When I caught up to them, Clara was standing at the back of the delivery van, staring at the closed door.
August had left her side and was bent over the rusted can that Aria had once used to water her plants.
“Want me to open it?” I asked.
She sucked in a deep breath, nodding as she blew it out. “Yes.”
The latch was rusted and stiff but after a hard tug, it sprang free. The scrape of metal on metal echoed across the yard along with an ear-splitting squeak as I lifted the door.
I hopped up into the back, surveying the space. Then I held out a hand to help Clara up so she wouldn’t get that dress dirty.
She didn’t let my hand go as she looked around. Her grip tightened when she saw the wreckage of old books and blankets shoved against the far wall.
An animal had gotten in here at one point and had turned the pages and cloths into shreds. A bed of its own.
Clara bent down, picking up something from the floor. The dry-erase marker. The one they’d used to track their countdown on the wall. She held it up, inspecting it for a moment, then tossed it into the mess. “It’s small.”
“It all feels small.”
A place that had once felt so vast, like a continent of its own, had been reduced to its three acres by time and age and reality.
“I’m not taking a picture of this.” She spun away, ripped her hand free and was on the ground before I could blink.
I took one last glance, wishing it hadn’t been like this for Clara’s sake, and left it behind, not bothering to close the door. Then I jogged to catch them on their way to the shop since I had the keys.
Going in first, I flipped on the lights. “I’m surprised so many work.”
The smell of gasoline and oil was thick from years of sitting. I had no idea if the equipment would work, but I’d let someone else deal with that.
I checked my watch. It was nearly eight. “I’d better head out front to meet the developer.”
“We’ll come with you.” Clara backed away from the shop and we all walked toward Lou’s front door. “Did you decide what you want to do with it?”
“Sell it.” Now that I’d come here and seen it again, there was no reason to hold on to an old junkyard. “I’d like to go through Lou’s shack. Make sure there isn’t anything inside to keep. But there’s nothing for me here.”
“Not quite.” Clara looked up at me with a sad smile. “There was something here. I think that’s why Lou left it to you. Because he knew that you needed to come here and be the one to put it to rest.”
I almost tripped over my own damn feet. “How do you do that?”
“Do what?”
“Say what I’m feeling but haven’t figured out how to articulate.”
Her eyes softened. “I’m glad we came here.”
“Me too.”
We rounded the corner just as a large white truck pulled up behind the Cadillac. A man in a nice pair of jeans and a button-down shirt hopped out, raising one hand to wave while he held a notebook in the other.
“Would you mind if I went into Lou’s?” Clara asked.
“Not at all.” I handed her the keys, then winked at August before going to shake the developer’s hand.
I spent the next thirty minutes taking him on a tour of the junkyard. He told me about his plans for the neighborhood and the park he’d be adding on this section of land. Maybe it wouldn’t happen, but I liked the idea of this being a place for kids to play. A safe place for future generations, like it had been for me.
“There’s a lot here,” I told him as we walked back to his truck. “I don’t have the time or energy to sift through it all. So I’ll sell it to you, as-is.”
“How much?”
“Make me a fair offer based on the valuation of the land.”
He nodded. “I’ll have my realtor draw it up today.”
“Great.” I shook his hand once more, waited until he was gone, then headed for the shack.
August was sitting at the same table where I’d once sat with Lou. He looked bored out of his mind with one hand holding up his head. When he spotted me, he sat up straight. “Can we go now?”
“Soon,” I promised. “Where’s your mom?”
“Back here,” Clara called.
I found her in what had been Lou’s office. Or library. Or notebook-hoarding room. “Um . . . whoa.”
There were spiral-bound notebooks stacked against the walls in towering columns. Some almost as tall as me. Three bookshelves against the wall were so overloaded with books and binders that the shelves sagged in the middle beneath the weight.
“What’s in these?” I slid a notebook off the top of a stack and opened it to the first page. It was a series of numbers on the left side with a sketch of a car’s grill that took up the center. It had the make, model and year of the car it would have belonged to. At the bottom was a location. Zone 4.
“I think he had this entire place cataloged.” Clara had a few notebooks open on Lou’s desk, flipping through them. Page after page was more of the same. “I bet he knew what and where every single piece was. These were his treasures.”
I shook my head, unable to believe all that I was seeing. Lou must have spent years in here, detailing every scrap and every part on this property. I put the notebook back on the stack, then left the office, wandering deeper into the shack. Lou’s bedroom was at the rear of the building, and unlike the rest of his home, it was clutter-free.
Everything was filmed with dust, but the emptiness of the room was utterly shocking.
A bed rested in the center of the space, pushed against the far wall. On either side were two nightstands. One held a box. The other a framed photograph. The picture drew me in, and I skirted the bed to get a closer look.
It was of Lou, barely recognizable as a younger man, seated with a woman wearing a yellow polka-dot dress. His wife. He had a smile on his face. He looked happy. He’d been a different man.
In a different life.
“When he lost her, he lost his way.” Clara had snuck up on me and was peeking past my shoulder. With a sad smile, she went to the other nightstand, running her fingertips over the dusty box. Then she flipped the clasp to lift the lid and gasped at whatever was inside. “Karson.”
“What?” I rounded the bed to her side, the photograph of Lou and his wife still in my grip. There wasn’t much to save here but this picture was definitely coming home.
“It’s a letter. To you.” She lifted it out, then narrowed her gaze at whatever else was in the box. “Wait. There are more.”
She pulled out a stack of letters, sifting through them. Each had one of our names on top. Six letters for the six kids who’d lived here. There was more in the box, but my focus was on Lou’s neat and tidy script and the envelopes in Clara’s hands.
“Oh my God.” She rifled through the stack again.
“I can’t believe it.”
She nodded. “He even spelled Londyn’s name right. With a y. I didn’t know he actually knew our names.”
I blinked, unable to process what I was seeing.
“He left them for you to find,” she said. “He put all of his stuff in the other rooms, but this one was clean because he wanted you to see this box and that photo.”