Chapter 2

"What did you see out there?" Cori asked, when I stood up.

"Nothing," I said. "I'm going to check the van."

She watched me put my boots on. She had her phone in her hand and she was already scrolling for a number, and she said, without looking up, "I'm calling your aunt's house. Somebody needs to tell your mother that her dead husband's building has a light on."

"Ruth's in Toledo."

"Then she can hear it from me."

I went out the side door and down the concrete steps into the wet, and the first thing that hit me was how loud rain is on gravel. It fills the alley like a crowd.

I walked toward the cold storage because I could not think of one good reason not to. Twenty paces. The dock chain was heavy in my hand when I lifted it - and it was warm. Not cold metal and rain. Warm, from a hand that had been holding it minutes before.

I dropped it and it swung.

There was a grocery bag on the dock, set down carefully out of the run of the water, and inside the bag was the dented stainless thermos. I knew that thermos before I picked it up. My father carried it to every auction from 1988 until he stopped going. My mother scratched her initials under the lid with an ice pick because a man at the fair took his by mistake once and she never let it happen again. R.H. Right there under my thumb, cut crooked.

Still warm.

Standing there with rain running off the bill of my cap, I went back. Not on purpose. That alley does it to me. It is thirty-two feet long and I have walked it about nine thousand times and about four hundred of those times I have ended up on the night of September 12, 2009.

Harvest Fair Saturday. I was twenty-two. I'd been up doing the books at the house until after midnight because my father wanted the fuel invoices reconciled before Monday. I couldn't sleep. Around one I remembered the auction crew had left the dock open, so I pulled on a jacket and went out the side door with a flashlight and no shoes, just boots and pajama pants, because I figured it would take four minutes.

I was halfway down the alley when the back door of the cold storage opened.

My father came out carrying the green metal cash box. Two handles, chipped green paint, thirty-eight thousand four hundred dollars in unrecorded settle-up cash that Cori had counted that afternoon at the auction desk and put in the safe because my father never took the deposit to the bank until Monday.

He carried it like a man carrying a box of eggs. Down the three concrete steps, across the gravel, to the auction truck. He lifted the tarp and set it in the bed, snug against the wheel well, and then he folded the tarp back over it and smoothed it down with the flat of his hand.

He stood there a while with his hands on the tailgate. Long enough that I started to shake from the cold.

Then he turned around and looked straight down the alley at me.

I had the flashlight down at my side. The rain was coming soft and steady. There was maybe forty feet between us. He didn't look surprised. That's the part I've never been able to put down - he looked at me like he'd been expecting me, and he'd decided what he was going to do about it, and what he was going to do was nothing.

"Go in the house, Nate," he said.

So I went in the house.

The next morning the safe was empty. And Cori told them she'd seen Dean in the office window. And my father said nothing, and I stood in the same kitchen I'm standing in now with a cup of coffee in my hand, and I said nothing, and by October my brother was gone.

I looked up at the office window. Empty. Then the bug light clicked off, hard and sudden, and the whole alley went blue-black and the rain kept coming down.

I took the thermos inside and put it under the van seat, where Cori never looks.

She was at the table with the phone against her ear and a notepad in front of her, and she'd written Deb - no answer and underlined it twice.

"Anything out there?" she said.

"Just the chain," I said.