“But don’t let other people tell you what he remembered, either.”
Rachel promised she would keep both thoughts in mind.
After ending the call, she stared at the orange flags in her yard.
The little pieces of plastic looked absurdly cheerful beside a question that had taken fifteen years to reach her.
Carol called Rachel just after seven the next morning.
Her voice was nearly unrecognizable without its usual scolding edge.
“I need five minutes,” she said.
“Not on the sidewalk where everyone can watch.”
Rachel agreed to speak at the picnic table in her yard, with her kitchen door left open and her neighbor Ava Nelson aware of the meeting.
She did not invite Carol inside.
The older woman arrived carrying no purse, only a wrinkled paper napkin she kept folding between her fingers.
“Martin put something in the ground before he died,” Carol began.
“I didn’t know where it was until the fence crew pulled the old post.”
Rachel resisted the urge to interrupt.
Carol explained that a week earlier the contractor had found a length of blue fabric and something solid while removing a rotten root.
He had stopped work and told her.
Carol recognized the box from a glimpse she had seen in Martin’s garage years before.
She told the workers to shift the new fence line so the place would fall on her side.
She claimed she planned to retrieve the box after they left.
“You moved my fence to take something that wasn’t yours,” Rachel said.
Carol stared at the napkin.
“I thought it belonged to Martin.”
Rachel asked why she had not simply told the truth.
“Because the last time I opened that box,” Carol whispered, “he told me a child would lose her father if I spoke.”
Rachel felt a coldness spread down her arms.
“What child?”
Carol looked at her and shook her head.
“I can’t tell you yet.”
The reply sounded less like refusal than a plea.
Rachel placed Nathan’s photograph on the table.
“Did your husband alter the maintenance records for my father’s bus?”
Carol flinched.
“He signed papers he should never have signed,” she said.
“But your father wasn’t innocent of everything, and I won’t pretend otherwise.”
Rachel forced herself to breathe.
“I didn’t ask whether he was perfect.
I asked about the records.”
Carol finally met her eyes.
“I saw a second copy of the service sheet, and it wasn’t the one shown at the hearing.”
For several seconds Rachel heard only the wind moving through the maple leaves.
