The second letter was worse.
The third was worse again.
By the fifth, she had fallen behind on rent.
By the eighth, she had sold Kyle’s pickup.
By the tenth, she was working a second job.
By the twelfth, Emory had been pulled out of dance lessons.
By the fourteenth, Claire was not even asking us for money anymore.
She only wanted someone to call her.
The last letter contained six words.
Please tell me what I did.
I set it down.
No one said anything.
The three hundred men beyond that office would have crossed state lines to bring Kyle home if he had ever been stranded beside a highway.
But his wife had mailed her suffering to us one envelope at a time.
And someone had hidden every single word.
I looked around the table.
“Find Grant.”
We located his truck before we located him.
At seven the following morning, one of our prospects spotted it behind an old storage facility outside Broken Arrow.
Grant was inside Unit 214.
He made no attempt to run.
When we arrived, he was sitting on a folding chair drinking gas-station coffee with banker boxes stacked all around him.
He looked exhausted.
He did not look afraid.
That disturbed me more.
Mickey wanted to enter first.
I told everybody to remain outside except Ray.
Grant watched as I walked in.
“Morning, Dawson.”
“You disappear the same night Kyle’s daughter turns up and you expect me to call that a coincidence?”
“Good.”
I looked around at the boxes.
“Claire’s letters.”
He nodded.
“You hid them.”
“Yes.”
Ray took an angry step toward him.
I put out an arm.
“Why?”
Grant dragged both hands across his face.
“You’re going to hate the answer.”
“I already hate every possible answer.”
He pointed toward a metal lockbox.
“Open it.”
Ray did.
Inside were flash drives, handwritten ledgers, photocopies of bank statements, a small key, and an old digital recorder.
Grant pointed at the recorder.
“Play file seven.”
I lifted it.
“Who made this recording?”
“You already know.”
I pressed the button.
Static hissed.
Then came a voice.
Kyle.
Two years disappeared in half a second.
“Testing. If this thing works, Dawson is going to make fun of me for owning technology manufactured after 1998.”
Ray sat down.
My throat tightened shut.
Kyle gave a quiet laugh on the recording.
Then his tone changed.
“If you’re listening to this because something happened to me, don’t panic and don’t start accusing people. Especially Wade. Wade looks guilty eating breakfast.”
Even then, Ray almost smiled.
Kyle continued.
“There’s a problem with the chapter accounts. Bigger than I thought. Family funds are being redirected. Not only ours. Memorial money, hardship payments, education funds. Small amounts at first. Enough that nobody notices unless they look across years.”
I stared at Grant.
Kyle’s recorded voice continued.
“I’ve been working with Grant.”
Ray’s head snapped up.
Grant stayed silent.
“We think somebody with access to the chapter’s outside accounts is using temporary holding companies to move money. Grant is keeping copies because I don’t know who else is involved.”
My fingers tightened around the recorder.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” I whispered.
Kyle answered from two years in the past as though he had heard me.
“I know what Dawson will say. Why not bring it to the table? Because I don’t have proof yet.”
The recording ended with a click.
Ray stood up.
“You were helping him?”
Grant nodded.
“Then why did you hide Claire’s letters?”
“Because the account theft kept happening after Kyle died.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means whoever Kyle had been searching for was still inside the chapter.”
“You thought it was one of us.”
“I knew it was.”
Grant looked toward the open door of the storage unit.
“Not yet.”
Ray slammed both palms down on one of the boxes.
“Quit playing games.”
“I’m not.”
“You let Claire lose her home.”
Grant flinched.
“You let that little girl go hungry.”
“I didn’t know things had gotten that bad.”
“You hid every letter!”
“Because whoever controlled the transfers was monitoring incoming chapter correspondence.”
I stepped toward him.
“You could have come to me.”
Grant met my eyes.
“Kyle told me not to.”
That struck in a different way.
Grant pointed toward another flash drive.
“Kyle believed your login credentials had been used.”
“My credentials?”
“Three transfers were approved under your name.”
“I never approved a transfer.”
“I believe you.”
“Did Kyle?”
Grant paused.
That tiny hesitation almost broke something inside me.
“Did he?”
The answer came fast.
“He believed you.”
My shoulders relaxed by a fraction.
“Then what was he worried about?”
“That someone close enough to you could use your identity.”
“Who had access?”
I already knew the answer.
My computer in the office.
My laptop at home.
The password binder we once kept inside the safe before encrypted accounts became standard.
Officers.
Secretaries.
Treasurers.
Far too many people.
Grant picked up the small key from the lockbox.
“Kyle gave me this four days before the crash.”
“What does it unlock?”
“Then why did you keep it?”
“He told me that if his family ever came back to the clubhouse desperate, I was supposed to give this to Emory.”
Ray stared at Grant.
“What kind of instruction is that?”
“The kind a man gives when he thinks something could happen.”
A cold feeling moved across my skin.
“Are you telling me Kyle knew he was going to die?”
“Then what exactly are you telling me?”
Grant looked at me for a long moment.
“I’m telling you Kyle didn’t trust the future.”
Claire left the hospital that afternoon.
We put her and Emory in a hotel twenty times better than the roadside motel where they had been staying.
Claire argued about it.
Maggie won.
Maggie always won.
By that evening, their room resembled an emergency command center. Takeout containers covered the table. Emory sat cross-legged on the bed wearing headphones and watching cartoons while Claire went through copies of the letters we had recovered.
I told her everything Grant had told us.
She listened without interrupting me.
When I finished, she looked toward Emory.
“Kyle never said anything about an investigation.”