“She said together,” Tasha said beside him.
He held out the key. She put her hand over his. Her fingers were long like her mother’s. Together they fit the key into the lock and turned it, and it turned easily, as if it had been oiled, as if someone had been coming down here and keeping it ready.
The door swung open.
The first thing Leon saw was her robe. It hung from the hook at the top of the locker, white with a gold stole, pressed and clean in its plastic bag, the robe from the Easter photograph. Below it, on the locker’s single shelf, sat a pair of black low-heeled pumps with the toes stuffed with tissue paper, and a hymnal with her name embossed in gold on the spine, and a small jar of Vaseline, and a roll of peppermints. Ordinary things. Choir things. For a moment Leon felt something almost like relief, almost like foolishness—as if this were all, as if the locker were only what she had always said it was.
Then Tasha reached past the robe and pushed it aside on its hook, and behind it, on the floor of the locker, wedged into the back, was a bag.
It was a navy blue vinyl overnight bag of the kind they used to sell at Hecht’s for nine dollars, with white piping along the seams and a shoulder strap that had cracked at the buckle. The zipper pull had broken off at some point and been replaced with a large paper clip. On top of the bag sat a thick bundle of envelopes held together with a rubber band that had gone brittle, and on top of the bundle, alone, propped against the back of the locker, was a large manila envelope with a single word written on it in black marker.
Leon.