Chapter Seventeen
Caitlin
While I still, after all these years, disliked the very necessary subway, I’d always been okay with trains. I guess because it wasn’t underground. But the train ride was even more enjoyable when Gav reached for my legs and draped them over his, keeping his hand planted on my knee the whole ride.
We slipped into a ride-share once we stopped in Jersey, then rode silently in the backseat until we reached a quiet little neighborhood full of starter homes with neat little front yards and mature trees.
“This is a nice place to live,” I said as the driver dropped us off outside of a little cape with sweet blue shutters and Black-eyed Susans still blooming in the front flowerbed.
“Yeah, if you like this much quiet.”
I glanced across the dandelion-free lawn, the weedless bed, the smudge-free glass.
“This place is loved,” I said. “He must be here more often than I thought.”
“Or he hired someone,” Gav reasoned. He held out a hand. “Coming?”
We made our way to the door.
I knocked, but Gav got right to work on the lock.
“Don’t look around,” Gav said, wrapping an arm around my waist. “We belong here. You’re family.”
With that, he turned the knob and led me inside.
The door opened into a decently-sized living room painted in a soft green with brown couches and a storage cabinet full of knick-knacks.
“What is it?” Gav asked, watching me.
“Is it just me, or does this sort of… scream woman? I mean, the linen drapes, the throw pillows, the rug, all the little figurines,” I waved toward the cabinet.
“I know my dad. Or, at least, I think I know him well enough to say that it would never occur to him to match the accent colors in the pillows and carpets to the main color of the drapes.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he picked up a new hobby. I have curtains and extra blankets.”
“Sure, but your apartment still feels very masculine. This feels feminine to me.”
“Maybe your father has a woman in his life.”
“Maybe,” I agreed. “It would make sense why he felt he needed a house. And to work for you to pay for it. It doesn’t explain why he felt the need to keep his relationship from me.”
“Maybe he didn’t want you to think he was trying to replace your mom?”
“Maybe. I mean, I’m a grown woman. I understand that most people don’t stay single forever. No matter how much they loved their dead spouse.”
“Yeah, but he sees you as his little girl. He could be thinking he’s protecting you. Come on. Let’s look around.”
We made our way into a kitchen that further confirmed my suspicions. There were floral mugs in the cabinet, a claw clip forgotten on the counter, and sugar-free caramel coffee creamer in the fridge.
By the time we made it into the bedroom, I didn’t need to look in the closet to know a woman lived there. But that didn’t stop Gav from looking for me.
“Is that her?” he asked as I picked up a framed picture of my father’s happy face beaming back at me. His face was pressed against that of a woman.
She was around his age, with dyed black hair, light blue eyes, and a round face.
“I guess.”
“What is it?” he asked when I kept staring.
“I don’t know. There’s something familiar about her.”
“Maybe she was another trucker?”
“Maybe.”
There were a lot more female truckers out there than there used to be, but it was still a small community.
I felt like I would have remembered her if that was why she looked familiar.
The women often were chattier with me, sometimes even taking me to buy feminine care products when I felt weird about doing it with my dad, or showing me their cab set-ups that they managed to make feel cozy and homey.
“Take a picture of that,” Gav instructed. “We can see if Zeno can track her down, get more information.”
“There are no papers here with her name or anything?” I asked after taking a picture and setting the frame back down.
“Nothing. So she probably doesn’t live here. Just crashes when your father is around.”
“But then how does the place look so good when no one has been here?”
“Maybe your dad has a lawn service.”
“Yeah. Did you find anything?”
“A few bills. In your dad’s name. Some repair receipts for the tractor. And a few receipts for storage units.”
“Storage units. As in multiple?” My father had gone most of his life not owning anything. I couldn’t fathom him accumulating enough over the past few years to fill up even half a unit, let alone more than one.
“Yeah. In different states.”
There was a tightness around the edges of his words. But I was a little too dumbfounded to analyze it.
“Are there any close to here?”
“Just one, yeah.”
“Did you find any keys? We could go look.”
“I wasn’t looking for Master keys. Do you have your father’s keyring on you?”
I fished it out of my bag and handed it over. “Is that one?”
“No. But this is to a safe. Which I would assume is around here somewhere.”
We spread out then, scouring every inch of the house before making our way down into the basement.
It was almost haunting how domestic the place felt.
There were plastic storage totes marked with masking tape and my father’s awful chicken scratch.
Laundry detergent sat on top of the dryer.
There was a basket of dirty clothes next to the washer.
And a collection of women’s bras hanging on the line.
Clothes in the closet.
Bras on the line.
It felt more like she was living there than just staying. I’d maybe kept a few items in ex-boyfriends’ places before. But I didn’t hang out my bras to dry. Though maybe that was just me and my young relationships. Maybe more mature couples did things differently.
“Got it. He hid this thing well.”
Turning, I found the source of the scraping I’d heard. Gav was hidden behind a metal storage cabinet he’d moved away from the wall.
My father had the receipts for secret storage units and a secret safe hidden in his secret house.
My head felt like it was spinning as I walked on numb legs over to where Gav was waiting for me before unlocking the large in-wall safe.
If he was thinking anything in particular, he wasn’t sharing it with me as he pulled the door open.
“Is that a gun? A real gun?”
Gav used one of my father’s keys to pick the gun up by the trigger guard.
“Yeah, that’s a real gun.”
My stomach lurched.
I mean, it wasn’t that I thought it was impossible for my father to own a gun. He believed in them. He just wasn’t legally allowed to drive with one across state lines, so he’d never had one before.
“Anything else?” I asked as he put the gun down and went back to the safe.
“The deed to the house. Paperwork for life insurance. Ammunition. And, yep, Master keys.” He handed those to me. “What do you want to do with the rest of this?”
“Leave it here for now.”
So that was what we did.
And I felt like my legs were lead as we walked down the block to wait for our next ride-share to take us to the storage unit.
“You okay?” Gav asked, giving my leg a squeeze. “We can just go home if you’ve had enough for one day.”
“If there’s anything else to find out, I kind of want the shock of it all over with,” I told him, feeling a sort of numbness settling in like I always did when there was too much to process and no way to work through it at the moment.
“Okay,” he agreed.
With that, we plugged in the number to the unit and made our way inside one of the buildings, walking past dozens of blue garage doors before we made it to my father’s unit.
“Why aren’t you opening it?” I asked after he unlocked the door and slid the lock into his pocket.
“Because you haven’t taken a breath since we’ve been standing here. I think this is a bad idea. We should head out for today. Let you get your head around all of this.”
I took an exaggeratedly deep breath.
“There. Just open it.”
“Caitlin…”
“Please. I just need to know.”
Gav’s face was tight. He didn’t like it. But he turned and pulled up the door.
I wasn’t sure what I expected to find. But neatly arranged boxes on metal racks wasn’t on my list.
“Hm.”
“What?” I asked.
“He has lanterns,” Gav said.
“Is that weird? The units don’t have lights.”
“No. But most people just leave the doors open when they’re inside so the hall light shines in. The lantern setup makes me think he was in here with the door closed. I’m thinking maybe we should close the door before we start looking in the boxes.”
I gave him a nod and flicked on the lantern closest to me. Gav did the same with another before closing the door.
I ignored the way my stomach tightened and walked over to the closest box.
“Trading cards?” I asked, grabbing a handful of the cards to show Gav.
“Same here. Just a different kind. Did your dad collect?”
“No. I mean he didn’t even like baseball. Or whatever the hell those are.”
Gav shot me a look before reaching back into the box, but this time digging all the way down to the bottom. When he pulled his hand back out, it wasn’t trading cards he was holding. It was cash. Several stacks of cash.
My heart sank.
“Hey, don’t do that,” Gav said, reading my face.
“My father has stacks and stacks of money hidden in a storage unit. In multiple storage units, it seems. And I’m not supposed to think the worst?”
“Your father made a lot of money working for me. More than it took to buy his house and more than is in his accounts. It’s not unusual to keep cash somewhere like this if you aren’t making it legally.
The last fucking thing anyone wants is the tax man breathing down their necks.
This lets him have his money somewhere safe.
But also accessible. That is probably why he has it in several different states. Because he’s always on the move.”
Okay.
That did make a certain kind of sense.
It didn’t mean all the other stuff wasn’t weird as hell, but it didn’t mean he was doing even more illegal things than we already knew about.
“Okay?” he asked, putting the money back in and hiding it.
“Okay,” I agreed.
“I’ll believe you when I see you actually take a deep breath again,” he said as he approached me.
“Okay,” I agreed, sucking in a breath so deep it burned, then releasing it slowly.