Blake surveys the office in a long, sweeping glance, a wry twist to his mouth. "It was pretty over-the-top.”
It was, but it was also his father’s office. I’d never say a bad thing about it. "Well, he would have decorated it in the nineties. That was the style back in the day.”
“Eh. It’s okay. Gordon Gekko and Louis the Fourteenth had a love child, and he grew up and decorated my dad’s office. Hey, look at me, I can make a joke about it.” He grins, but his eyes are twin reflecting pools of hidden pain.
“I’m hardly one to talk about parental decorating choices. My mom and my dad have been in a decorating war since the day he carried her across the threshold. Both of them go for redneck chic, just in frighteningly clashing styles. I say that with love, of course.” I smile in reminiscence. “My father has deer heads and stuffed bass and an antique fishing pole mounted on the wall, and a big cracked-leather recliner that no one’s allowed to touch. My mother never saw a floral pattern she didn’t love, doesn’t matter what color or style. Also, she really misses having dogs, so she’s got needlepoint pillows with dogs everywhere, and dog statues, mixed in with all the flowery stuff.” As I’m talking about it, a well of nostalgia swells up in me. I need to visit Peach Pit soon.
Blake smirks. “I see where you get your sense of style from.”
“You mangy Yankee!” I elbow him. “I open up to you about my secret shame, and you hold it up to mockery.”
“Secret no longer. I’m adding it to your company bio and putting it on our website.”
“You know how I keep threatening to call Alice and find out your deepest fears?” I narrow my eyes at him.
He throws his hands up. “I surrender unconditionally. Your company bio is safe.”
Then he looks around the room, and his smirk fades to a faraway look of sorrow. The thousand-yard stare.
“This is a huge amount of space. I can't justify keeping it empty any longer. And emotionally, I think it's time for me to move on."
My throat squeezes in sympathy for him. As someone who came close to losing her mother, I can’t imagine the devastation of losing both parents. And at such a young age.
He walks over to the chair group, and I follow him. "I had a bunch of cleaning supplies and boxes brought up to my office. Would you be okay with boxing up everything in here? Including the stuff in the file cabinets? I can’t bring myself to do it, and I just wouldn’t trust anyone else with it. I know you’ll handle everything with respect and care.” He blinks hard a couple of times, and clears his throat. “You’d probably have to do a little dusting before you pack.” He runs his finger over the back of a chair, leaving a clean streak in the thick gray fur of dust. “I'm going to have everything brought to my house, and I can set it up in one of my empty rooms.”
His trust in me means more than I can put into words. He’s a proud man, and he’s exposing his tenderest innermost feelings to me. A hermit crab crawling out of its shell.
“I would be happy to,” I tell him.
The two of us walk back to Blake’s office in silence. Together, we push two carts full of boxes and cleaning supplies down the hall and into the office, and he hands me a set of keys.
Then he walks behind the desk and puts his hand on it. He stands there, his gaze slowly sweeping the room, eyes shining with emotion. “I just want to look at it one last time. I’m being a baby, I know.”
“No, you aren’t! It’s hard, Blake, I understand that.”
As his gaze sweeps the room, it lights on his father’s desk, and his expression changes. “That’s odd.”
I walk around to stand next to him, and follow his gaze. The desk drawers are slightly ajar, and there are scratch marks on the locks and claw marks around the corners. The desk is covered with a thick layer of dust, so it's obvious the marks aren’t new. Blake pulls open several of the drawers. One of them sticks. The wood around the drawer’s corners is chipped.
“What the hell?” he curses. He starts walking around the office. He checks out the file cabinet. “Same thing here! Jesus. Someone broke in here after my father died and pried open every damn drawer.”
He hurries over to a picture of his father standing next to a 1990s sitcom actress, grabs the frame, and swings it away from the wall. It’s on hinges. There’s a wall safe behind the picture, and he quickly turns the lock several times, then opens the door. There are stacks of files in there, and the papers in them are spilled out as if someone pawed through them and then shoved them back in.
“Do you want to call the police?”
His brow furrows in a scowl. He stares at the desk, and finally lets out his breath in a frustrated sigh. “Honestly, after twenty years, there's not much they could do. The trail will have long gone cold."
Poor Blake. This is the last thing he needs. “I imagine you’re right.”
He makes a wry face. “I’m going to go talk to the head of security, but he’s only been here a few years, and I doubt we’ll come up with anything. Go ahead and pack this up, please. I just want to get this over with.”
When he leaves, I dive right in. I start with the knickknacks, carefully bubble-wrapping the golf trophies and boxing them up, dusting as I go. Next, I pack the fashion magazines, resisting the urge to sit down and flip through them. Retro fashion is my jam, but I need to just hurry up and get through this, for Blake’s peace of mind.
Once the magazines are all boxed up, I move on to the files from the desk drawers.
I empty out all the drawers except the one that sticks. That one, I yank at violently, but it fails to budge. Finally I fetch a letter opener and I keep working it until it flies open.
As it opens, a thick envelope falls onto the floor. There’s tape on the back, as if it had been stuck to the top of the drawer above it, but the tape must have given way over time.
I sit there in Mr. Hudson’s massive overstuffed chair, staring at the envelope. This thing was important enough to hide – and is very likely what someone was in here searching for. I should show it to Blake right away.
Or should I?
He said he couldn’t face going through his father’s things. I hope it’s something harmless, but who hides harmless files by taping them underneath a drawer? If it’s blackmail pictures of his dad and some starlet, I’ll give it to Henry instead and let him decide the best course of action.
I open it up and pull out a sheaf of papers. On top of the sheaf is a hand-written letter, in big loopy letters, written in ink from a fountain pen. "Bill: This is your last chance. I'm sick of putting in more than my fair share. Your hands aren’t clean either, and I have the proof. You're going to pay the rest of this off, or I will expose you to everybody. I’ll go down too, and I don’t care. It doesn't matter anymore; I'm not going to keep living like a pauper. It’s not worth going on like this.”
It isn’t signed, but I’ve seen Raymond’s distinctive handwriting before on vintage Hudson’s advertising posters. And who else would it be?
A chill sweeps over me, raising the hairs on my arms. With shaking fingers, I flip through the papers beneath the letter. As far as I can figure out, these are Hudson’s bank accounts from the 1990s. There seem to be a lot of bank withdrawals, in the tens of thousands of dollars each. Overall, it would add up to at least hundreds of thousands, probably millions.