Taken (18 page)

He took the key and sack and went inside the store, saw the wall of leased boxes. He used the key to open box thirty-eight.
There were four items inside: a stationery box, two square mug-sized boxes, and a manila envelope. The envelope had Shannon’s name written on it, but this envelope was smaller and didn’t feel like it held a book. He closed and relocked the box, pocketed the key, and took the items back to the car. He passed the sack to Shannon.

“Want me to show you the treasures?” she asked.

“Sure, if only so I can tell Paul what I’m bringing him.”

She carefully opened the stationery box. The papers inside were in cellophane sleeves, neatly stacked. “They’re very old letters. They’re worth something because of the signatures.”

“How valuable?”

“Maybe a few thousand? I don’t know for sure. Flynn had a romantic streak—he liked to be the one to tuck away things like this.”

Shannon used his pocketknife to open the two square boxes. She grinned. “Interested in old baseballs?” She held one up. “Autographed, and worth something.”

He didn’t recognize the signatures, but the condition of the ball suggested something from the early era of the sport.

“These two should be easy to trace. They’ve probably been in that storage box for years,” she said.

He pointed to the last item. “The envelope has your name on it. Something else Flynn stored for you?”

“Yes.” She picked it up, unwrapped the thread tie, turned it to dump out the contents. A handful of smaller sealed envelopes slid out into her lap.

“What are they?”

“Memory cards for a digital camera. Photos I’ve taken.”

His interest sharpened. “Over the last eleven years? Anything that will be helpful to the cops?”

Shannon sorted out the smaller envelopes, turning them so the initials and dates written on the flaps were visible. “Sorry, not on these. There aren’t people in these photos, just landscapes, trees, animals, sunrises, that kind of thing. I can tell because the sealed sleeve is marked with the initials and date of the person who checked the memory card before I was allowed to keep it. These individuals would delete any photo that had a person in it, whether it was one of them or a stranger’s baby—if a person, it’s gone.”

The dates covered a variety of random years, some recent, the oldest eight years ago. “How many photos are here?”

“I’d guess between five hundred and a thousand across these memory cards. I don’t know if they can still be read or if they’ve gone bad.”

“A camera shop will have the adaptor needed to read them. If you don’t mind me looking at them, I’ll see which cards are still good, load the photos onto my laptop, then get them transferred to a flash drive for you.”

She dumped the smaller envelopes back into the larger one and handed it to him. “I appreciate the help. Take these other items to Paul, would you?”

“We’ll swing by and drop them off on the way to the apartment. Is there anything else we can check in this area?”

“There are a few places I don’t want to be the one to disturb. But there is something . . .” She tugged a notepad out of her canvas bag and flipped to a blank page. “Do me a favor and put this note in the box you just emptied. Flynn might convince the shop owner to open the old box for him by saying he lost his key.”

He read the note:
Flynn, I needed
the baseballs as a gift for my brother and dad
. Shannon

“He should know me well enough to see right through the note. He knows I’m not going to give stolen goods to my family. But if someone else is with him, it’s an explanation that would seem plausible for the empty box. If they think it’s me, they’ll react differently than if they think it’s the cops who cleared it.”

“You don’t mind tipping Flynn to the fact you’re alive.”

“He would already be acting on the assumption I might be. It won’t change his behavior much to have it confirmed. And it might be . . . useful if he thought I was alive and talking to the cops. It might speed up whatever he’s doing this summer.”

Matthew wanted more details about Flynn, about what might be going on in the family, but didn’t think probing would get his questions answered just yet. “Give me a minute.” He walked back into the store and put the note in the box.

Matthew tabbed through the pictures Shannon had taken. Driftwood. Beaches. Sand crabs. Ocean waves. “Do you remember where you took these photos?”

Shannon came over to the kitchen table and looked over his shoulder at the laptop screen as he moved through the images. “Yes.”

“Would you tell me something about that place?”

“One day I might,” she replied lightly. “It’s not that far from Boston. I’ll show it to you.”

He turned to look at her. It was the first time she’d hinted at coming east. “I’d like that.”

“I’m not going to want to be in Chicago once this becomes public. The East Coast is not the most pleasant place to drive with all the traffic congestion, but there are some nice places I wouldn’t mind revisiting as a tourist.”

He nodded and turned back to the laptop. She’d offered something he’d be able to come back to at another time. He looked at more of the images. “They really are good photographs. Nice compositions, interesting subjects. These”—he pointed out two—“are visually stunning.”

“Thanks.”

He’d been loading the memory cards without a problem. Even the oldest ones had been readable. “Is this all your photos, these cards?”

“No . . . there are more.”

He caught something in her voice. “Shannon?”

She slid into the seat across from him with a small shrug. “It was how I survived, staying out of people’s way and spending my time with a camera when I wasn’t expected to be doing something else. They photographed and indexed every item they were going to store and later sell, and it was tedious work. A good photograph meant a better sale price could be negotiated before they actually risked transporting the item to the buyer. I volunteered to do it because it kept me out of the way of what else was going on. Since they could check my work with what I had on the memory card, they let me take the photos.

“I convinced them the better I handled a camera, the better the photos I could take for them. I could carry around one of the older cameras so long as they saw the thumbprints showing every photo on the card and deleted what they didn’t like. And I could keep the old memory cards of photos so long as I bought a new memory card to replace the old one. I’d send these memory cards of photos away to storage; otherwise they had a habit of disappearing. Flynn would do that for me—drop off the memory cards at one of his private boxes. There are more cards I might be able to locate, depending on where Flynn put them.”

“These photos mean a lot to you.”

“They were the only things that were mine.”

He now understood why they mattered so much to her. Taking photos was the only thing in the eleven years where she’d been able to be herself. “Would you mind if I had the camera shop print these images for you onto decent photo paper?”

“That would get expensive.”

“Consider it a gift. I’ll take a copy of a couple photos I like as payment, hang them on the wall in my office one day.”

She hesitated, then nodded. “I would like to see them printed.”

There were 417 photos, and Matthew had the camera shop owner print the first 50 while he waited for the Chinese restaurant next door to prepare his to-go order.

The shop owner handed him a sturdy box holding the prints. “Yours?”

“A friend’s.”

“There are some stunning photos here. A few would look really sharp enlarged, maybe up to twenty by thirty. Keep that in mind when you look through them. I’ll offer a good price on the printing, even make it a trade if she’d share a few of the images. They’d make for good advertising in my window.”

“Yeah? That’s nice of you. I’ll let her know.”

Matthew told Shannon the shop owner’s remark after they’d finished dinner and she was opening the box of prints. “It’s been several years since you saw these photos if the memory cards have been stored for years. What do you think of your own work?” The photos spread across the tabletop made an impressive panorama.

“I think I liked nature,” she said with a smile, sorting through the images.

He picked up one. “You had to be high in a tree to get this perspective.”

“I’m sure I was. I enjoyed climbing trees and looking down at the world.”

He studied a few of them, appreciating how they’d turned out in print. “I told your brother we would be over around nine this evening. You could take a couple of these prints to them if you like.”

She considered the suggestion. “Not tonight, but I might enlarge and frame a couple of the better ones for him.”

Matthew thought that was a good idea. It would be a visual record of her missing years, but one of the few nice memories she’d been able to make for herself. “He’d like that, I’m sure.”

Jeffery welcomed Shannon to his home with a hug, introduced Cindy, and made a point of letting the women set off on a tour of the house without him. Matthew appreciated the move. He followed Jeffery into the living room, accepted with a thanks the soda already poured.

“She’s looking more rested,” Jeffery remarked.

“She had a good day.”

“Now, you . . . you’re looking worse.”

“There’s a diary from the first month,” Matthew replied, and he proceeded to heavily edit what he chose to say about its contents. This journey with Shannon was going to require bearing up under very difficult information, and Jeffery seemed prepared to deal with that reality. Matthew gave Jeffery points for simply nodding when he finished.

Matthew made sure Shannon was upstairs with Cindy before he turned the conversation to what was coming this evening. The good parts of the evening were coming to an end. A root canal without Novocain was how he would describe what was ahead. Matthew took a deep swallow of the drink he’d been handed. “Are you ready?”

Jeffery paced. “Are you sure about this—doing it tonight?”

“It has to be done. Make it as simple and as direct as you can. Don’t bury the lead or try to downplay it. Just level emotion. ‘I love you, we’re family, Mom made a mistake a long time ago, and I wanted you to hear about it from me rather than from some reporter.’”

Jeffery shook his head. “I’m about to hurt the innocent person in this family who has already taken enough hurts for a lifetime. It would be easier to take a bullet.”

Matthew understood the sentiment. “You’re feeling what she’s about to. At least you’ll be able to truly empathize. You’ve warned your parents?”

“Yes.”

“Can either one of them handle a conversation with her tonight?”

“I wouldn’t recommend it. Mom’s already sobbing her heart out, and Dad’s basically the opposite—emotionally numb. Mom would give Shannon a variation of ‘I’m so sorry. You must hate me. I never wanted you to find out this way. Your father was so focused on the business I never saw him,’ and turn self-absorbed throughout the conversation. Dad wants to apologize and say the marriage was having some problems, he’s deeply upset she had to learn about her past this way, that the divorce wasn’t about her but about the affair and that he couldn’t rebuild trust with her mom. He won’t be able to get
through it to say a clean ‘I love you, Shannon,’ even though he gets there by the time he’s done. Neither one are going to be helpful to Shannon. She needs a hug, an ‘I love you, and it’s going to be okay,’ and neither will be able to give her that tonight. They’ll be piling their own history of marriage troubles onto Shannon’s shoulders while breaking her heart.”