Miriam advised us not to answer the latest message. She forwarded it to the police investigator handling the report of the missing envelope and asked us to preserve every email, photograph, and document connected to the case. Her instructions were sensible, but they did nothing to quiet the question that had followed me home from my mother's house: what had my father discovered eleven years earlier that someone was still desperate to conceal?
The next morning, I returned to Eleanor's house with a portable scanner and several archival folders. Rebecca was already there, sitting at the kitchen table with her laptop open. She had made a spreadsheet listing every document we had found, its date, its source, and the people named in it. For someone who had spent years avoiding the subject, she was now determined to leave nothing to chance.
"We need to reconstruct Dad's final week," she said. "Not just the day he died. Everything he was doing before that."
My mother stood beside the sink, drying a cup that was already clean. "I can tell you what I remember."
"Tell us everything, even if it seems unimportant," I said.
Eleanor put the cup down. She remembered that our father had begun sorting his old files about two months before his death. He had worked in the garage late into the evenings, sometimes leaving the house after dinner to visit people he had known through his repair business. He never explained where he was going, but he returned with envelopes, receipts, and handwritten notes that he stored in the desk.
"Did he seem frightened?" Rebecca asked.
"No. Frustrated, certainly. He became impatient when I asked about the papers, but he wasn't frightened of anyone."
"Did he mention Leonard Voss?"
"Once. He said Voss had given him an answer that raised more questions than it settled."
I wrote that down. My mother remembered another detail: the week before his death, Dad had asked her whether she still had the photograph albums from the years when we were children. He wanted to see a picture of the old company office, although she hadn't understood why.
"Did you find the picture?" I asked.
"Yes. I gave him the album, and he sat in the study for nearly an hour. The next morning, he returned it to the shelf."
"Did he say what he'd found?"
"No. He only asked whether I remembered a man who used to visit your grandfather."
"Which man?"
She shook her head. "He didn't give me a name."
Rebecca closed her laptop. "Let's look at the albums."
We brought three heavy albums down from the upstairs cupboard. Their plastic sleeves had yellowed, and the pages smelled faintly of dust and old adhesive. The photographs showed birthday parties, school ceremonies, summer picnics, and family gatherings in the yard behind the house. I found one of Dad standing beside a half-repaired truck, his sleeves rolled to the elbows and a cigarette tucked behind one ear.
Near the back of the second album, my mother stopped turning pages.
"That's the building," she said.
The photograph showed the old grocery company's office on the day it had reopened after renovations. A small crowd stood in front of the entrance. My grandfather was near the center, wearing a dark suit that looked uncomfortable around his shoulders. Samuel Price stood beside him, and Helen Mercer was visible behind a woman holding a bouquet.
At the far right stood Leonard Voss, much younger but unmistakable. He was speaking to another man whose face was partly hidden by the edge of the photograph.
Rebecca leaned closer. "Who's that?"
My mother took the album from me and held it toward the window. The light fell across the man's face, revealing a narrow chin, a receding hairline, and a distinctive scar near his left eyebrow.
"I know him," she said.
"From where?"
"He worked for the company. I can't remember his name, but he was involved in the accounts. Your grandfather used to call him when there was a disagreement about a payment."
I photographed the image and enlarged the man's face. The scar was clear enough to distinguish him from anyone else in the crowd, but the photograph offered no name.
I turned the page and found another picture taken on the same day. This time, the unknown man stood beside a table covered with documents. Leonard Voss was there again, his hand resting on the back of a chair. My grandfather stood opposite them, looking down at a sheet of paper.
Someone had written a date on the back in my father's handwriting: October 14, 1987.
The same date appeared on the transfer record Martin had shown us.
"Why would Dad have marked this photograph?" Rebecca asked.
"Because he wanted to remember who was there," I said. "Or because someone told him it mattered."
I examined the photograph under the scanner. In the corner, partly obscured by a stack of papers, was a small metal plaque mounted on the wall. The lettering was faint, but I could make out the words RECORDS OFFICE.
My mother pointed at the unknown man.
"Your father asked me about him. I'm sure of it now. He wanted to know whether I'd seen him after the company was sold."
"Had you?"
"No. I told him I hadn't."
I searched the old newspaper archives for photographs of the company's staff. Several articles mentioned Leonard Voss, Samuel Price, and Arthur Brooks, but the unknown man appeared only once in a photograph captioned with a list of company representatives. The name was blurred in the digitized image.
Rebecca found a higher-resolution copy in a local historical collection. The caption identified him as Martin Keene, the company's records administrator.
"Martin Keene," I repeated. "He worked in the records office."
"And he was standing beside Voss on the day the transfer was authorized," Rebecca said.
My mother sat down slowly. "Your grandfather trusted him."
"Do we know whether he's alive?" I asked.
Rebecca searched the public records. Martin Keene had moved out of the area in the early 1990s. His last listed address was in a neighboring county, and an obituary published several years earlier indicated that he had died. He had left behind a wife and two children.
That seemed to close one avenue until I noticed the obituary's list of survivors. One son, Peter Keene, had worked in financial records management. His current professional profile listed him as a consultant for small businesses dealing with legacy accounts and archival disputes.
I read the description aloud.
Rebecca stared at the screen. "Could he be connected to the person who called you?"
"Possibly. But we can't assume that simply because he works with records."
We searched for Peter's business address and found an office in a commercial building on the north side of town. There was no reason to visit him without first speaking to Miriam, so I sent her the photograph and the details we had uncovered.
She called twenty minutes later.
"The photograph is useful," she said, "but we need to establish what Martin Keene actually did and whether his son has any connection to the current dispute. Don't contact Peter directly yet. I'll check whether his firm has acted for the trust or for Leonard Voss."
I agreed, though the delay frustrated me. The unknown man had been present when the first transfer was authorized, and his role in the records office might explain how the second release had been filed without the proper signature.
Before we could continue, my mother brought another item from the cupboard. It was a small envelope containing photographs that had never been placed in the albums. Most were duplicates, but one showed my father standing outside the old company office. He was older than in the earlier photographs, perhaps a few months before his death. Beside him stood a man whose face was turned away from the camera.
The date on the back was written in the same handwriting as the note inside the ledger.
January 6, 2015.
My father had died eleven years earlier, in January 2015.
I turned the photograph over and read the brief message he had written beneath the date.
THE PERSON WHO KEPT THE RECORDS KNOWS WHAT WAS REMOVED.
Rebecca took the picture from me. "He wasn't talking about the ledger. He was talking about someone."
"Someone who worked in the records office," I said.
My mother looked at the photograph for a long time.
"Your father believed the truth was in the records," she said. "But he also believed someone had taken the truth out of them."
The words stayed with me as I scanned the remaining photographs. Each image gave us a little more information, but none supplied the missing name or the original authorization. The evidence pointed toward the old records office, the first transfer, and a second release that had never been properly documented.
Then Rebecca found a photograph tucked into the back of the envelope. It showed the same office, taken from the opposite side of the street. A man was leaving the building with a thick folder under his arm.
His face was visible.
It was Leonard Voss.
On the back, my father had written four words that made my sister stop breathing for a moment.
HE TOOK THE ORIGINAL.
Click here to continue reading: PART 10: The Man in My Father’s Photograph Had Taken the Original Document, but His Son Claimed the Missing Pages Told a Different Story
My Mother Wrote Six Ordinary Numbers, but the Man Behind the Counter Suddenly Forgot How to Breathe
Part 9 of 30
