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Fool’s House. He was very interested in all that. Especially her collection . Said he wanted to come see my house. So I invited him to the party.” I remembered through my haze that we were to host our first party of the summer that very night.
    Lydia had always held a party when she arrived in Southampton. (The first party of the summer was called the Fool’s Welcome, while the last one would be, for obvious reasons, the Fool’s Farewell.) On this, her will was more than clear: Lydia wanted us to spend at least one summer month living together in the house while we settled her estate and sold the house, and she fully expected us to continue all the traditions during this time.
    Aunt Lydia had died in Paris. This was a detail in the story of her death she would have enjoyed, that it happened in her favorite city. Paris had been Lydia’s “spiritual home” and a constant conversational reference point. If something was expensive, for example, “you could spend a week in Paris for less,” and if she wanted to describe something she didn’t like, it was, “Well, it’s not Paris in the spring, that’s all I can say.” As sad as I was that this dear, funny woman was gone, I was happy to know she would have appreciated the way her story had ended. She died in an out-of-the-way tea shop on the Left Bank she always said was worth the detour. And I’m sure it was, unless you were Lydia and you keeled over at your table while finishing a pot of Darjeeling and were pronounced dead at the scene. Or morte at the scene. I’m not sure it was worth that much of a detour, although she’d always said the napoleon there was unparalleled. I knew she would have said she left this world as she lived in it, enjoying every single second as much as she could.
    Her will had been crafted in the same elaborate language she’d used in the letters I’d saved all my life. Lydia liked flowery words. She wrote that she “bequeathed” her house and all its contents to Peck and me, her “beloved” nieces. She was quite specific in her direction that we spend a month in Southampton together, “should the timing of my passing allow for a summer vacation,” while we prepared to sell the house and that we use the proceeds from the sale to check off items on what she called “Lydia’s list.”
    Lydia’s list was a roster of things she wanted us to do while we were still young enough to enjoy them: travel to every continent, have an affair with a man who spoke no English, read the classics, play backgammon for money, skinny-dip in the ocean, that sort of thing. Very Bucket List , but hers had been composed in 1999, when she’d had a cancer scare, and mostly included things she herself had already done.
    In her will, which had not been changed since 1999, she also expressed her “fervent desire” that Peck and I seek a “thing of utmost value” from within this cherished place she was leaving us. She gave no clues as to what this thing might be. We’d never discussed the will with her, although over the years she’d occasionally mention that she would be leaving the house to us. She didn’t own her apartment in New York, so this was her only real estate. We’d never had any conversations with her about anything valuable that she might have owned, nor was there anything in her letters about a piece of jewelry, perhaps, or one of the many paintings covering the walls of her house, that might be considered a thing of value. There was only a safe.
    “A goddamned locked safe,” as Peck put it. The safe was old and squat, an industrial-looking thing tucked into a corner of her closet, behind masses of mothball-and-lavender-scented clothes. There was the traditional dial at the front and a large wheel that would turn to open the door only with the correct combination of numbers. Simple enough. Except we didn’t have the code. There’d been no mention of a combination to the safe in the will, or any indication of what it might