Chapter 8
The morning Abigail had spent out with Cleo attending a yoga and meditation workshop had been exactly what she had needed. She was several hours away from the house, entirely surrounded by people who bore no resemblance whatsoever to gorgeous contractors with oddly attractive hands, and as far removed from family secrets as it was possible to be.
The meditation bit had gotten a little cliché towards the end, but Abigail was happy to put up with a little bit of New Age spiritual stuff she didn’t connect with in exchange for the calm the meditations had helped her achieve. Bee had also attended and it had been quite amusing to watch the black-clad and generally alternative woman stand elegantly in tree prayer pose and hum serenely.
She had not nearly fallen over three times like Abigail had, so she was in no position to poke fun, but Bee had taken it well. Especially considering the way they left things last time. [EK1]Abigail glanced over at Cleo, who was walking beside her, and wondered if she had spoken to Bee since the incident. She could see Cleo’s point: it was kind of an odd ball thing to be able to recognize hardened and horrific criminals on sight, but they both knew that Bee was a true crime fan. The way Cleo had reacted was... well, it was perfectly Cleo. She had a thought, and it came out of her mouth. Now that it had upset someone, she was pretending that it had never happened at all.
"So, uh, I was wondering... have you spoken to Bee?" Abigail asked, trying her best to keep her voice calm and neutral.
"No," Cleo replied almost immediately, "have you?"
"No..."
They walked a few steps in silence and even before Cleo had started to speak, Abigail knew from the sharp intake of breath that her friend was about to start monologuing about how she hadn’t done anything wrong and that Bee should be the first to reach out.
Abigail was not in the mood for that.
"You need to call her," Abigail said, "I know you probably think you don’t need to because she’s the one who stormed off—but you need to. It wasn’t so much what you said but the way you said it, and it doesn’t really matter how you intended it because the impact it had was that it hurt her."
Cleo was looking at her with her mouth hanging open, but there was no sass or offense in the stare—it was pure shock.
"Did... did you just MOM VOICE me!?" Cleo exclaimed.
As she said it, Abigail realized that she had, in fact, used her Mom Voice on her friend and winced.
"Apparently yes, but that doesn’t make what I said untrue."
Her friend's nostrils flared as she huffed an exasperated sigh, and Abigail turned her attention to the broken pavement along this stretch of the street to avoid tripping. The lack of retort from Cleo made it clear to Abigail that she had struck a nerve. They paused and pulled to the side to let a tourist family pass them as they marched up the street in formation. The dad was up front, glaring at a map while a string of children followed him, and the Mom tailed the group, wrangling a small dog under one arm and a toddler on a backpack leash. Cleo met Abigail's eyes, and the pair couldn’t help but laugh.
"I thought dogs went on leashes and you carried your kids?" Cleo whispered once the family had passed.
In return, Abigail giggled and shrugged, "Hey—maybe the dog is old and the kid has a lot of energy."
Cleo’s smile faded as they began their walk again, "I actually did call her... but she didn’t pick up. She’s also ignored my text."
"Oh... Sorry, I just..."
"…figured I hadn’t changed at all since high school?"
That wasn’t exactly what she had been thinking but it wasn’t exactly wrong either...
"Sorry, really," Abigail replied, "I know you’ve changed since high school. You wouldn’t even take out the garbage in high school because it was gross. Remember when you made me change the dressings when your belly ring got infected because you couldn’t handle the sight? Well, now you’re a nurse. I should know better that you’ve changed."
Cleo bumped her shoulder into Abigail’s as she laughed.
"I think I may have changed a hundred thousand dressings by now," she said, "and I haven’t changed that much. I still think Bee is being a bit dramatic. It’s not like I called her something heinous..."
They had reached their street, and Abigail could see a van parked outside her house. She narrowed her eyes to try to focus on it.
"You basically called her a freak," Abigail said, "and do you see how alternative she is now—can you imagine she was less intense as a teenager? You probably hit on something really sensitive."
In the distance, Abigail saw the figure of a man retreating from her door, climbing into the van, and driving off.
"Hey!" she said, pointing, "Did you see that!?"
Cleo shook her head, "what?"
Abigail broke into a jog, trying to see the license plate of the van but it was too far ahead. She leaned on her front gate post, huffing with the effort of even that short sprint.
"Abby!? What!?" Cleo asked, panting similarly as she arrived next to her. "Oh my lungs, we need to do more exercise..."
"Van.... man..." Abigail said, laughing between words.
"I think you mean delivery man..."
What?
Abigail turned her attention to where Cleo was pointing... directly at a box sitting on her porch with the welcome mat limply draped over the top.
Oh...
"Right... sorry, I guess I’m a tiny bit anxious about the whole recent break-in thing."
"I know," Cleo said, holding her hands up in supplication, "what is it?"
They’d both recovered from the embarrassingly short sprint and so they headed for the house.
"Assuming it’s from Shelley, the first box of files she sent a while ago that’s taken forever to get here..."
Removing the ineffectual welcome mat disguise, Abigail pointed to the bottom left corner of the box.
"Yeah, see, she signed the corner," Abigail said.
"Why?"
Abigail shrugged. "She said it’s a habit from a few nasty cases she’s taken over the years where people try to get their partner served with a fake delivery from their lawyer. You see her signature, and you know it’s from her."
"That seems excessive..." Cleo said.
"Well, she’s the best. I don’t argue with her. You wanna go sort through decades old paperwork that may or may not destroy my memory of my father?"
She’d said it with the intention of it being a joke, albeit a dark joke, but as it came out, she heard how it sounded.
…like a plea.
Cleo nodded, "Sure, hon. You want me to make tea?"
***
The neatly stacked piles of paper took up most of the office desk. They had been separated into financials, lists, old instruction booklets, notebooks, and forms.
"Oh..." Cleo said, startled, "uh... I guess it might have been his gun, after all."
"What?"
Abigail’s heart ached as she leaned over to see what Cleo was showing her. A stack of papers stapled together, all of the red tape and paperwork required to buy a gun in the state of Rhode Island and a tattered receipt for a payment made to a store blithely called Bows and Barrels.
"Oh..." Abigail said, defeated.
On the one hand, she was glad the gun in her house hadn’t been an illegal weapon, but at the same time, this was proof she hadn’t known her father that well at all.
"Sorry, hon," Cleo said, "I know you were kind of hoping for a win... though at least now you can tell those nice officers that your dad was at least allowed to have it..."
"Hah," Abigail snorted, "they haven’t even been in touch since they were here. I feel like they didn’t believe me."
With a shrug, Cleo tugged the sheaf of papers from Abigail’s hands and placed them on the pile of forms. Desperate to do something with her hands, Abigail grabbed a notebook and started flipping through it. They’d been at this for nearly an hour, and they had only found this one interesting thing. She had secretly been hoping the contents of this would somehow prove to her that all their suspicions had been wrong.
A handwritten double-page spread in the notebook caught her eye. This notebook was barely used and seemed in slightly better condition than the other notebooks in the box. It fell open to the center page, so either it was cheaply made or someone had spent a lot of time with it open to this page.
"Woah..." Cleo said, peeking over to the pages.
"Yeah..."
Both pages were covered in neat, deliberate black ink.
"That’s... interesting," Cleo said, "are they coordinates?"
BT-150 19/1, 19/6, 28/2, 16/3, 1/5, 6/8, 7/3, 9/45, 11/8, 6/8, 6/8, 9/66, MLB-1925 6/55, 9/24, 69/84, 6/88, 9/4, 8/7, 6/88, 5/2, 5/2.
"No... they could be dates?”
"Ah yes," Cleo said, pointing to one of the clusters, "the eighty-eighth day of June..."
Abigail made a face, "Well, they’re not coordinates either."
She read through the pages, "This is definitely weird... right?"
"Uh, yeah," Cleo said, "this is, without a doubt, weird."
"Okay, so long as I’m not losing my mind."
She shook her head and put the notebook down to the side of the other stack. She couldn’t quiet the thought in her mind that this one was important.
"And look at this," Cleo said, handing her another sheet of loose paper, "I think they’re flow charts of business structures."
"Okay?" Abigail replied, "That’s normal...right?"
As she read and glanced over the hand-drawn diagrams, she realized that half of these names were the same as those on the documents in the wall safe.
"Oh my God..." Abigail whispered as she saw it, "Look!"
She pointed to the middle tier of one of the clusters, Stanford and Fromm Equities and Bonds RI Franchise.