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Yeah, right.
There’s a reason we call him Mayberry around here.
But he’s still a nice guy—sweet, endearingly helpless, often frustrated with how much goes on right under his nose and yet completely out of his sight, and he can’t do crap about it.
He almost seemed excited to help when I showed up and asked to rummage around Dad’s old case files again.
I didn’t even have to promise him a cold brew or two on the house for his trouble, though I do anyway.
And that’s how I find myself shut in the tiny closet of a break room, papers spread out in front of me, while I read through words I’ve studied so many times I can practically recite them from memory.
Only, this time I keep holding my breath.
It’s like now, I think there’ll be something different.
Something I never noticed.
This time, I’ll find the one magic word I always skimmed over before that will turn the key and make this insanity make sense.
His death.
The crashed plane.
The overdose.
The gold.
How that’s connected to the Lockwoods.
And if I can figure that out, I’ll finally know what I should do, because right now...
Lost would be an understatement.
Nor do I really know what I’m looking for as I sift through the ugly, harsh photos of my dad’s old truck. That dirty lighting hurts my eyes and only seems to exist in police crime scene photos.
Sighing, I try to tell myself I don’t miss him.
Not when Dad caused so much trouble. But when I see his limp body sprawled against the steering wheel, my eyes start stinging.
My heart churns with a quiet old pain that says it’s been lodged below my ribs for too long, naked and waiting.
Waiting for me to deal with it. To face it. To do something.
There, I’m just as lost.
I never learned how to process pain in a healthy way.
So I guess I just...don’t.
I focus on the details of the case, wiping my eyes and forcing them back to the photos I thumb at, sticking my tongue out in defiant focus.
Nothing in the car.
Nothing that might be connected with his plane or the stupid gold.
Just traces of heroin. The report says it looks like he did a clumsy job melting it and then tying off and injecting it right there in the driver’s seat—almost like he couldn’t wait to get somewhere safe and had to do it right then.
That in of itself seems weird as hell.
I remember Dad when he was clean, and remember him when he wasn’t.
He was always a cautious man, and even at his lowest, he wasn’t stupid.
The love for the drug was his own dirty little secret.
He hid it away from us.
Doing it like this so clumsily just isn’t like him.
What else catches my attention, though, is the fact that they found prints on the car. Unidentified.
On the door handle, the seat belt, the driver’s seat, the steering wheel. Even on the seat belt buckle.
Who was driving Dad’s car?
I bite my lip, this angry voice hissing anxious questions in the back of my head.
Wrong question. Shouldn’t you be asking who was strapping him in?
My breath stalls, and I shake my head, wondering if I’m losing my mind.
Am I really thinking like this? Really?
This wild theory that someone else force-fed bad drugs into his veins and murdered my father?
It’s totally ludicrous, especially knowing how the smack was this constant shadow looming large over his life, wrestling him back into its clutches again and again. No matter how hard he fought to quit the stuff, he always came back for another deadly kiss.
The coroner’s report reads clear as day.
Massive overdose.
That’s the kind of thing you do to yourself when you’re addicted, just not on purpose.
I don’t know.
Something’s not adding up.
Because Dad hid that journal for a reason—tucked it away so well the police didn’t even find it during a forensics sweep of his truck. It took Mitch pulling the truck to pieces to salvage it for parts. Even the electrical tape Mitch said was holding it in place fit the seat color.
Almost like Dad was anticipating someone else might need it one day.
Someone besides him.
Did he know he was about to die?
Was this twisted message in a bottle meant for Mom, for me?
God. My face collapses into my palms.
I’m imagining things. Hallucinating. I have to be.
Looking for meaning where there isn’t any, and desperately trying to explain that multimillion-dollar payload he sank to the bottom of Glass Lake.
Just what the hell was going on in his life when he’d jump in his plane and disappear, sometimes for days?
What kind of secrets was he keeping?
What awful cargo did he carry?
I don’t get any answers—but I do get the scare of a lifetime when my phone abruptly rings, shattering the stillness.
I jump, nearly swallowing my next breath, then try not to laugh at myself when I fish my phone from my pocket.
