Why? Why would Whitaker hide all this? Why not sell one, just one, and live comfortably? Why entomb a fortune while the town around him faded? Clara’s eyes burned, not from the dust. From the enormity of it. From the weight of what she’d stepped into.
A mechanic with grease under her nails, behind on rent, raising a daughter alone, now sat in the middle of a secret worth more than the entire town of Blue Hollow combined. And no one knew. No one.
Back upstairs. The morning light had begun to seep through the broken window panes. Clara sat in the driver’s seat of her Suburban, hands gripping the wheel, staring out at nothing.
A million questions swirled in her mind. Was it legal? Could she even touch those cars? Did the world out there have any idea what was under her feet? She reached over and opened the glove box. Pulled out the flyer she’d first seen at Thompson’s.
She stared at the price again. $4,000. She let out a short, shaky laugh.
What the hell did I just buy? The morning haze hadn’t yet lifted from Blue Hollow when Clara stepped back into the garage. She’d barely slept. Her dreams had been a tangled mess of spinning tires and flickering headlights.
Of Evelyn asking questions Clara couldn’t answer. She stood silently in the bay, breathing in the cold, oil-stained air. The garage didn’t feel the same anymore.
Yesterday, it had been an old building she could barely afford. Today, it was a vault. A secret.
A burden. She turned on her flashlight and descended the stone steps again, each one heavier than the last. She walked past the Ferrari, past the Jaguar, past the Shelby Cobra gleaming beneath its dust-streaked tarp.
They didn’t shock her anymore. What shook her now was the why. Why were they here? Why her? At the Oak desk.
She opened the ledger again, hoping there was something she missed. She flipped back a few pages. And there it was, half a page.
Written in a different hand. Sloppier. More personal.
