Chapter 1

Chapter Five:

Too Close To The Truth

The bottom of a box nobody had touched since I got here, shoved back in a corner behind broken tools and a stack of old tires. Old paperwork. Receipts gone soft at the corners. A stack of photographs, edges curled up from damp. Dust caked on top, left grey streaks across my fingers when I moved it. I wasn’t hunting for anything. I just wanted somewhere to be that wasn’t that cot.

One photo stopped me. My father, younger, arm around a man I didn’t recognize. Behind them a banner half torn down, Iron Vale painted across it, the letters run from rain. On the back, written in pen that has gone brown with age, a date. It was three days after the week they said he vanished.

Three days after. If he ran that week he had no business standing in a photograph three days into it, smiling, no idea yet what he was supposed to have done.

I found him out by the garage, radio going low on a workbench somewhere, some station full of static and old country music. He was elbow deep in an engine, sleeves shoved up past his elbows.

“I need you to look at something.”

“Not now.”

“Now.”

He wiped his hands and looked anyway, because I didn’t move out of the way. I held out the photo. He glanced at it first, barely a second, already turning back to the engine before his eyes finished the pass.

Then he looked again. Slower this time.

“Where did you get this.”

“The storage room. The box marked ’09.”

“That’s not possible.” He tilted the photo up toward the light bulb over the workbench. Checked the date on the back a second time. “He was gone by then. Everybody says he was gone by then.”

“Everybody says a lot of things. This is a photograph.”

“Photographs get mislabeled.”

“By three days? Somebody wrote that date by hand right after it was taken. Nobody predates a photo by accident.”

He didn’t answer. He kept staring at the photo, his jaw tight, a muscle jumping near his ear.

“This doesn’t prove anything.”

“It proves he wasn’t gone when they say he was gone. That’s not nothing.”

He handed it back slower than he’d taken it.

“I need to see the rest of that box.”

That was the closest thing to agreement I was going to get, so I took it.

We went through the storage room together, boxes dragged out into a rough line under the one working bulb. Nobody said the word partners out loud. He crouched down next to me and started sorting through the papers. Our shoulders bumped twice in the first ten minutes. Neither of us scooted over.

“This ledger.” He held up a battered notebook, corners chewed by mice. “Nobody has opened club books this old in years.”

“Anything useful in it?”

“Depends what you call useful.” He turned the pages slower the further in he got. “Money moving around the week everything fell apart. Numbers that don’t match the official record.”

“So the official record is wrong.”

“Or somebody wanted it to read different than it was.”

We worked past dark, then past the hour the compound usually went quiet. Somebody left food at the door and neither of us got around to eating much of it, plates going cold on top of a filing box. At one point I reached for a box on a high shelf and he was already moving his hand up to catch it before it tipped, before I’d even finished reaching for it. Fast. “You didn’t have to do that.”

“That would have hit you in the face.”

“Still. Nobody told you to.”

He didn’t answer. Went back to the ledger.

Somewhere around midnight I caught him watching me instead of reading. He dropped his eyes back to the page fast, jaw set, like I’d walked in on something.

I’d started noticing that jaw, the way it moved before he let himself say anything else. I started noticing the way he went quiet right before something real came out of him, instead of something meant to end the conversation. His hands went slow with the old paper, quick and rough with tools, like the two didn’t belong to the same person. He’d told me my first night here he wasn’t doing any of this because he trusted me. I kept thinking about that over again. I kept coming back to it at odd hours. It kept getting harder to hold onto.

“You are staring,” I said.

“Wasn’t staring. I was reading.”

“You haven’t turned that page in five minutes.”

He looked down at it. Turned it around and said nothing. I let it drop, because pushing meant admitting I’d been watching him just as long.

Two minutes later he went still. He stopped moving entirely, enough that I stopped what I was doing to look over.

“What.”

He turned the ledger toward me. He pointed at a line of numbers that meant nothing to me until he walked me through it. It was a payment. It was dated three days before my father supposedly sold anyone out. Routed through an account that had nothing to do with Iron Vale.

“That’s not club money.”

“No.”

“Then whose is it.”

He didn’t answer right off. He flipped back a page, then forward again. He was checking one thing against another, mouth pressed into a thin line.

“Somebody paid for information before your father was even accused of selling any. Someone that knew what was coming.” His voice had dropped low. Careful, the way people get when they’re saying something out loud for the first time and checking if it makes sense. “This isn’t your father’s signature on the transfer log.”

“Then whose is it.”

He didn’t say it right away. He kept it to himself for a second, jaw tight again. When he finally said the name, we were both quiet for a whole minute. It meant somebody in this club had known what was coming for Daniel Voss before it came.

Somebody who wasn’t Daniel Voss at all. Somebody still walking around this compound, wearing the same cut the rest of them wore, maybe close enough right now to hear us talking about it through the wall.