She was systematic about it, organized, thorough, not rushing, even though every instinct in me wanted to grab everything and leave. She'd make a good investigator. I remember thinking she processed things the same way she probably processed losing Daniel methodically without letting the feeling swallow the function. Near the bottom of the third box, she pulled out a notebook. Spiralbound college rule dark blue cover.
Daniel's name wasn't on it. Nothing was on the cover. She opened it and then she sat down on the floor of that storage unit. Right there on the concrete and she read. I didn't ask.
I just waited. She read for a long time, maybe 15 minutes. I walked back to the corkboard and looked at the photographs and maps and tried to understand the geography of what Daniel had been documenting, the illegal dump site, the access roads, the drainage channel. I stopped. I looked at the map on the corkboard more carefully.
There was a line on it, handdrawn in pencil, faint, running from the industrial site north and west across the county, running under Alderton Road, the drainage channel, the old 1,958 storm drainage system that Bill Harrove had told us about, the one big enough to walk through bent over. I turned around. Claire, she looked up from the notebook. Her eyes were red. Not from crying, from the effort of not crying.
The drainage channel under your yard. I said on Daniel's map, it connects to the dump site. She looked at me for a long time, then read this. She held out the notebook. Daniel's handwriting was different from Evans.
Bigger, less precise. The handwriting of a man who wrote fast and didn't worry about neatness. But what he'd written was clear enough. The notebook started about 10 months before he died. The first entries were almost casual observations, questions, things he'd noticed, references to Evan, to conversations they'd apparently had before Evan died, to promises Daniel had made.
Then the entries got shorter, more urgent. The dates closer together. Someone called the station asking for me specifically. Personal number, not the department line. Didn't leave a name.
I didn't call back. Check the garage tonight. Nothing disturbed. Moving the secondary copies to the yard tomorrow. If they come for the unit, there's still the yard.
If they find the yard somehow, there's still the unit. Two chances is better than one. Talk to a lawyer. Off the record, he says, "What I have is enough to open an investigation, but not enough to guarantee protection." He said the word protection like it was something I was already going to need. Clare doesn't know any of this.
I can't tell her. If she knows, she's in it. As long as she doesn't know, she's outside it. That's the only thing I can give her right now. I stopped reading.