Inside, the manila folders were damp and swollen. I flipped through the receipts from twelve years ago, looking for the original registration.
My hand hit something hard at the back of the drawer. It was a small brass key, different from the others, wrapped in a piece of yellow ledger paper.
The paper had a name written on it in Adrian’s handwriting: Paige.
I held the key under the flashlight beam, my thumb tracing the cold metal.
My fingers brushed against the cold, locked drawer of the old metal cabinet.
The key did not turn in the rusty lock of the filing cabinet, no matter how hard I pressed my thumb against the metal. I left the garage and walked back into the dark house, my boots leaving damp prints on the linoleum.
By seven the next morning, the kitchen smelled of toasted bread and the sharp, clean scent of sliced oranges. My older sister, Clara, sat at the corner of the oak island with a yellow legal pad and a sharpened pencil, her brow furrowed as she drew a neat grid.
“We need a clear picture of what he took,” Clara said, her pencil hovering over the paper. “Every account, every line of credit we can remember from the early days.”
I did not answer right away. I was carefully slicing the crusts off the boys’ turkey sandwiches, keeping my hands steady so she would not see the slight tremor in my fingers.
“The main household account was active on Tuesday,” I said, wrapping the first sandwich in wax paper. “I paid the electric bill online, and the transaction went through without any delay.”
“That was Tuesday,” Clara said, tapping the pencil against her chin. “Adrian moves fast when he has his lawyers behind him. You need to hire a private investigator, Margaret. Someone who can track where that seventy thousand dollars went before it disappears into a corporate tax shelter.”
I set the knife down on the cutting board. The silver wedding band on my left hand felt cold, and I rubbed it slowly, feeling the smooth groove where the metal had worn down over twenty-four years of marriage.
“An investigator costs money we do not have in hand,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “And Adrian has the company accountants on his payroll.”
“Then we find the original records ourselves,” Clara said, leaning forward. “The ones from the transition year, before the business registered with the state utility board.”
I looked out the window at the gray Virginia morning. The damp autumn wind was already shaking the last red leaves from the maple tree in the side yard, sending them scraping across the glass.
“They are trying to make me look invisible before we even start,” I said.
Clara wrote a single number at the top of her pad and circled it twice. “Not if we find the paperwork first.”
I zipped the boys’ blue backpacks and set them by the back door, then checked my watch. The school bus would arrive in ten minutes, and I needed to be gone before Adrian’s corporate car had any reason to pass our street.
By noon, the clouds had thickened, bringing a cold, steady drizzle that turned the gravel lot of Hollis Transit Systems into a gray slurry. I parked my station wagon near the back fence, away from the glass-walled executive offices where Adrian’s clean white shuttles were lined up like soldiers.
