Thalia held the faded black-and-white photograph and studied it once more.
Eremon Estate was much larger than she had first realized.
The main building stood three stories high, with a grand stone portico rising at the center and two long wings extending outward on either side.
Age had blurred many of the finer details in the photograph, but she could still make out what appeared to be a circular fountain in front of the estate.
Adrian stood on the right side of the group.
He couldn’t have been much older than his early twenties at the time.
He wore a simple light-colored shirt and had a tall, slender build, with a faint smile on his face.
It was difficult to connect the young man in the photograph with the elderly husband Mrs.
Bennett had described, whose health had deteriorated near the end of his life.
After studying the photograph for a while, Thalia looked up.
“Have you seen this picture before?”
Mrs.
Bennett took it and examined it carefully before shaking her head.
“I don’t think so.
There aren’t many photographs of Adrian from when he was young.
Most of the ones I’ve seen are in our family albums.
This one was probably left in this drawer all these years, so I never noticed it.”
“Did he ever tell you about Eremon Estate?”
“A few times, but that was a very long time ago.”
Mrs.
Bennett sat down on the edge of the bed and thought for a moment.
“All I know is that he lived there for several years when he was young.
Then something happened and his family moved away.
By the time I met him, he hadn’t lived there for years, so I never visited the place myself.”
Thalia looked back at the photograph.
“Did the estate belong to his family?”
“I don’t think so.”
Mrs.
Bennett frowned slightly as she tried to remember.
“I seem to recall Adrian saying that his father worked at the estate, which was why the family lived there.
I don’t know what kind of work he did.
Adrian never went into detail, and I never thought to ask.”
Thalia nodded and didn’t press further.
Several decades had passed.
Even the people directly involved might no longer have remembered every detail clearly, much less Mrs.
Bennett, who had never been to Eremon Estate herself.
Ivan looked toward the drawer, which still contained a number of old belongings.
“Would you mind if we sorted through the rest of these?”
“Of course not.”
With her permission, Thalia put her gloves back on.
She and Ivan began removing the remaining items one by one.
Most were completely ordinary.
There were several unsent letters, old receipts that had long since become useless, a few coins, and a stack of photographs tied together with a thin piece of string.
Thalia didn’t assume that everything Adrian had left behind must be unusual simply because of what had happened with the pocket watch.
She examined each item the same way she would normally handle old belongings at the gallery, then sorted them carefully by type.
After a while, she pulled a faded brown envelope from beneath several photographs.
There was no recipient or address written on the front.
On the back, however, was a single word.
Eremon.
Thalia paused.
“Eremon again.”
Ivan immediately looked over.
Mrs.
Bennett rose from the bed and came to stand beside them.
“What’s inside?”
Thalia didn’t open it without permission.
Instead, she handed the envelope to her.
“Would you like to look yourself?”
Mrs.
Bennett turned it over several times.
Apparently certain that she had no memory of the envelope, she eventually handed it back.
“You open it.”
Only then did Thalia carefully loosen the brittle flap.
There was no letter inside.
Instead, she found a folded sheet of old paper.
She removed it and slowly unfolded it on the table.
A simple floor plan appeared in front of them.
Ivan leaned closer.
“Looks like the ground floor.”
Thalia quickly recognized the basic layout as well.
The main hall, dining room, kitchen, and several major corridors had been roughly labeled.
The drawing wasn’t professionally made.
It looked more like something someone had sketched from memory, and several rooms didn’t have names at all.
Ivan’s gaze moved to the lower-right corner.
“There’s a date here.”
Thalia followed his eyes.
1971.
Three years after the black-and-white photograph had been taken.
She looked over the floor plan again and soon noticed that a small room on the western side of the building had been circled in ink.
Everything else had only been labeled normally.
This was the only room that had been deliberately marked.
Thalia pointed to it.
“Why was this room circled?”
Mrs.
Bennett studied it for a while before shaking her head.
“I don’t know.
Adrian never showed me any of this.”
Ivan picked up the brown envelope and checked it again.
“There’s nothing else inside.”
Thalia placed the photograph beside the floor plan.
Both were connected to Eremon Estate, and both had been kept separately among Adrian’s belongings in a drawer that was rarely touched.
At the very least, that suggested the estate had been more than an insignificant childhood memory to him.
As for what the circled room represented, there still wasn’t enough information to say.
Rather than speculate, Thalia and Ivan continued sorting through the rest of the drawer.
Unfortunately, they found nothing else related to Eremon Estate.
Mrs.
Bennett stood beside the table, looking between the photograph and the floor plan with a complicated expression.
“I lived with him for all those years, and I never knew he’d kept any of this.”
Thalia didn’t immediately try to reassure her.
Keeping old belongings that had never been mentioned to one’s family didn’t necessarily mean someone had deliberately hidden them.
Sometimes things were simply left untouched for so long that eventually there was no obvious reason or opportunity to explain them.
Adrian had been dead for thirty years.
What mattered now was understanding what the voice left inside his pocket watch had been trying to tell them.
That thought reminded Thalia of the other sentence she had heard the previous night.
The key is in the watch.
She looked at Ivan.
“We should probably go back and figure out that hidden section in the pocket watch first.”
Ivan had clearly been thinking the same thing.
“We need to find out what’s actually inside.”
Thalia nodded.
If the watch really contained something, there was a good chance it was connected to Eremon Estate.
After hearing their conversation, Mrs.
Bennett spoke up.
“Go ahead and examine it.
As long as you don’t deliberately damage it, you don’t need to worry too much.
If Adrian really left those words behind, perhaps he wanted someone to open it.”
Even with her permission, Thalia didn’t make any careless promises.
“We’ll preserve the watch as much as possible.
If we can’t open it safely, we won’t force it.”
“All right.”
The three of them remained at the old house for a while longer.
Once they were satisfied that there were no other obvious clues, Thalia and Ivan prepared to leave with the photograph and floor plan.
Mrs.
Bennett gave them permission to take both items, and they recorded them according to the gallery’s usual procedure before leaving.
By the time the siblings returned to the gallery, it was nearly noon.
Thalia placed the photograph and floor plan into separate protective sleeves before taking out the silver pocket watch again.
After the events of the previous night, it had returned to its completely motionless state.
The hands once again rested at eleven forty-seven.
Thalia put on her gloves and placed the watch beneath the work lamp.
“The seam we found yesterday is here.”
She turned the watch over and quickly located the area near the hinge.
Ivan stood beside her as she selected a set of finer tools.
“Take it slowly.”
“I know.”
Thalia didn’t look up.
With a metal object that was already several decades old, force was the last thing she wanted to use.
The case itself was heavily worn, and even a slight mistake in the angle of the tool could leave permanent damage.
She first cleaned away the dirt that had accumulated in the seam over the years, then carefully traced the edge to determine exactly where the pieces joined.
More than ten minutes passed before the narrow line, almost invisible before, became a little clearer.
Thalia switched to an even thinner tool and carefully slipped it into the gap.
The moment it touched the inside, she stopped.
“What is it?” Ivan asked.
“It’s hollow behind this.”
Ivan immediately leaned closer.
Thalia kept her attention on the watch, slowly loosening the edge along the seam.
A moment later, an extremely soft click came from the back of the case.
The thin plate that had been fitted tightly against the metal lifted slightly.
Thalia stopped at once, exchanged her tool for a pair of tweezers, and carefully raised the plate.
There was no complicated mechanism underneath.
Only a shallow hidden compartment.
And in the center of that compartment lay a tiny brass object no larger than a fingernail.
Thalia stared at it for two seconds.
Ivan was silent for a moment as well.
“It really is a key.”
Thalia looked up at him, surprised herself.
“So when he said, ‘The key is in the watch,’ he meant it literally.”
She had assumed the words might have been symbolic, or perhaps referred to something only Adrian himself would have understood.
Instead, his message had been perfectly straightforward.
The key was inside the pocket watch.
Using tweezers, Thalia carefully lifted the tiny object from the compartment and placed it on a black padded mat.
The key was much smaller than one meant for an ordinary door.
It was made entirely of brass, its surface darkened by age and oxidation.
Instead of the usual round bow, the handle had been shaped into a simple four-petaled flower.
Ivan picked up the magnifying glass and examined it.
“Too small for a door.”
“Could be for a drawer, a box, or a cabinet.”
Thalia turned the key over.
There was no number or obvious maker’s mark on the front.
But when she examined the other side, she noticed a faint engraving near the handle.
She adjusted the angle of the work lamp and leaned closer.
It wasn’t a symbol.
It was a letter.
E.
For a moment, neither of them spoke.
Thalia looked toward the photograph lying nearby.
“Eremon?”
“Possibly.”
Ivan didn’t immediately treat it as a certainty.
He looked over the objects spread across the table.
“But so far, everything we’ve found is pointing toward Eremon Estate.”
Thalia nodded.
The voice Adrian had left behind told them to go back and specifically said that the key was in the watch.
Among his belongings, they had found a photograph of Eremon Estate and a hand-drawn floor plan of the building.
Now they had discovered that the pocket watch really did contain a hidden brass key marked with the letter E.
The scattered clues were finally beginning to connect.
Thalia placed the key inside a small transparent protective case, then inspected the hidden compartment again.
Once she was certain there was nothing else inside, she carefully closed the back of the watch for the time being.
“Next, we find out more about Eremon Estate.”
“I’ll do it.”
Ivan picked up the black-and-white photograph.
Thalia looked at him.
“Why do you get to do it?”
“Because you restore things.
I research them.”
“You say that like I don’t know how to research.”
Ivan glanced at the pocket watch still waiting in front of her.
“Are you going to finish working on that or not?”
Thalia followed his gaze and finally surrendered the computer.
“Fine.
You look it up.”
Ivan pulled out the chair and sat down, organizing the name on the back of the photograph, the dates, and everything else they had learned so far.
Thalia returned to the worktable and continued working on the pocket watch.
The restoration room soon became quiet again, filled only with the tapping of the keyboard and the occasional soft sound of a tool touching the table.
About twenty minutes later, Ivan suddenly stopped typing.
“Found it.”
Thalia immediately looked up.
“The estate?”
“Yes.”
Ivan turned the computer screen toward her.
“It’s still there, but no one’s lived there for years.
It’s not especially far from here.
About two hours by car.”
Thalia removed her gloves and walked over.
An old photograph of the estate was displayed on the screen.
The building had clearly deteriorated over the years.
Large sections of the exterior showed signs of weathering, and the grounds were overgrown with weeds.
Even after several decades, however, Thalia recognized it immediately.
The tall central portico.
The wings extending to either side.
And the dry circular fountain standing in front.
It was the same place shown in Adrian’s old black-and-white photograph.
Eremon Estate.
Thalia studied the image for a moment before looking down at the tiny brass key on the table.
“It really does seem like he wanted someone to go back.”
Ivan didn’t disagree, but he also didn’t immediately suggest that they leave for the estate.
“We contact Mrs.
Bennett first.”
“I know.”
Thalia picked up her phone.
Whatever had happened at Eremon Estate all those years ago, and whatever Adrian had left behind there, it was still part of his past.
Mrs.
Bennett was now the owner of the pocket watch and the belongings they had found.
Before making the trip to Eremon Estate, the least they could do was tell her what they had discovered.
As for what the tiny brass key Adrian had hidden inside his pocket watch for thirty years was meant to open—
They would probably have to reach Eremon Estate to find out.