Chapter One

She could have missed the duck entirely. It was at the very bottom of the cedar chest, and in the manner of the princess and the pea and the stack of mattresses, Laurie might have ignored it if she hadn’t pulled all the blankets out to see whether any of them seemed special.

The duck was about a foot long, made of wood, and lighter than she expected when she picked it up. She couldn’t even guess how old it was, since it looked pristine, like it had barely been touched. It was without a single visible scratch, and it was worked to a finish so smooth she could make out the thinnest brushstrokes in the paint with the tips of her fingers. The colors were bright: a green head and a reddish-­brown chest, a gold flush along the sides with blues and greens along the wings. Laurie stepped into the hall. “Now, why,” she said, standing with one hand on her hip and the duck in the other, “would a ninety-­three-­year-­old woman have had a wooden duck in a chest under three afghans and a quilt?”

“To get to the other side?” June called back from the living room.

“It’s not that kind of riddle.”

Laurie walked with it out into the living room, where June was working through the books. Or some of the books. Aunt Dot had them in practically every corner, stuffed into floor-­to-­ceiling built-­in shelves or sitting in stacks on the floor, in danger of tipping over. “I guess she had it for the same reason she has four feather boas and a signed picture of Steve McQueen.”

“Which is what?”

“She was ninety-­three. Why wouldn’t there be a duck?”

Laurie took out her phone and snapped a couple of pictures of the duck from different angles to show her mother. “It’s pretty, actually. I don’t know why it wouldn’t be out somewhere you could look at it. Everything else is.”

Dot’s whole house was an extravagant display case for the fruits of her adventures. There were postcards in patterned fabric boxes, home-­movie reels in bins with labels marked in ballpoint pen, and travel souvenirs that suggested impulsive shifts in Dot’s collecting philosophy. There were egg cups, spoons, and little dessert plates with scenes painted on them. She’d been to Rome, to Bangkok, to Buenos Aires and Mexico City. She’d camped in a trailer with two girlfriends in Yellowstone in the summer of 1952, and she’d wandered around China on her own in 1994, when she was in her sixties. In a photo from that trip that she must have convinced a stranger to take for her, she was next to the Great Wall, her gray hair gathered in a loose ponytail at the back of her neck. She wore a light denim jacket with a patch of Elton John’s face on the arm.

Dot had tried just about everything they taught at the community college—­and kept every course catalog—­and her work and supplies were stacked and stored in one of the bedrooms. Ceramics, cross-­stitch, knitting, scrapbooks with stenciled titles like “Christmas 2003: Cold as Hell.” Painting, sketching, calligraphy, beaded bracelets strung on fishing line. There was a big blue plastic bin at the bottom, under all the boxes of crafts, that said in progress/unfinished. Those were destined to remain so now.

There was a small stash of love letters from some of Dot’s known boyfriends: Paul, the teacher; John, the chemist; Andrew, the journalist. There was also one without an envelope that was signed “M,” which Laurie suspected might have been from a woman,...