Chapter 79: Nine Pages
Curtis Dagg opened on Saturdays from eight to noon and did not answer his phone during those hours.
We got there at 8:40. Theo went in. I stayed at the fence.
There was a dog. There is always a dog.
The dog was chained to a bollard on about twelve feet of chain and it did not bark. It watched.
I counted the cars in the front row. Nineteen.
Eleven minutes later Theo came out with a manila folder that had a rubber band around it and the rubber band had gone flat and shiny with age.
He handed it to me over the hood of the truck.
“He didn't even ask,” Theo said. “I said my mother was the one on the bike and he went and got it.”
Nine pages.
I read them standing up because I did not trust myself to read them sitting down and be careful.
Page one. Tow ticket. Date, the ninth of March. Time of dispatch, 11:52 p.m. Requesting agency, State Police Troop C. Vehicle: silver Ford Taurus sedan, registered owner Dean A. Mercer. Plate ending 4471. Damage noted: front, driver's side, severe.
Page two. Vehicle condition sheet, filled in by hand. There is a checkbox grid on it. Twenty-two boxes.
One of them says AIRBAGS DEPLOYED. It was checked.
Another one says GLASS. Checked.
Another says PERSONAL PROPERTY IN VEHICLE, and beside it, in the notes line, someone had written: 1 handbag, 1 phone (cracked), 1 jacket, misc.
The handbag was mine. I never got it back and I never asked.
That line of handwriting was the first thing anybody had ever written down about that night that nobody had shaped.
A tow driver listing property at midnight. No lawyer. No theory. Just a list.
Page three. Storage invoice. Eleven dollars a day, day one through day seventy-nine.
Page four. Notice of lien, sent certified to Dean A. Mercer at our address on Kelvin Street.
Page five. The green card back from that certified letter, signed.
I stopped at page five for a long time.
The signature on the green card was not Dean's.
I know Dean's signature. It is a D and then a horizontal line with a hook at the end, like a hospital chart.
This was a full, careful, upright signature with the letters separated, the way a person signs when they want to be able to prove later that they signed.
R. Halloway.
“Who's that?” Theo said.
“My aunt.”
“The mother.”
“Bree's mother. Renata.”
“Why is she signing for your husband's mail?”
“I don't know.”
That was true. I want it on the record that at that moment I did not know, and that I looked at the name and moved on, because I was looking for a car.
Renata is fifty-eight. She has never held a job I could name.
She is the person who sat across from me in a corridor and explained what would happen to me if I did not sign.
That is my error and I own it. It was in my hand in April and I did not understand it until much later.
Page six. Auction notice, published in the classified section of the county paper, three consecutive weeks.
Page seven. The bill of sale.
Sold at lien auction on the twenty-ninth of May for $410 to Rufus Ivey, of Ivey Auto Parts, Bellhaven.
Page eight. A copy of Ivey's dealer license.
Page nine. A hand-annotated note on Ardmore Recovery letterhead: “Buyer took whole unit. Not stripped on site.”
Not stripped on site.
Four words in ballpoint, written by a man closing out a job at the end of a shift.
I put the nine pages back in order and put the rubber band around them and it broke.
“What does that mean,” Theo said. “The last one.”
“It means it left here as a car,” I said. “Not as a pile.”
“Is that good?”
“It's the first good thing in eleven months.”
I said eleven months because I count from the day I understood the date on the confession. Before that there was nothing to count from.
I drove us to a gas station and bought a road atlas for $6.99 because I do not have a phone that does maps and I do not want one that can be searched.
Bellhaven is forty miles the other way.
In the parking lot Theo asked me a question I have thought about since.
“If it's a pile now. If they crushed it. What do you do?”
“Then the module went into the crusher with it.”
“And then what.”
“Then I have a signed confession dated two days before the crash and no way on earth to explain it,” I said. “And I do the eighteen years of nothing that everybody in my position does.”
He nodded like that was a reasonable answer, which it was.
Then he said, “Ivey Auto Parts is open till two.”