"Is there a key, Mr. Crane?"
His voice came out quieter than he intended. Crane gave him a brief, regretful smile.
"I'm afraid not, son. Your grandmother delivered it in this condition three weeks before her passing. She left no key."
Spencer snorted. "Just toss it in the Charles on your way home. Save the bus fare."
Adam lifted the box. It was heavier than it looked. The corroded edge caught on the thin fabric of his polo and tore a small ragged hole near his side, but he pressed it against his chest anyway, the same way he had once pressed his school backpack against himself on the day Cordelia brought him home from foster care.
He walked to the door without looking back. In the reception area outside the law office, a quiet woman in her fifties watched him pass. As he reached the elevator, she stood, came over, and pressed a cold bottle of water into his free hand.
"You shouldn't have to carry that alone, hon," she said softly.
Adam managed a nod. He did not trust his voice.
The journey home became a slow-motion humiliation. The Red Line was packed, and Adam stood in the center of the car with the box clutched against his ribs. Rust stained the front of his polo in reddish-brown streaks. A woman in a camel coat looked at the stains, then at his sneakers, and quietly moved two seats farther away.
A teenage boy across the aisle nudged his friend and whispered something. Both glanced at Adam and then looked away too quickly. Adam counted the stops. When he reached Park Street to transfer, he had to set the box on the platform just to flex his fingers because they had gone numb.
He stood in the rush-hour crowd with twenty pounds of rusted metal at his feet. One stranger glanced down and stepped around him as though Adam were unstable. A maintenance worker passed, stopped, then came back and asked if he needed help.
Adam shook his head. The man nodded once and continued on his way. Adam never learned his name, but for reasons he could not fully explain, he thought about that small offer several times afterward.
He picked the box up again and eventually climbed four flights to his studio apartment in Allston. By the time he reached the top, his arms were shaking. He kicked the door open with his foot because the latch had been broken for weeks and the landlord had refused to fix it. He dropped the box onto the chipped Formica table, which immediately tilted under the weight.
Without thinking, Adam grabbed a paperback from the floor and wedged it under the short table leg. It was a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo he had bought for fifty cents at a sidewalk sale two years earlier. He had never finished it because there had never been time.
He sat down. The studio smelled of damp brick and the chemical lemon scent of cheap bathroom cleaner. From his chair he could see almost everything he owned: a mattress on the floor with one fitted sheet and a blanket folded at the foot, a milk crate used as a nightstand, a thrift-store wire rack holding three shirts and two pairs of pants, and a bookshelf made from two cinder blocks and a plank.
There were eleven books on the shelf. Above them, a photograph of Cordelia in the rose garden was taped to the wall and beginning to curl at the corners. An eviction notice, already seven days overdue, was taped to the inside of his door. On the table sat a final electricity bill beside a printout from Bunker Hill Community College: Tuition deadline October 1. Outstanding balance: $2,418.
His checking account contained $14.62.
Adam stared at the box for a long time. Twenty pounds. A scrapyard in Saugus paid around forty cents a pound for cast iron, which meant perhaps eight dollars, maybe twelve if he argued it was something better, perhaps fifteen if the man at the desk was in a generous mood.
Fifteen dollars could buy three days of groceries if he stretched it. Rice, eggs, discount bread. Three days. He thought dimly about what came after the three days, the registrar's office at Bunker Hill where he had stood twice before holding forms with the same impossible number printed at the bottom, the locksmith shop where his hours had been cut to fifteen a week, and the next eviction notice, which would not be the kind that simply stayed taped to a door.
Adam let his head fall into his hands. He cried once, hard and quick, then wiped his face on his shoulder and stood. His phone buzzed on the counter.
Spencer.
He almost ignored it. He should have. But somewhere inside him remained a small, foolish hope that Spencer was calling to apologize, and Adam hated that hope enough to answer the phone just to kill it.
"Hello?"
"Adam." Spencer's voice was warm. The warmth was the worst part. "Did you make it home okay? Didn't pull anything carrying that thing on the subway?"
Adam did not answer. There was a pause, followed by the faint clink of ice in a glass.
"You really ought to thank me, you know," Spencer continued.
Adam closed his eyes.
"I'm the one who suggested it. Three weeks before she died, she asked me what we should leave you. And I said, 'Grandmother, the boy is spiritual. He doesn't need money. Give him something with character.'"
Spencer gave a soft laugh. "Then I reminded her about that ugly iron lump the groundskeepers dug up years ago. She laughed at the idea. She laughed so hard she nearly choked on her tea."
Spencer's voice softened. "Welcome to the family legacy, little brother."
The line went dead.
Adam stood very still in the center of his apartment. The phone slipped from his fingers and struck the counter. He did not pick it up. He thought of Cordelia holding his hand in a hospital corridor when he was seven, when he had asked whether she was going to die too, and of her telling him no.
Now Spencer had told him she had laughed at the box. A different heat rose in Adam, not grief but something harder. He picked up a wrench from the toolbox near the radiator and raised it over the rusted lid.
He held it there. He stood long enough for the heat in his face to cool, long enough to hear his own breathing, long enough to notice the weight of the wrench and the tremor in his hand. Then he lowered it.
Whatever the box was, even scrap had value, and $14.62 would not carry him through the week. He went to the sink, found an old toothbrush and household cleaner, and began working at a small patch of grime above the fused padlock. The black residue came away slowly, staining his fingers and shirt.
His arms ached. The cleaner irritated the small cracks in his hands, so he stopped, washed them, and continued more carefully. After nearly twenty minutes, a small patch beneath the corrosion began to shine.
Adam stopped breathing.
The metal beneath the grime was not brass and did not look like ordinary iron. It had a dull gray-white sheen. More important, stamped into the cleared patch was an intricate engraving: a double-headed eagle locked in combat with a winged serpent, the entire image encircled by a ring of thorns.
Beneath the crest were three letters: FGB.
Adam typed them into his phone. Nothing useful appeared. He found pawn-shop forums, references to a Russian bank, and a Dutch chemical company, but nothing connected to the strange mark on the box.
Still, the engraving was too fine to be meaningless. Someone had crafted it carefully on an object that had been allowed to look like garbage, and they had done it well enough that no one had noticed for what seemed like decades.