Page 43 of Her Last Doubt

Eleanor turned her hand over under Rachel's and squeezed, weakly but deliberately. "I wasn't sure. I know you how…how your job can be taxing." It seemed that each word, each breath, was a struggle for her.

"Well, I'm here now."

"Good." Eleanor's eyes moved to the window and back. "I've been thinking about that book. The…the uh…”

“Lonesome Dove?”

“No. The one I told you about last Tuesday."

"The Penelope Fitzgerald."

"Yes. I was going to lend it to you. I don't think that's going to happen now." There was a quiet note in her voice that wasn't self-pity, just practicality, the same tone she'd used for months when talking about things she wasn't going to have time for.

"I'll find a copy," Rachel said.

"You should. You'd like it." Eleanor settled back slightly against the pillow. "I want you to know that this has been a genuine friendship, Rachel. These past months. Not just someone being kind to an old woman. A genuine friendship. I felt that from you. A caring woman when this old lady’s family couldn’t…well, most aren’t alive, but the ones who are…”

“Shh. I was glad to be here. I was honored to get to know you, Eleanor.”

"You filled a space that I think would have been very empty without you, and I'm grateful for it."

Rachel kept her hand and didn't try to find a response that would match the weight of the last comment. She felt like she was being stabbed right in the heart, and she knew that sometimes the right thing to say was nothing. She had learned that in this rooms just like this one more clearly than anywhere else—even in interrogation rooms.

"Tell me something good," Eleanor said after a moment, trying on a smile that didn’t stay there long. "Tell me about your daughter. Paige."

"She's thirteen going on forty," Rachel said. "She's been listening to true crime podcasts and keeping a color-coded spreadsheet of unsolved cases by jurisdiction."

Eleanor made a sound that was close to a laugh. "Is she going to be you?"

"I think she might be worse," Rachel said. "I think she might actually be smarter."

"Good," Eleanor said, and her eyes were warm even as they grew heavy. "The world needs more of that."

Her breathing had gone shallower in the last few minutes, slower between each rise and fall of her chest. Her eyes drifted closed and then opened again halfway, and she turned her head slightly toward the small table beside the bed. She reached out, a deliberate motion that took effort Rachel could see the cost of, and her fingers found something on the table and closed around it. She lifted Rachel's free hand and pressed the object into it, folding Rachel's fingers down around it and holding them there.

Rachel looked down. It was a key, small and old-fashioned. It looked to be made of brass with a simple bow and a short shaft, the kind that belonged to a lockbox or a drawer rather than a door.

"What is this?" Rachel asked.

But Eleanor's eyes were closed. Her breathing was slow and even. For a moment Rachel thought she was simply resting, gathering herself to answer. But the quiet stretched out, and her hand went still over Rachel's, and the monitors continued their slow, steady work.

Rachel sat with her.

It was another fifteen minutes before the line on the nearest monitor went flat, a soft alarm sounding that brought the nurse in from the hallway, quiet and practiced. Her face held the steady, tempered sorrow of someone who had done this work for years without being emptied by it. Rachel stood and stepped back to give her room and stood near the window, her hand still closed around the key and thinking about the Penelope Fitzgerald novel she was going to find a copy of.

She stayed until there was nothing left to do and after that, she stayed a bit longer.

***

The funeral was held on a Thursday, two days later. It was held at a small Episcopal church in the West End that Eleanor had attended for decades before she'd gotten too sick to make the drive. The service was short and honest, conducted by a minister who read from a passage Eleanor had apparently requested herself. The minister spoke about Eleanor without platitudes or borrowed sentiment, which Eleanor would have hated. He described her sense of humor and her kindness, and the way she'd been able to make anyone who sat with her feel that the conversation had been the most important one she'd had all week.

It was all absolutely correct.

Rachel sat in a pew near the middle with Jack on her left and Paige on her right. Paige had worn her good coat without being asked, which Rachel noted quietly without comment. She sat with her hands folded in her lap and her eyes on the minister, and once or twice Rachel caught her daughter blinking more than usual in the way she did when she was trying her best not to cry.

The church wasn’t crowded. There were only a dozen people, perhaps a few more, none of them young. There was no family that Rachel could identify, and that made her incredibly sad. It reminded Rachel of what Eleanor had said near the end about spaces going unfilled.

When it was over and they were standing on the stone steps of the church with the morning light thin and flat overhead, a woman approached Rachel from across the small gathering. She was quite old—maybe in her early eighties. She was white-haired, dressed in a dark coat and a silk scarf, moving slowly and with intent. Something about her posture remined her of Grandma Tate and she wasn’t sure if this warmed her heart or saddened it even more.