Chapter 5 - Leaving Cedar Vale
I left Grant's house at eighteen with a duffel bag, two hundred dollars, and the blue notebook hidden inside my jacket. I did not say goodbye. He was in the den watching a basketball game, shouting at men on television who could not hear him.
June drove me to the bus station. Neither of us spoke until the bus turned onto the highway.
“I should have taken you sooner,” she said.
“You tried.”
“Not hard enough.”
I watched Cedar Vale disappear behind us. The town had one main street, two churches, a shuttered mill, and enough secrets to keep every family busy for generations.
I studied criminal justice in Chicago, then became a records researcher for a public-interest newsroom. I learned how to follow money through shell companies, how to read property maps, and how often official mistakes had fingerprints.
For eleven years, I did not return home.
Then June died in her sleep.
Her attorney called me on a Tuesday morning. She said June had left me the contents of a storage unit and a letter that could not be mailed because the address on it was “the old house.”
I went back to Cedar Vale in November.
The old house belonged to Grant now, though he had converted it into offices for Voss Renewal Group. The kitchen had been remodeled. The refrigerator was gone. The drawer was gone. The walls were painted a clean, expensive gray.
I stood outside for a long time before going to the storage unit.
The attorney handed me three boxes. The first held June's photographs. The second held tax records. The third held the cookie tin.
There was a new note beneath the lid.
Eli, I was afraid of the wrong person for too long. Forgive me only if you can. Do not forgive me because you think you should.
Under it lay a key and a receipt from a self-storage facility in Ashford. The unit had been rented in Mom's name six months before the crash.
I called my editor, Maya Chen, who was now the newsroom's investigative counsel.
“You said you wouldn't bring work home,” she told me.
“I didn't. Home brought work back.”
She met me that evening at a diner across from the courthouse. Maya had been my closest friend for seven years, and she had the unnerving ability to hear the sentence underneath a sentence.
“What do you think is in the unit?” she asked.
“Evidence. Or a trap.”
“Those are not mutually exclusive.”
We went to Ashford the next morning. The manager recognized the name on the lease but not the photograph of my mother.
“A man paid the rent in cash,” he said. “Big guy. Work coat. Scar on his face.”
The cemetery stranger.
The unit contained a folding chair, a portable tape player, two cardboard boxes, and a child-sized red raincoat. The raincoat had belonged to me. I remembered losing it when I was ten.
Inside the first box were newspaper clippings about fires at abandoned buildings. Each article named Voss Renewal Group as the contractor hired to clear the sites.
The second box held a ledger with columns of addresses, dates, and dollar amounts. Several names were marked with a black star.
Maya turned a page. “These payments are not restoration expenses.”
“What are they?”
“Protection. Maybe silence.”
The tape player had one cassette inside. I pressed play.
Mom's voice sounded weaker than I remembered.
“October third. Grant met with Bell at the old quarry. They discussed the Mercer property and said Jonah was still alive. If anything happens to me, the records are split between June and the person who knows what happened at the river.”
The tape clicked off.
Maya looked at me. “The person who knows what happened at the river.”
“Jonah.”
“Maybe.”
At the bottom of the box was a recent postcard, postmarked Boise. The picture showed a river cutting through pine-covered hills.
May you like
On the back, someone had written only four words:
Ask why he stayed away.
