“I suppose so. Just don’t sell anything Daddy gave you, either.”
Her mother rubbed the wedding band she’d never removed. “I never have and I never will.”
“Thanks for these.” Cara tucked the signet ring and watch into her purse. “I don’t really have anything that was specifically his.”
“Now you do.”
“Were they in the attic with his things?”
“No. I’d put them away for safekeeping. Then couldn’t find them, of course. So I turned the house upside down. Can’t you tell?”
“Not really,” Cara answered honestly. “It looks about the same as it always does.”
“Ungrateful child you are.” But there was a gleam of laughter in her mother’s eye. “So… Everything’s planned for your trip?”
“Yes. All set.”
“What if something happens to Glenn while you’re gone?” Her mother’s voice quavered a bit.
“Then they’ll call, Mom. Iris is going to be checking in with you and Glenn while I’m gone. I need this time away.”
“I know, honey. You work so hard. I’m sorry, I just worry…”
Cara leaned over and gave her mother a hug. “I know, but don’t, okay? I will come back refreshed and renewed and everything will be fine. Glenn is in good hands, and Iris will take care of anything you need while I’m gone.”
“Okay, honey. Do you mind if I take a nap before we eat?”
“Of course not. Get some rest and then we’ll go someplace fun.”
While her mother napped, Cara tried to read and just relax, but her mind kept wandering to work and Branden.
Eventually she put the book down. Having her father’s ring and grandfather’s watch made her want to see some more of her dad’s old things.
She climbed the pull-down stairs into the attic and found the boxes of things she and her mother had packed up and brought from the other house after her father had died. When she was younger, she’d come up here and sit next to the boxes and think about him, but she hadn’t had the strength to go through them.
Now she felt compelled to. She figured going through her father’s things would give her strength and ground her in her decision to leave Branden and D&M behind. After all, she and her mother had started anew after her father’s scandal. Her father hadn’t had that chance, but if he’d lived, Cara liked to think that he’d have done whatever he could to move on.
She sat down in the floor and began going through the boxes. She found his things from college, and his commendations from work. There were photos of him graduating high school. He looked so young and hopeful…it broke Cara’s heart that his life had been cut so short.
She pulled out a stack of paperwork; in it was his high school diploma, his college diploma, a copy of his degree from his business school, and some paperwork from his job with the city that must have been put into one of the wrong boxes.
One of the papers was a spreadsheet printed out on the city’s letterhead. It was a graph that had been charted out with red, blue, and green lines. The right side was a list of employee benefit funds and the top was a list of years. Across the bottom were monetary figures. The chart spanned the five years before her father was arrested. It had a date on the bottom indicating when it was printed off of Excel. That day had been a week before her father had been arrested.
Cara felt a tickle of excitement in the pit of her belly. Her father had been accused of embezzling from the city’s pension fund. Could this document have had something to do with that? Had he been looking into it? But if he had, why wouldn’t he have said so? Perhaps he had been looking into it but hadn’t come up with anything definitive. There was certainly nothing on the graph, as far as Cara could see, to exonerate him or incriminate Davies any further.
Cara tucked the graph safely into one of the file folders and took it downstairs with her. When she got back from vacation, she’d go through the rest of these boxes.
As Cara drove home, heavy clouds obscured the highest buildings in the Manhattan skyline as she headed west over the bridge. The signet ring was too big for her but she wore it anyway, on her thumb. She had a gold chain somewhere she could slide it onto. The pocket watch needed repair—did anyone still repair watches? Whatever the cost, it would