They went on a Saturday morning in early March. Naomi drove the Skylark, with Mr. Tolliver beside her on the bench seat telling her stories about her father she had never heard, like the night Walter rebuilt the barbershop's furnace in a cold snap and refused to take a dime for it. When they pulled into the driveway of the split-level on the north side, Ray Brandt was standing in his open garage under the old sheet-metal sign, and he did not move for a long moment after the Skylark rolled to a stop. He just looked at it.
Then he came down the driveway, slowly, on bad knees, and stopped a few feet from the driver's door, and Naomi got out.
He was a small man, smaller than she had expected, with a big white mustache and a Cardinals windbreaker and eyes the same washed-out blue as his son's. He looked at her and then past her, at Mr. Tolliver getting out of the passenger side with his cane, and his face did something complicated.
"Mr. Tolliver," he said. "Lord. I remember you."
"I remember you, too, Ray," Mr. Tolliver said. "You were a skinny kid."
"I was." Ray turned back to Naomi. "Captain. I'm not going to make you stand out here and listen to me talk. I've got a lot to say and none of it's any good to you. I just want to give you two things."
He reached into the pocket of the windbreaker and brought out a key.
It was a long, old-fashioned GM key, the twin of the one on her father's ring, its brass worn smooth, and tied to it with a loop of string was a yellowed manila tag. On the tag, in faded pencil, it said: SKYLARK 72 GRN — WHITFIELD — HOLD.
"My father kept a board," Ray said. "Behind the desk. A spare key to every car he ever sold on a note, and some he didn't. When he died I put all of them in a coffee can and I couldn't make myself throw them out. I don't know why. I went through that can last week, after Kyle told me. This one was in there." He held it out to her, and his hand trembled. "Your father paid for that car in full, and my family kept a key to it for forty-seven years anyway. In case. That's what HOLD meant. In case."
Naomi took the key. It was cold and heavier than it looked. She closed her hand around it.
"And this," Ray said, and turned, and Kyle came out of the garage carrying the green ledger, and handed it to his father, and Ray held it out to her with both hands. "It's everything. Every car he reported stolen that wasn't. Every name. Some of them are probably still in that computer, the way yours was. Kyle says there's an audit coming. I want them to have this. I want you to give it to them, not me, because they'll listen to you and they won't listen to an old man who sold used cars." He paused. "Mr. Tolliver's name is in there. Nineteen seventy-seven."
Mr. Tolliver said nothing for a moment. Then he said, mildly, "I know it is, Ray. I was there."