And Daniel, I think Daniel spent 3 years figuring out what to do. And then something made him move fast, bury everything he had. Leave you a breadcrumb you'd only find if the ground gave way. Don't trust the ground, she said softly. He wasn't warning you away from the yard.
He was telling you where to look. We made a decision sitting at that table that I'm not sure was the right one. But I've turned it over in my mind enough times in the month since to know that I'd probably make it again. We decided to go to Alderton storage before we told the sheriff's department about the key. I know how that sounds and I want to be clear.
I wasn't trying to interfere with anything. I wasn't thinking about evidence or chain of custody or any of that. I was thinking about a woman who had spent 6 years not knowing why her husband changed and why he died. And I was thinking that whatever was in that storage unit might be the only chance she'd ever get to understand it. So we went.
Clare drove. Her hands were steady on the wheel, which told me more about her than anything she'd said at the kitchen table. The kind of steady that isn't natural it's earned. The storage facility was exactly what you'd expect on a secondary road outside a small Ohio city. Singlestory cinder block units, orange rollup doors, a keypad at the entrance gate, a small office with the lights on.
The kind of place that rents to people who don't want to throw things away and don't know what else to do with them. Clare typed in a code at the gate. It worked. I looked at her. Daniel set up the account, she said, watching the gate swing open.
He used our anniversary as the code for everything. She paused. I tried it on a guess. We drove slowly down the row. Unit 114.
The number was on the key tag. Tiny and faded, but readable. The key fit. The lock opened. Clare reached up and grabbed the handle of the rollup door and pulled it up in one motion.
Like she needed to do it fast before she lost the nerve. For a second, we just stood there. The unit was about 10 ft deep and 8 ft wide. Standard small unit and it was not empty. Along the left wall, four cardboard filing boxes.
Banker's boxes, the kind with lids, each one labeled in Daniel's handwriting. Not words, just letters and numbers. A code of some kind. Along the back wall, a folding table with a flat screen monitor on it. No tower, just the monitor unplugged.
Next to it, a printer. And stacked under the table more boxes. On the right wall, a corkboard and on the corkboard pinned with push pins in different colors were photographs, printouts, handdrawn maps, and newspaper clippings. I walked toward the corkboard. Clare walked toward the boxes.