Fourteen Keys

After the funeral, Beth and her brother Matt went to clear their aunt Rosalind’s flat, expecting dust, old tea towels and a week of polite arguments over who should keep the clock. What they found instead, in the drawer of the hall table, was a leather pouch with fourteen keys, each with a paper label in her aunt’s round handwriting: a street name, but no number.

“Fourteen streets,” Matt said. “Fourteen houses she owned in secret?” Beth laughed, but not completely. Rosalind had been a librarian who lived on a small pension and had never wanted to buy a dishwasher. “Or fourteen jokes,” she said. “She did love a puzzle.” On Saturday afternoon they tried the key marked Quay Street.

It fitted a green metal door in a row of garages. Inside there was an armchair, a reading lamp and a shelf with a single book, with a note on the first page: “For whoever needs a quiet hour.” A young woman in a nurse’s uniform appeared in the doorway. “You’re not Rosalind,” she said. When Beth explained, the woman sat down in the armchair and cried quietly. “Twelve hours on the ward,” she said, “and this is the only silent place I have.”

Over the next three weekends they visited the others: a workshop for a retired watchmaker who mended neighbours’ clocks for nothing, a spare room above a bakery for a girl who practised the cello, a greenhouse for an old man who grew tomatoes for the whole street. Each time someone was grateful, and nobody knew about the others. The payments showed that Rosalind had used her pension to pay every rent. This explained the missing dishwasher.

Matt, who had planned to sell everything and share the money, began to hesitate. “If we stop paying,” he said, “fourteen people lose the only place that is theirs.” “And if we don’t,” Beth replied, “we lose most of what the flat is worth.”

At the very bottom of the pouch they found a fifteenth key, with no label, and a folded note. “Not for the flat,” it read. “For one of you. Find a new street and use this key to help someone who needs it.” Matt looked at Beth. Beth was already looking at the map.