Chapter 81: Wheeler's Gap, By Mail
I did not drive to Wheeler's Gap.
I want to explain that, because it looks like cowardice and it was arithmetic.
A person on parole who drives a borrowed truck ninety-four miles into a county where she has no business, and knocks on the door of a stranger, and asks about a car from a fatal crash, has created four separate ways to be sent back.
Trespass. Interfering with a witness. A traffic stop. A man who calls somebody.
So I wrote a letter.
I wrote eleven drafts. I have them still, in the folder, held together with a fold-back clip that Marisol let me take from the supply cabinet.
Draft one was six paragraphs and explained everything.
Draft eleven was four sentences and explained nothing.
Dear Mr. Kessel. In September six years ago you bought a silver Ford Taurus shell, VIN ending 8802, from Ivey Auto Parts in Bellhaven for six hundred dollars. I would like to know whether any part of that vehicle is still in your possession, and if so whether you would allow a licensed technician to remove one electronic component at my expense. I have enclosed a stamped envelope.
I signed it with my own name.
Marisol read it before I mailed it and said one thing.
“Put in that you'll pay for his time.”
I added a sentence. I offered fifty dollars for his time, which was the whole of what I had after rent.
Then I put the letter in the mail on a Tuesday and I did the thing that six years teaches you, which is nothing.
I scanned. Four hundred pages, four hundred and thirty, three hundred and eighty.
I made the eight women's coffee on Sunday mornings because I was up anyway at 5:30 and it made Denise dislike me slightly less.
I went to my parole appointment on the second Thursday. Nineteen minutes. He asked about employment, housing, and contact with the family of the victim.
I said I had contact with the family of the victim.
He wrote it down and did not look up and said, “Initiated by them?”
“Yes,” I said, and it was true, because the letters came first.
Eleven days after I mailed the letter, Theo called Marisol's office at 4:50 p.m., which is the only number he had for me.
“There's a man on my phone,” he said. “He wants to talk to Cass Mercer.”
“How does he have your number?”
“Because I put mine on the envelope.”
I had not asked him to do that. He had gone to the post office and paid for the certified mail and put his own name and number on the return, and never mentioned it.
I said, “Put him through.”
“I can't put him through. He's on my phone. He's holding.”
I said, “Then tell him this exactly. Tell him: yes, the car is still in your barn, or no, it is not.”
Twenty seconds.
Theo came back on.
“He says it's in a field,” he said. “Behind the barn. He says there's a tree growing through it.”
I sat down.
There is no elegant way to describe what a tree growing through a car means to somebody in my position, so I will describe what I did.
I put my left hand flat on the desk beside the phone and spread the fingers and looked at them.
Then I asked the only question that mattered.
“Is it a shell or is it a floor?”
Theo relayed it. I heard the man's voice through the phone, tinny and long.
Theo said, “He says everything's off it. No engine, no doors, no glass. He says the floor's still there. He says the seats are gone but the tunnel's there and there's carpet.”
Carpet.
“Ask him if there's a bolted metal box under where the console was, about the size of a book, with a plug in it.”
Forty seconds this time.
“He says he doesn't know. He says he's not going out there in the dark.”
“Tell him tomorrow.”
“He says he wants to know who I am first.”
I stopped.
Because that is the moment. Every single time, there is a moment when the person on the other end asks who you are, and the whole thing turns on the sentence you say next, and there is no version of it that is both short and true.
I said, “Tell him you're Nadine Okoro's son.”
Silence on the line for about four seconds.
Then Theo said, quietly, not to me, “My name is Theo Okoro. My mother was killed by that car.”
I heard the man say something. I could not hear the words.
Theo listened for a while.
Then he came back on and his voice had changed.
“He says he'll go out and look in the morning,” Theo said. “He says he's had that car in his field for six years and nobody ever came.”
“Anything else?”
“Yeah,” Theo said. “He asked me what her name was again. He wrote it down.”