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“Wow.”
I look up from the stacks of boxes crammed into the living room to find Alicia frozen in surprise halfway down the stairs, wearing nothing but a nightshirt and a stunned expression. I didn’t expect her to come down this early in the morning and had planned on carrying everything to my study to have it out of the way before she was awake.
Now her eyes bulge at the stacked boxes. “You said you were sending for all of his files, but I didn’t think it would be this much.”
I can imagine how she wouldn’t. There are thirty-seven boxes, all of them delivered less than an hour ago by highly trusted men who’ve been on the family payroll for years. It took a great deal of trust for me to allow them to load the files into boxes, then to fly with them across an ocean and unload them here.
“You know the older generation,” I remind her with a sigh. “He liked to do everything on paper.”
“Now I know why he needed that big house, to store all that paper.”
“There’s a good chance I didn’t need most of this, but he wasn’t the greatest at keeping things organized.”
“What a combination. Fully analog, and he had no organizational system.”
“What did he care? He wasn’t the one who would have to comb through everything once he was gone.” Even though I’m more than slightly irritated with him, I can’t help but experience a twinge of fondness. He did things his way and refused to bend to pressure. He must have been doing something right since he grew our business to what it is today almost single-handedly.
“I give him credit. I do. I know I sound critical.” She runs her hand over one of the boxes before turning to me with a quirked eyebrow. “Well, it seems like we have a lot of work to do.”
“You don’t have to help me with this.”
“What, I’m going to let you go through a million boxes all by yourself? Please. Just tell me what to look for, and we’ll get the work done twice as fast.”
She pauses in the act of lifting the lid from one of the boxes, turning to me, her teeth sinking into her lip. “That is unless you don’t want me to. I understand if you don’t.”
“No, that’s not it.” And it isn’t, which in itself is surprising enough. “I didn’t expect you to want to help.”
“You don’t have to do everything all by yourself.” With that, she removes the lid from a box and pulls out an armful of files. “So what are we looking for?”
“That’s the thing. I’m not exactly sure.”
“Ah, so we’re looking for a needle in a haystack, but we don’t know what the needle looks like? Even better.” But she’s grinning as she sinks to the floor, sitting cross-legged with the files stacked beside her.
I can trust her, can’t I? It seems like I should. She is my wife. She’s witnessed me doing terrible things.
I’ve done terrible things to her.
Yet here she is, eager to help. I’m not sure I’ll ever understand her.
“You see, shortly before his death, he made a series of large payments. I know two of those payments went to Frankie.” His name curdles in my mouth, even now that he’s dead. Just because he paid the price doesn’t mean my attitude toward him has softened any. I’m still not completely sure I believe his story. Why would the man want to die? Was he sick? If he was, why wouldn’t he tell me? That’s the question at the heart of all of this, the one that sticks in my craw and keeps me up at night, thinking. Didn’t he trust me? Shouldn’t I have been let in on the secret, considering I was meant to take his place? It might have been nice to be clued in so I could prepare myself. This could all have been done so much more intelligently.
Instead, I have hours’ worth of searching to do with no clear goal in sight.
“The payment went to someone with the initials D.S.,” I conclude. “So that’s where I’m starting. Anything to anyone with that name. An invoice, a receipt, anything you can find.”
“You’ve got it.” Using the scrunchie on her wrist, she gathers her hair into a bun on top of her head, then cracks her knuckles before flipping open the first folder. My chest swells at the sight.
The next couple of hours is spent mostly silent, with only the sounds of flipping pages and the occasional frustrated sigh punctuating the quiet. The guards on duty are outside the house—that was my specific request since I don’t necessarily want them hanging around while I go through Grandfather’s private things. For a moment, I can almost pretend we’re a normal couple working to solve a problem together. It isn’t as easy to believe that when we’re surrounded by bodyguards.
“Wow, some of this is older than either of us. It looks like it was typed out on an actual typewriter.” She shakes her head in wonder, thumbing through a stack of stapled pages. “Old contracts.”
“He didn’t believe in throwing anything away—which I suppose is part of the reason we’re surrounded by a forest worth of paper.”
“It’s interesting, though.” She runs her fingers over the page she landed on and smiles. “It’s like touching history. I know this isn’t exactly the Declaration of Independence, but it is an old contract signed more than thirty years ago. I wonder what life was like back then.”
“Probably not very much different than it is now—only back then, he had no choice but to keep everything in hardcopy.” I, on the other hand, am going through files from a few years ago. “This? Could have been scanned and shredded.”
She pulls an empty box down beside her and refills it, then pushes it aside before tackling another. “Be careful,” I warn, glancing up from my work. “I don’t want you lifting any of these boxes while they’re still full.”
