She Discovered Too Late novel · Chapter 13 of 24

Chapter 13: Still Alive

Miriam sat down in Colby's desk chair and did not turn on the lamp.

The light from the hall fell across the folder, and that was enough.

She laid the first photograph face down on the blotter.

The second one showed a thin man in a rain jacket, carrying a lunch pail across a loading yard.

I knew the jacket. I had bought it at a thrift store in Toledo for six dollars, the week after I left.

On the back Colby had written: Toledo. Eight weeks out. Warehouse job, nights.

The third photograph was the same warehouse, and the same man, with a cardboard box in his arms and a guard behind him.

On the back: Fired. One phone call to the site manager did it.

Miriam read that line three times with her lips moving.

I stood behind her chair and remembered the box.

I had carried a coffee mug and a pair of work gloves out to the bus stop in it.

Nobody had told me why. The manager had only said he was sorry, and that it came from above him.

I had spent a year thinking I was unlucky.

She turned over the next photograph, and the next.

A foundry in Akron: Fired. Called the foreman, said he had a record.

A shipping depot: Fired. Called the owner, said he stole.

A room above a laundromat, with my face in the window: Moved again. He is running out of towns.

I had no record, and I had never stolen anything in my life.

At the bottom of the folder she found a stapled sheet.

It was an invoice from a private investigator, and under it lay a stack of the same invoice, one for every month.

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