Chapter 5 - The Lockbox
She had it out in her car. A plain gray metal case, about the size of a shoebox, one keyhole on the front.
She set it on the conference table and stepped back like it might go off.
"She kept this for forty years," I said.
"She took it everywhere. Spain, then Italy for a while, then back to Spain. Every apartment, every move, that box came too."
I put my key in and turned it. First try.
On top was a bundle of papers held with a rubber band that had gone hard and cracked. Under the papers, a small notebook with a warped, water-stained cover. Under the notebook, one photograph.
I picked up the photo first.
Two men at a restaurant table, facing each other. One was my father — younger, mid-forties, exactly how I remember him from back then, dark hair, good suit. The other man I'd never seen. Big through the shoulders, wide face, small eyes. He was holding an envelope out across the table, and my father's hand was already reaching for it.
On the back, in Diane's writing: *Dad and R. Vale. October 1985. The Copper Lantern. Took this from the window upstairs.*
She'd been watching them. At fifteen.
I set the photo down and opened the bundle. Financial records. Ledgers in somebody's hand, photocopied bank statements, a letter on the letterhead of a firm called Vale & Associates. I'm no accountant. But even I could see money coming in under one column of names and leaving under another, and my father's initials written in the margin over and over, next to the transfers.
"She understood all this?" I asked.
"She was the smart one. Her words." Marta sat back down. "She overheard your father and Vale talking in November of '85. After that she started paying attention. By your birthday she'd been collecting it for months."
"And Dad found out."
"He found the notebook. The night of the party. He went up to her room while everybody was around the table and found it."
I thought about Diane kissing Mom on the cheek. Swiping frosting off the cake. *Save me another piece.* How easy and ordinary she'd made it sound.
She already knew, when she said it. She knew what was waiting for her out back.
"He told her that night?"
"In the backyard. He called her out there. That's when he told her to go."
"And she just went? She didn't fight it?"
Marta's jaw tightened. "He told her that if she wasn't gone by morning, he'd walk into the police station himself and tell them she'd been stealing from his accounts and forging his name. He said he'd already had papers drawn up to prove it." She paused. "She was sixteen. He was her father. She believed he'd do it."
The room felt smaller than it had an hour before.
"What about Vale?"
"He gave your father money — to keep Diane quiet and get her out of the country. Your father used some of it to buy her passage to Spain. He knew somebody over there who owed him. She landed with the clothes on her back and that key sewn into her sweater."
"He paid to get rid of his own child."
Marta said nothing.
I looked down at the papers in my lap. Forty years. My mother dying without an answer. My father in his chair at Ridgeline, turning to the window, telling me to leave it alone.
"He's still alive," I said.
"I know."
"He's never told me. Never told anybody."
"No."
I set the stack down on the table, careful, the way you set something down when your hands aren't quite steady.
"Marta. What do you want to happen now?"
She looked straight at me for the first time since we'd sat down.
"My mother wanted you to know the truth. That's the whole of what she asked me for." She paused. "What you do with it is yours to decide. But you should know — Raymond Vale is still alive too. He lives about forty minutes from here. Has for the last twelve years."
I looked at the photo. The two men. The envelope halfway across the table.
"He's been right here," I said. "This whole time."
"Yes."
"And Dad knew that."
"I believe he did."
I picked the photo up again and turned it over and read Diane's writing one more time.
Then I got out my phone and called my son-in-law, Paul — Karen's husband. Before he retired he spent thirty years working financial-crimes cases.
"Paul. I need you to look at something for me. Can you come to Maddie's school?"
May you like
A pause. "Right now?"
"Right now."
