She called him to ask whether he might have confused two meetings.
He checked an old pocket calendar and admitted that he had probably remembered the month incorrectly.
Nora corrected the summary before sending it forward.
Harold thanked her for not treating uncertainty as a reason to reject everything he had said.
That evening, the television producer left another message offering Nora a fee for a dramatic reenactment.
She deleted it and helped Owen practice spelling words for school.
Chapter 9J: The Envelope in the Freezer
Beth discovered a sealed plastic pouch behind a stack of frozen vegetables while cleaning out their mother’s old chest freezer.
The freezer had been stored in a relative’s garage after Elise died and had only recently been returned to service.
Beth recognized the blue ribbon tied around the pouch from the ribbon inside Henry’s leather case.
She called Nora without opening it.
The sisters met at Beth’s apartment after Owen had gone to bed.
Inside the pouch they found several handwritten addresses, two receipts for registered mail, and a small envelope containing a duplicate key.
The key carried a paper label with the name of a neighborhood storage company that no longer existed.
Beth wanted to drive immediately to the old location, but Nora reminded her that the business might have closed decades earlier.
They searched public records and found that the original property was now occupied by a bicycle repair shop.
The owner told them he had purchased the building from a family trust and had never seen the name on the label.
He did, however, remember that the basement had contained wooden storage lockers when he first inspected the property.
Most had been removed during renovations, although one locked cabinet remained behind a partition.
Nora and Beth visited with the owner’s permission and found the cabinet empty except for a roll of carpet remnants.
The key did not fit its lock.
Beth looked crushed, as though Elise had left them another message that could no longer be read.
Nora placed the key back in the pouch and said an unanswered question did not have to become a secret they invented an answer for.
They kept the receipts because the postal tracking numbers might reveal where Elise had sent the registered letters.
The next day, a retired postal employee explained that records from that period were unlikely to remain available.
Nora accepted the limitation and wrote it beside the numbers in her notebook.
Owen found the pouch later and asked why Grandma had put important things in a freezer.
