You must be Angelica, he said. Walter was our friend. He showed me a photo of you once.
Our, I said. What do you mean our?
He said you would come, the man continued, already moving toward a drawer behind the counter. He was not interested in my questions yet. He had a task and he was completing it. He pulled out a sealed envelope and placed it on the counter between us.
Walter said not to give this to anyone except you, he said. Nobody else asked. So here you are.
I picked up the envelope. It had my name on the front in Grandpa’s handwriting, the same careful printing he had used on the scavenger hunt notes when I was a child. I asked why Grandpa had not simply given it to me while he was alive. The man smiled, a small knowing smile.
Walter liked making you work for things, didn’t he.
I swallowed. Yeah, I said. He did.
I opened the envelope in the front seat of my car. A single sheet of paper. Grandpa’s handwriting. You are on the right track. Do not stop now. I held the paper for a moment, feeling the specific quality of being known by someone who is no longer available to know you, and then I folded it and put it in my pocket and started the engine.
The second location was a diner. Red booths, a specials board written in chalk, coffee that smelled the way coffee smells in places that have been making it for thirty years in the same machine. The smell hit me when I walked in and my eyes stung because it was the smell of his mornings, of the five o’clock kitchen, of the quiet domestic ritual that had been the anchor of my childhood, and now it was just a diner with strangers in it and Grandpa was three days in the ground.
The woman behind the counter was in her mid-fifties, sharp-eyed, the kind of person who registers everything in a room without appearing to. She looked at me as I approached and before I had finished introducing myself she said, you are his youngest girl. He described you exactly.
She reached under the counter and placed a small key on the surface between us. I picked it up. It was a plain key, the kind used for safe-deposit boxes, with a tag that had a number on it.
He said you were the only one who would follow it through, she said.
Why not just leave me whatever this leads to directly, I asked. Why the receipts and the coordinates and the envelopes and all of it?
She leaned on the counter and looked at me with the patience of someone who has been holding a piece of information for a long time and knows how to deliver it correctly.
Because you need to see it, she said. Not just receive it. Walter said if he only told you, it would not mean the same thing. You would know the conclusion but not the shape of it. He wanted you to see the shape.
I frowned. See what, I asked.
She shook her head. You will understand at the next stop, she said. And the one after.
