Lucy was nodding, carrying food to the dining table while he got a bottle from the fridge, and some glasses. She told him about the second key on the tile in his brother’s photograph, then posed a question that was troubling her. “Is it your wish, then, that if we can find this other key, in addition to the first silver one, and the original documents, we should just hand everything over to them, and halt our own efforts to compete to find the answer?”

Alex deliberated. He knew her thoughts: that his mother had gone to considerable lengths to create a space as a repose for the key and second batch of documents; that undoubtedly, umpteen generations of the women in her family had preserved this secret “treasure” until some moment when it should be revealed. But Will had died for it—or because of it. That was surely not part of the design.

“My mother wouldn’t want all this. Will, Max, the threat I feel overshadowing my happiness with you now. You know my view, Lucy. I admit a strange curiosity about it all; what can have been so important to them? But no family heirloom, however precious, could be more valuable than the people I love. We must let it go. I’ll make sure I find a way to cover that call tomorrow and get them the pictures you’ve developed—hopefully that will buy us time to unearth the rest. There’s nothing else to be done. I want no more to do with them.”

“Alex…?” Lucy was about to walk on uncomfortable terrain, and wanted to choose her words with care. She understood his reluctance, especially after today’s events; but she had a case of her own to plea, and somehow, it mattered desperately to her. “This may be painful to contemplate—obviously, even for me to talk about. But without Will’s death, I wouldn’t be alive; and Will would not have become what he was not. This was emphatically more than a parlor game to them, if only because of what your mother did to save it all.”

Alex listened to her without anger, sensitive to a passion in her that was not Lucy’s habit. He knew she had strong emotions, though they were so often suppressed; but like him, she concealed the depth of them from others with care.

She realized her words had moved him, and decided not to give him time to contradict her. “Besides,” she added now, “Bruno gave up his freedom, and even his life, for what he thought was important. Dante had a special place—a sort of ante-hell—for people who were too morally weak to speak out against injustice, or have any opinion, those who compromised over important issues. They were despicable to him—fence-sitters and neutrals, who lived, he said, without occasion for either infamy or praise.”