, leaving two dark, damp ovals on the knees of her tailored slacks. The arrogance had peeled away entirely, leaving behind the jagged skeleton of pure survival. She kept her back hunched, staying low behind the line of the privet hedge as Frank hauled himself up against the porch stringer.
His knees protested, bone grinding against cartilage with a sharp ache he ignored. He shoved the sheepfoot blade back into his jeans, palming the little green-skinned key.
“The fence line,” Frank muttered. “Move.”
They stayed within the dead space—the six-foot alley between his weathered shiplap and her neat, painted stucco where the sun never fully reached. The ground was thick with dropped pine needles, dry and slick as grease under their soles. At the rear corner of the property, half-swallowed by an unpruned trumpet vine, the weathered galvanized post leaned outward under forty years of frost heave. Bolted to its flank was a six-by-eight-inch utility enclosure, its olive-green enamel blistered into brittle scabs by decades of summer sun.
The split black garden hose ran out of the ditch, crawled up the rusty zinc pipe, and disappeared straight into the bottom knockout hole of the box.
The padlock hanging from the hasp wasn’t a standard utility company cylinder with a brass badge and a stamped seal. It was a cheap, heavy master lock, mottled with gray oxidation, its shackle pitted with red scale.
Karen stood three paces back, her fingers hooked into the hem of her cardigan, knuckles tight. “It’s been locked since they poured the curb,” she whispered. “Nobody has the key.”
“Somebody did,” Frank said.
He stepped into the tangle of dead vines, ignoring the dry stalks snapping against his shins. He brought the little notched key up, lining its corroded ward against the narrow keyway. He didn’t force it; forty years of turning rusted valves had taught him how metal gave way when it was ready. He seated the blade, applied a slow, steady torque with the ball of his thumb, and felt the tumbler seize, resist, and then pop with a sharp, dry tink.