She had known that envelope was there her whole life. When she was little she had thought it was a game, the way he would tap the glove box with two fingers every time they passed a police car, the way he would say "papers are in the box, baby girl," the way other fathers might say "buckle up." When she was a teenager she had found it embarrassing. When she was older, after she had been pulled over twice on the same stretch of highway outside Dover on her way to the base, she had stopped finding it embarrassing and had started carrying her own registration in a clear sleeve clipped to her visor, and she had never told him so, and she wished now that she had.
After he died she had taken the registration and insurance cards out of the envelope and replaced them with her own. She had not looked at anything else in it. It had felt like reading someone's diary.
She took it into the kitchen now and slid the rubber band off. It broke in her fingers.
Inside, under her current registration, was a folded sheet of thin yellow carbon paper. A bill of sale. BRANDT AUTO SALES, it said across the top in a typeface that looked like a circus poster, QUALITY USED CARS SINCE 1961, and an address on Fulton Avenue, on the east side, a street she remembered from childhood as a row of car lots strung with plastic pennants that snapped in the wind. 1972 Buick Skylark, Willow Mist, white vinyl top, and the VIN, and a mileage of 41,600. Sold to Walter E. Whitfield. Price: $1,150.00. PAID IN FULL — CASH, it said, and someone had stamped it, and below that was a signature in a big confident loop. Raymond Brandt.
Brandt.
She sat very still.
Under the bill of sale was a second document, a carbon of a carbon, almost too faint to read. A receipt for cash, the same amount, the same date, the same signature, and in the corner, in her father's printing, a note: Counted it out on his desk. Mr. Lyle Tolliver witness. Below that was a third sheet, a white one, with the seal of the Calder County Municipal Court, dated six weeks later. In the matter of the State versus Walter E. Whitfield, charge of auto theft, the charge was dismissed. Nolle prosequi. And clipped to that, last of all, with a paper clip that had rusted a perfect orange outline onto all four sheets, was an index card in her father's hand that said:
They took me out of the car on Marquette Street in front of Naomi's day care. Officer asked whose car is this. I said mine. He said that's not what the paperwork says. Spent two nights in county. Lost the job at Pepsi bottling. Got the job at the bus garage instead so I guess it worked out. Keep the papers in the car. Always keep the papers in the car. — W.E.W., 1979.
Naomi put the card down on the table and put her hand flat over it, as if it might blow away.
She had been six months old in 1979. She did not remember any of it. Her father had never told her. Her mother, who had left when Naomi was six and who lived in Atlanta now and called on birthdays, had never told her either. She thought of the red grease pencil crossing off days on the refrigerator calendar, and the hammer under the seat, and the two fingers tapping the glove box, and she understood that for forty-four years her father had been driving around inside a question that someone had asked him once on Marquette Street, and that he had decided, quietly, without telling anyone, to keep the answer ready for the rest of his life.
And tonight, forty-seven years later, the question had been asked again. Same car. Same words. And the name on the cop's chest was the name on the bill of sale.
It could be a coincidence. Calder was not a small city, but it was not a big one either, and Brandt was not an unusual name. She told herself that firmly, and then she did what she did with every coincidence she encountered in an accident investigation, which was to write it down in a separate column on the legal pad headed OPEN QUESTIONS and refuse to believe it or disbelieve it until she had evidence.
Then she turned to a fresh page and began to make a plan.