Aunt Edith
Aunt Edith is sitting on the harbour wall in a deck chair she has clearly brought from the attic, squinting at you exactly the way she squints in photographs, as if she suspects you of something. She looks well. She looks, in fact, about a decade younger than her last photograph, which is one of the lesser-advertised effects of living somewhere time doesn't pass so much as pool.
"Took you long enough," she says. "I left you the journal, the key, the riddle, the tin, and a cat with the answer stamped on his collar. Any slower and I'd have had to leave you a diagram."
She was never dead. She simply counted, and climbed, and chose โ and a town that cannot say the word Thursday could hardly explain where she'd gone, so it said the other thing, and the solicitor wrote to you, and the trap (she prefers "invitation") was set.
"So," says Aunt Edith, pouring you tea from a thermos that has never run out. "You've seen it now. The question is what you do with it. There are three ways this goes, and I'll respect any of them โ well. Two of them I'll respect. One I'll merely tolerate."