Tess found the tin on Saturday while restocking the spice shelf, an old flat tin with a faded rooster on the lid, and I watched her hands go still around it before she even opened the latch.
"He gave you this," she said. It wasn't a question. "For the rye starter. I remember him bringing it over, making a whole production of it, like he was handing over a family heirloom."
"He said it was his grandmother's recipe. Written in pencil on the inside of the lid." I nodded toward it. "We've used it every week since. It's the reason the rye has that caraway edge people ask about."
Tess opened it, read the pencil marks, her father's careful block letters translating something older, and then she did something I didn't expect. She closed it hard, walked to the back door, and I understood from the set of her shoulders exactly what she meant to do with it.
"Tess."
"I don't want it here. I don't want anything of his here. People are going to see my name in the paper next to his, and I'm not going to also be the girl who kept his recipe tin on display like it's a shrine."
"Nobody's displaying it. It's in a spice drawer."
"That's not the point and you know it."
I did know it, mostly, but I also knew what I'd watched happen in my own head over the past week, how fast a thing could tip from ordinary into evidence just because somebody decided to look at it that way, and I wasn't ready to let a rooster tin become one more casualty of that tipping.
"Give me a day," I said. "Let me ask one question first. If the answer's no, you can do whatever you want with it, throw it in the quarry for all I care."
She let me take it, reluctantly, like she was doing me a favor she didn't believe in.
I called Ellis that afternoon, feeling a little foolish doing it, and asked straight out whether anyone investigating Martin Vey had any interest in a recipe tin from his kitchen that he'd given a neighbor two years back.
"Can you describe it," Ellis asked, and I did, rooster, pencil writing, caraway rye, and there was a pause on the line that felt longer than it probably was.
"No," Ellis said finally. "Nothing's flagged that matches that description. If that changes, someone will contact you. Until then, it's yours to do with as you like."
"It's not evidence of anything, then."
"I didn't say that either way. I said nothing's flagged. That's the honest answer I have for you."
I understood the difference Ellis was drawing, and respected it more than I wanted to, because it meant I couldn't hand Tess a clean verdict, only an absence of one.
When I told her, she sat with it a long moment at the prep table, turning the tin over once in her hands.
"So it's just a tin," she said.
"It's just a tin. The same tin it was last Tuesday, before any of this."
"I keep waiting for someone to tell me what he did, really did, the whole truth of it, and all anyone gives me is pieces. A number of defendants. A word like conspiracy. Nothing that explains the man who taught me to proof dough using his own mother's measurements."
"I don't think that explanation's coming, Tess. Not whole, not soon, maybe not ever."
She didn't cry this time. She put the tin back on the shelf herself, lid closed, rooster facing out, and went back to scaling dough like her hands needed something ordinary to hold onto more than they needed an answer, and I let her have that, because it was the truest thing either of us could offer the other that week.