Whatever waterproofing Daniel had used the plastic wrapping, maybe something else inside had done its job. The contents were dry. Not perfectly preserved, but dry. She lifted out the first thing. A photograph printed on regular copy paper and then laminated.
The lamination had yellowed at the edges. Daniel standing outside somewhere. Some kind of industrial building in the background. Next to him, three men. Nobody I recognized.
Nobody Clare recognized. "Those aren't firefighters," Clare said. "At least." "I don't think so. Their posture is wrong," she set it down. The next item was a stack of letters, handwritten on plain white paper, folded and tucked into an unsealed envelope.
The handwriting was careful, precise, not Daniels. She unfolded the first letter, and I watched her face. She read three lines and stopped. She turned the paper over, looked at the signature, and then Clare Bennett set the letter down on the table very slowly, as if it were made of something that might break. "That's my brother's handwriting," she said.
I waited my brother, Evan. Her voice was completely steady, which I was beginning to understand was how Clare sounded when she was most upset. Evan died 4 years before Daniel. He was in an accident, a car accident on Route 40. She looked at the letter.
He never mentioned Daniel knowing anything about this. Whatever this is, she touched the edge of the paper but didn't pick it up again. I don't I don't know why Daniel would have Evans letters. She reached back into the box. At the bottom, wrapped in a piece of cloth was a small brass key.
We both looked at it. Daniel never told you about a key? No, a storage unit. A lock box somewhere? Nothing.
She picked it up, turned it over. On the bow of the key, the top part where you grip it, there were two letters stamped into the metal. As she stared at them, Alderton storage, I said. She looked up at me. There's a storage place about 2 mi from here out on the Sunbury road.
Clare set the key down on the table next to her brother's letter. She looked at the photograph. She looked at the box. She looked at me. Caleb.
Yeah, I think my husband spent the last year of his life trying to protect me from something. She paused. And I think I need to find out what. The sinkhole was still open in her backyard. The tarp I'd laid over it was flapping slightly in the October wind.
The garage padlock was still in place, and somewhere beneath that yard, running north and south under Alderton Road, was a tunnel that someone had been using. We didn't know who. We didn't know why. We didn't know what they'd been moving through it. Not yet.