How did drop-off go? Anything different?
Ignoring the fluttering in her belly, Rachel typed a quick response.
Other than the chat about the guy sleeping on the floor, no big changes.
That the lie came so easily shouldn’t have surprised her. The teenage rebel inside her had become an adult, but she’d never changed. She braced herself for Mick to ask where she was right now or to mention his stealthy sleeping-bag-relocation plan from earlier that morning, but he did neither of those things. At least she didn’t have to hate herself for lying to him again or wonder why he put his trust in her. She hadn’t earned it.
Hurrying from the eat-in kitchen to the living room, she tried to focus on something else. That didn’t ease her disquiet, either. It was like seeing the place for the first time. She was a visitor to a stranger’s home.
“Where would you have hidden the documents, Dad?”
Her throat squeezed as she used the term for the first time in two days, an ache settling deep in her chest. She still wasn’t certain how many of the statements made about him in the papers they’d located were true, and she could admit now that she’d come to find evidence to clear his name, but it was more than that. He was her father, and she would love him, even if the original documents proved Stan’s guilt.
Still, she couldn’t shake the sense that some proof of her father’s involvement might have been all around her. First, in the land that she and Riley now owned. Then in the walls of the house built to her father’s specifications with the dark-paneled walls, the bay window that invited in the afternoon light and the built-in cabinets with bookshelves that stretched to the ceiling.
She turned a slow circle in the space, taking in the same sturdy wood and leather furniture that had survived from her own years of watching Saturday morning cartoons to the nights when Stan had read books to her children in his recliner, one tucked under each arm.
Pushing aside the lump that formed in her throat, she tried to look at each piece through a financial lens. If he had been as wealthy as the Bilton oil would have made him, then why had he lived an ordinary life as a fire chief? Sure, they’d had a few extravagances—the basketball court, her ring, the fancy garage to store a decrepit truck—but that didn’t begin to account for all the wealth that had probably been pumped out of that land. Where were the sports cars, the fancy watches, the sculptures and paintings?
“He didn’t care about things like that.”
Where was the rest of the money? Though Mick had asked about it, Rachel wasn’t sure she wanted to know. Some of it could be seen in buildings and projects all over Mount Isabel, but blood money didn’t become pure just because it was donated to a good cause.
Something else Mick had said flitted through her thoughts again, making her restless as she stalked to the back of the house. Everyone deserved the benefit of the doubt, even her father. Did she as well after lying to Mick today?
Because she wasn’t ready to consider that, she hurried upstairs and into her father’s office that had once served as the twins’ nursery, with a pair of windows to let in the morning light. She pushed aside those sweet memories as well and dug in the center drawer of Stan’s desk for the filing cabinet key.
“Why did he even lock this?” She pushed aside the overstocked files with manuals for old TVs and VCRs that had long ago ended up in the landfill. Riley had probably already looked through those papers while searching in the same cabinet.
During her next stop in Stan’s room, she found empty drawers, where her brother had disposed of their father’s socks and underwear and donated his nicer clothes. He might have located the files he’d put in the messenger bag during that difficult task that he’d shielded her from as well.
As she closed the final drawer, she scanned the closet and the bedside table, trying to see from a different perspective all the places her brother had already searched. But as she moved around a few sweaters Riley had left at the top of the closet, another location popped into her mind. Its existence was a foggy memory—she couldn’t have been more than four at the time—but she shivered as it swam in and out of focus.
“Did Riley even know about it?”
She rushed back to the office to the set of cabinets and bookshelves that matched those in the living room downstairs, already knowing the answer. If her brother was aware of the space, he’d never learned about it from her. It was a secret, like the one they’d shared with the twins about Mick visiting their house. Only she’d kept it for more than twenty years.
The muscles in her neck tightening with the ridiculous notion that she’d be caught like the last time, she closed the office door and then moved to the far end of the bookshelves, past rows of her dad’s beloved mysteries, westerns and biographies. Then she crouched in front of a cabinet where she’d promised her furious father she would never play inside again.
Even now, her whole body shook as she opened the door. The inside looked ordinary enough, just shelves like those above the cabinets but with little space between them so everything on them had to lay flat. That didn’t make sense. Even as a preschooler, like the day he’d caught her, she and her fashion dolls couldn’t have fit in a space that small. Were her memories faulty, or had the cabinet changed?
She pulled out the firefighting magazines and old copies ofTime, stacked in surprisingly tidy rows on the top shelf and more carefully arranged books in the open space below. Even when that part of the cabinet was empty, it didn’t look right.
On her hands and knees, Rachel leaned her head near the floor and used her phone as a flashlight to examine it closer. The light showed a small gap between the back of the cabinet and its bottom when the rest of it appeared to be well made. She tried to remove the shelf, but it was stuck, so she used one of the hardcover books to pound on the wood until it came loose. When she yanked it out, an extra back panel pulled free with it.
Her breath caught as it opened. She leaned closer and directed the phone flashlight inside. Beyond the cabinet, in a section of wall created by the office’s L-shape, was a tiny room, about four feet long and three feet wide, accessible only from inside the cabinet. Just big enough for a preschooler to squeeze inside with her toys. Or for a grown man to hide a lifetime of secrets.
There were two file boxes in it now. Rachel pulled out the first, sat crisscross on the floor and opened it. Unlike the mishmash of papers in Stan’s filing cabinet, these files were carefully labeled and alphabetized as though her father had gotten his papers in order, expecting someone to read them after he died. He’d been right about that.
She flipped through the files with titles like “Land Contract” and “Petroleum Quality Reports.” But when she came to the letterR, her breath caught. The file said simply “Rachel and Riley.”
She jerked the folder from the box and opened it flat in her lap. A letter was right on top, handwritten on lined paper in a familiar, messy script.
Dear Rachel and Riley,
If you’re reading this, I have passed from this world. From these records, you’ll see that I deserved everything I got. I’m sorry. A better man would have figured out how to confess and keep both of you safe. I wasn’t that man.
You’ll be hearing a lot of things about me. Some will be true. Some won’t. But I didn’t report the things I knew, so that makes me just as guilty.
