Chapter 4
I sat in my truck in the diner parking lot and didn't turn the engine off.
The lot faced the county road that led to the storage units. Neons buzzed from the diner sign and threw pink light across my hood. Inside, a couple waitresses moved behind the windows. I could see coffee steaming. I couldn't go in. Not with what I had in my hands.
The notebook sat on my steering wheel. The key with the blue tape marked 214 sat on the dash where I'd put it so I wouldn't lose it. My wedding band clicked against the plastic spiral when I lifted the cover.
I'd only read the first page standing over her bed. In the hallway I'd shoved it in my jacket pocket because the nurse was coming. Now, alone, with the heater blowing and the heart monitor beep still stuck in my ears, I opened it properly.
The first page was what I'd seen. THEY WANTED THIS. All caps, hard pressed, the ballpoint digging into the paper. Under it, DON'T TRUST ANYONE. The Y in ANYONE trailed off like her hand had slipped.
The blood was at the top edge. Not a smear. Specks. Little rust-colored dots that had soaked into the paper and dried there. I touched one with my thumb. It didn't come off.
I turned the page.
Mom's Accident / Wasn't An Accident. That's what I'd glimpsed when the nurse's arm came between us. Seeing it again, full, it was worse. She'd written Mom's Accident first, then crossed it out with a single hard line and written Wasn't An Accident underneath. The handwriting was shaky. Not her school handwriting. The letters wobbled, crowded together like she'd been writing in a moving car or with a hand that wouldn't stay still.
My daughter was seventeen. Her handwriting was usually neat, small, looped. This wasn't neat. This was someone trying to write while hurt.
The next page wasn't words. It was a date. 11/14. Then a time. 3:40 pm. Then school parking lot - gray truck. She'd underlined gray truck twice.
I stared at it and my breath fogged the windshield. November fourteenth was three days ago. That was the day before her accident. Before they said she took the curve too fast on Old Mill Road.
Another page. Tried to tell J - crossed out. Then: Locker 214?? No. Storage?? She'd drawn a little key shape, then written BLUE TAPE. Then next to it, in smaller letters, like an afterthought: like Mom's.
That stopped me.
I went back and looked at the blood again. At the top edge, where the spiral binding was bent like it had been shoved into a backpack fast. If she'd written this before, before anyone touched her, why was there blood on it?
Unless she'd written it after.
Unless they'd already gotten to her once, or she'd been bleeding when she wrote the last lines. Hide the key. Write the warning. Get it somewhere they wouldn't look.
The gray backpack. The small zip pocket. She'd meant for me to find it. Or for someone to find it who knew her handwriting.
I flipped forward. There were two more pages, both half-empty.
On one: He said Mom was digging too. He lied. She knew. That was all. No name. Just He. The H was pressed so hard the paper tore.
On the last written page: If something happens check where she put it. Not lost. Hidden. 214 is same.
I closed the notebook. My hands were shaking and I pressed them flat on the wheel to stop.
For two years I'd told people my wife's accident was just an accident. Rain. County Road 9. No guardrail. The state trooper had shown me photos of the tire marks and I'd nodded and signed papers and told our daughter it was nobody's fault.
Our daughter hadn't believed it. Or she'd started not believing it. And she'd followed whatever trail her mom had left and found the same people were still watching.
They wanted this. Not a crash. Not a bad curve. They wanted her in that trauma room with a neck brace and the monitors reading 90/19.
I picked up the key again. The blue tape was frayed at the edge, like it had been on there a long time. 214 wasn't her locker. The high school lockers were three digits but they were red, not blue. And she wrote storage. And like Mom's. My wife had rented a storage unit for two months before she died. I'd cleaned it out after. Or I thought I had. I'd brought home two boxes of old tax files and donated the rest. I hadn't looked for anything taped blue.
I sat there while the diner's neon flickered and a semi rolled past on the county road toward the storage facility I'd been heading to. The one with all those blue doors row after row. Unit 214.
If my daughter was right, my wife hadn't been hiding junk. She'd been hiding proof. And she'd used that same blue tape, that same number system, so her daughter would recognize it.
I slipped the notebook into my inner jacket pocket and zipped it shut. I put the key in my front jeans pocket where I could feel it against my leg. I checked the rearview. No gray truck in the lot. Just my truck breathing out exhaust into the cold.
May you like
I understood now why she told me not to trust anyone. Because whoever made Mom's accident look like an accident knew how to make a teenage girl's look the same way.
And I was still using their roads, their hospital, their report.
