My brother came by the next day around noon. I buzzed him in and he trudged upstairs, toolbox in hand.
“Don’t know what we might find in that desk, eh?” He winked as he took up his tools and settled in to work.
“Thanks, Kyle,” I said. “I’ll make us some tea.”
While I boiled water, I realized I had a knot of excitement in my stomach. And the excitement had nothing to do with tea and everything to do with what might be in that desk. And, of course, it might be nothing. But a locked drawer…it seemed to me to imply possibilities. After all, why lock a drawer if there is nothing inside?
My mind went through options. I discarded them one by one. But I was confident that whatever happened, there was something to be found. Call it a hunch.
As I walked toward Kyle with the tray, the locked drawer sprang open.
I put the tea things down and we both stood there, staring at rich wood grain and careful joinery.
It was empty. The drawer held nothing at all.
“But that doesn’t make any sense,” I said. “Who locks an empty drawer?”
“No one, that’s who,” Kyle said.
I poured us both a cup of tea while he moved back and forth, looking here and there. He tugged at the top of the desk in a way that indicated he thought it might move. It didn’t. Then he swung down onto his knees and peered up and under. Nothing again. It was pointless, I thought. There was nothing there. But he was so intent on what he was doing, I didn’t have the heart to discourage him.
At a certain point, Kyle went back to looking at the desk, the empty drawer pulled open like a gaping mouth.
I didn’t see anything to keep looking at and was about to go and do something else when I felt more than saw Kyle come to attention.
“What the…” he muttered.
“What is it? What do you see?”
He didn’t answer, instead focusing on whatever it was I could not see.
He paced one way, then the other, peering at the desk from all angles. Then he moved back again. Pushed the drawer in. Pulled it out. Pushed it back in. Stuck his arm way in with the drawer partly open. Moved around back again, knocking against the wood. Suddenly I felt as much as saw Kyle’s energy change.
“What?” I said. And when he kept ignoring me, I got more insistent. “What?”
“There’s something in there, Nic.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I mean, look.” I pointed at the desk. “It’s empty.”
“Not in the drawer. I think there’s a chamber behind the drawer.”
“A chamber?” I imagined a vast room. I knew that couldn’t be what he meant, but I couldn’t get the picture out of my head.
“Yeah.” He pulled the drawer open again. Reached inside. “See? This area is larger than what we’re seeing. Bottom and back.”
“Are you saying there’s a false back?”
But he didn’t answer. Instead, with a determined look on his face, he pulled a small crowbar out of his toolbox and moved in the direction of the desk.
“Hey!” I said when it looked like he was about to resort to force.
“If I’m right, what I’m about to break through wasn’t part of the desk in the first place.”
“Whatever. I paid a week’s salary for that desk!” At that moment, it didn’t seem relevant that it had been mostly the newspaper’s money, not mine.
He seemed not to have heard me, and it wasn’t long before I heard a loud crack followed by the splintering of wood.
“Holy Dinah!” It came from Kyle, but it could just as easily have been me. He looked up, eyes wide, from where he crouched on the floor in front of the desk. He’d been right. With a few quick chops, he’d broken through what he’d correctly guessed was the false back of the drawer. And there was something inside.
I watched Kyle, down on his knees, reach in and feel around. After a while his hand came back out. In it was what looked at first to be an oblong bundle of paper. He laid it on the floor and looked at me questioningly.
I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. Go ahead.”
Cautiously, he pulled away layer upon layer of protective paper.
When all the paper was out of the way, we saw that the wrapping had been protecting a wine bottle unlike any I’d ever seen. The glass was thick and dark, with letters embossed on it. The label was slightly yellowed but otherwise perfect. Kyle reached inside the drawer again and pulled out another bundle. And then another after that. In all, he brought out half a dozen bottles, which he unwrapped and lined up on the surface of the desk. Quite a pile of old paper was left behind. I gathered it all up and shoved it into the desk. I thought we’d deal with it when the time came to repair the hole my brother had made discovering the hidden chamber.
“Concordia Monastery,” Kyle read aloud. “Very fine wine. Kelowna, British Columbia. You ever heard of them?”
I shook my head.
“Me neither. What do we do?” he said. We looked at each other without blinking. A family trait in times of pressure, that not-blinking thing.
“Drink it?” I said.
He gave me a long look. Then we both looked at the tea and back at each other.
“I’ll go get glasses,” I said. Because drinking it seemed as good a place to start as any.
As I was returning from the kitchen with the wineglasses, my phone rang. And before the ring had settled into our ears, Kyle’s phone went off as well. Our eyes met as we picked up. My mother was calling me. And Kyle? I could see right away that he was talking to Dad.
I tried to focus on the voice. It was near hysteria, unusual for my mom.
“We’ve had a break-in, lass. Imagine!”
“You’re all right?”
“Och, aye. We weren’t here. Your da was at the golf, of course. And I was down the way at Mary’s for a cup of tea.”
“It happened during the day?”
“Yes. That’s what I’m saying. They broke in bold as anything in broad middle of the day. Just now. Imagine!”
“What did they take?”
“Well, that’s the thing, isn’t it? They made a big mess, but nothing seems to be missing.”
“Nothing at all?”
“That’s right. The place was ransacked. But nothing as we can see is gone.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“Aye. That’s what we thought as well. And it’s not like we’re drug dealers or anything. Just simple people. We’ve nothing to hide.”
There was more along these lines. I felt the unfamiliar shiver of concern for my parents that must be akin to the feelings parents always have for their kids. I couldn’t bear the thought of something happening to them and hated that they were having to deal with something frightening that was out of my control.
When I hung up, my brother was already off the phone. He was sitting there looking at me, concern raw on his face.
“It was Dad. He was very upset.”
“Mom too. I’ve got some time this afternoon. I’m going to drive up there and see if I can reassure them.”
“I’ll come with you,” Kyle said.
We drove out to Burnaby in my brother’s Volvo convertible. It’s a crazy car for an out-of-work artist, but he’s always liked nice things, and he’d married a woman who could afford to give them to him. For a while. The marriage had been over for years, but some of the residuals lived on. He’d kept the car. He’d gotten the cat. I didn’t judge. And ever since the relationship ended, he was always available to help me if I got in a jam.
When we pulled up, Kyle and I could see that our parents’ home on Capitol Hill was teeming with activity. The driveway and the curb at the front of the house were lined with cars neither of us recognized. We exchanged a glance as we drove past. Kyle parked farther up the block, and we walked back.
When we opened the front door we found the house flooded with the kind of noise that can only be properly made by Scots. A bunch of them.
“Och, no, you don’t say.”
“Aye, Gladys, that’s right. Ye can’t imagine.”
And so on, a story being told and retold. And maybe it was growing in the telling. Changing shape. Kyle and I could only guess.
“What the hell, Mom?” I said when I cornered her in the bedroom, separated for the moment from her gaggles of concerned friends. “You were never in any danger, right?”
“Well, you don’t really know sich a thing, do you? He coulda still been in the house when we got back. The possibility seemed distinct.”
Distinct. “Ah,” I said. “And did that prove to be the case?”
“Well, no. I came home to this.” She indicated the bedroom we stood in. A half-stripped bed, dresser drawers open, waste-paper baskets overturned. “This is not the way I left things.”
I just looked at her. I didn’t doubt her words for a heartbeat. I could not imagine a situation where Mom would leave the house with the bed unmade, let alone things strewn on the floor.
“Do you have any idea who it might have been?”
“Oh no, lass. Not at all. You know, we’ve never had such a thing happen.”
“And you say nothing is missing?”
“Not so’s we’ve been able to tell, at any rate. It doesn’t appear to be. But Marjorie MacDougall said when she was broken into last year, it took her and Hamish a whole month to realize the extent of what was gone. They took her eyeglasses, if you kin imagine. And the wee change purse she’d kept after her mother went on, poor soul.”
I resisted the urge to travel with her through the recollection of Marjorie’s break-in. “So far nothing though, right?”
“Aye.”
“And certainly, if there was danger before, it’s now passed.”
We settled them down as well as we could. Large amounts of tea were consumed. We ate a bunch of biscuits. After a while Mom and Dad seemed to calm, and Kyle said he had to go because he had a thing. I asked him to drop me at the office on his way. My parents stood in the driveway, waving goodbye as we left. They suddenly seemed so small and vulnerable to me. I felt a wave of something indefinable and unfamiliar wash over me. It was love, sure, but something else too. Something that tasted a bit like fear.