“I think there might be a connection.” Antony rubs his jaw as he ponders. “The timing fits, at least. Why would Micha have a copy of this at all?”
“Did Cherry know Micha?” I can’t even believe I’m suggesting the idea, but my imagination is starting to run wild. Did my brother know Cherry before I ever met her? Did he figure out she was somehow tied to the Ramsays? “Do you think that’s why she’s here?”
“I can only look shit up, boss; I can’t read minds. It seems a little too coincidental though I suppose it could be an accident.”
“An accident,” I mutter and then laugh.
“Boss?”
“Accident, Maryland,” I say. “That’s the name of her hometown. At least, that’s what she’s told me.”
“Right. I remember that.”
“What else did you say was in there?” I ask.
“You mean in Micha’s file?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, there wasn’t a lot. Let me get the whole thing.” Antony leaves the office to retrieve the file.
“You think you’re playing her,” Pops says, “but maybe it’s the other way around.”
“Fuck you,” I mutter. “Whatever is going on here, I don’t think Cherry knows anything about it.”
Even as the words come out of my mouth, I’m starting to doubt them.
“You’re even more naïve than she appears to be.”
Antony comes back into the room with a file folder in his hands. He drops it on the desk and opens it up.
At the front of the file is one of those advertising mailers full of coupons to various local businesses, unopened. The postmark date on the envelope is the second of March, last year. Antony flips the small stack of papers to the back and finds that the last item in the file is an empty business envelope, also postmarked during the previous March.
“If Micha wanted to date his research without putting a date on the file, this is how he’d do it.”
“Yeah, Pops has talked about doing things like this before. March second to March tenth. What else is in there?”
“The original birth certificate and the copy were right after the first envelope,” Antony says. He places the documents back where he found them. “Then there’s the rest of it.”
He flips through each item slowly.
The first is a group of receipts stapled together. When I pull them apart, I find a receipt from a Mexican restaurant in Cascade Falls and two invoices addressed to the Big O. One is a shipping invoice for various bottles of wine, and the other listed a variety of cheeses and their price per pound.
“I remember this,” I say, holding up the invoices. “Micha wanted to do a wine and cheese pairing at the club.”
“Yeah, that sounds familiar. I thought it was a stupid idea. Did you notice the address on the cheese receipt?”
I take a closer look at the receipt and immediately see what he’s talking about. I let out a long breath.
“A cheese shop in Accident, Maryland.”
“Yeah. Weird, huh?”
“Too weird.” I shake my head. “What about the restaurant?”
“No idea why it’s in there.”
I replace the receipts and look at the next item. Behind the invoices is a grainy, black-and-white photo of a man ushering a very pregnant woman into a boxy, nineties-style sedan. On the back of the photo is a sticky note with “72 S. St” written on it. I pull it off and hold it up to Antony.
“What do you think this is?” I ask, and Antony takes the paper from my hand.
“Do we have a family code I don’t know anything about?”
“Not unless no one told me, either.”
“The ‘S’ could stand for south.” He hands the paper back to me.
“South Street?” I flip the paper over, but there’s no other information.
“Yeah. It could be an address.”
“Is this on the west side? I didn’t know there was a South Street in Cascade Falls.”
“There isn’t.”
“If it isn’t a street in Cascade Falls, where is it?”
“Maybe it’s a safe deposit box number, or a locker number, or a PO box number.”
The final item in the file is a newspaper clipping. It doesn’t contain a date or a newspaper name, just a short article about an antique shop being temporarily closed due to the owner’s illness.
“This is Cherry’s aunt’s shop.”
“Yeah, I noticed that.”
I shake my head. I can’t make heads or tails out of any of this. Why was my brother investigating Cherry a full year ago? What does this have to do with his death or her birth parents? Most importantly, what does Cherry know about any of this?
“What the fuck is going on here, Antony?”
“I don’t know, boss.” He leans against the desk and looks over the documents splayed in front of us. He huffs a breath through his nose. “I think we need a second opinion.”
“If you mention Nora, I’ll break your jaw.” The last thing I need is my nosy, opinionated sister digging around in all of this and throwing it back in my face.
“No, not your sister—Threes. He’s really good at mysteries and puzzles, and he might be able to piece shit together better than we can. If we pick that guy up, we’re going to need Threes anyway, so we might as well tell him why.”
Threes isn’t pleased about being woken up at four in the morning, but he stumbles down the stairs to hear us out. Antony brings him up to speed, and then Threes goes over the information in the file himself.
“This does look like Micha’s handwriting,” Threes says as he holds up the sticky note. “He always made those weird sevens with the mark across them like that. I don’t know about a South Street though.”
“It must not be in Cascade Falls.”
“What about this place in Maryland?”
