My Ex-Fiancé's Memory Game novel · Chapter 11 of 24
Chapter 11: The Bridge
On Wednesday night Sam picked me up at eleven.
"Wear sneakers," he'd texted. "We're walking the drop."
The Strawberry Mansion Bridge is old and green, with lamps along the rail.
Carter proposed to me on it at sunset, two years ago, with a violinist.
We parked on the east side and walked down the path under the bridge, with Sam's flashlight bobbing ahead of us.
"Here," Sam said.
A green city trash can, chained to a post beside a park service road.
"Your father put the bag in at two in the morning, June twelfth. He drove it down himself. They told him no cops, no cars following, or Carter loses a finger."
My father had stood right here, in the dark, alone, with two million dollars and his heart in his mouth.
"So nobody saw who took it."
"Nobody saw anybody. At six a.m. the bag was gone."
He pointed his flashlight down the service road.
Fifty yards along, a metal gate crossed it, painted yellow, with a padlock the size of my fist.
"That road's the only way a car gets down here," Sam said. "The gate's locked every night at dusk. City Parks keeps the keys."
"So whoever picked it up walked in?"
"With twenty-two pounds of cash? Up that hill?" He shook his head. "The gate camera got one bad picture."
He took out his phone and showed me.
A gray square of night. The yellow gate, standing open. The back half of a pickup truck going through it with no lights on.
On the driver's door, half in shadow, there was a logo.
A white oak leaf inside a circle.
I took the phone out of his hand.
I know that leaf.
I closed my eyes and went looking for it.
A porch. Heat. Sand on the floorboards. Margate, two summers ago, the Fourth of July.
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