Chapter 4 - The Bus Station Locker
The notebook pages felt heavy in my hands, like sheets of lead. I stared at the sentence—*If anything happens to me, check the locker at the bus station*—and felt the ground beneath my feet dissolve entirely.
Three years. For three years, I had mourned a simple, senseless tragedy. I had spent a thousand Sunday mornings kneeling by a patch of manicured grass, believing that my son’s death was nothing more than the cruel, random lottery of wet asphalt and bad luck.
Now, sitting in a drafty, run-down house at the end of a dead-end street, the past began to reassemble itself into something terrifyingly calculated.
"Did you ever go?" I asked, looking up from the notebook, my voice barely audible over the hum of the kitchen refrigerator. "To the bus station?"
Maya shook her head slowly, her eyes wide with lingering terror. "I didn't dare, Diane. The day after the funeral, a black sedan sat parked outside my apartment for twelve hours straight. No one got out, but the message was clear. I was being watched. If I went poking around a bus station locker with Caleb’s name on it, I was afraid I’d end up wrapped around a concrete pillar too."
A shiver racked my frame. The paranoia I had always associated with crime dramas was suddenly sitting in this quiet kitchen, wearing the face of the man I had shared a bed with for twenty-two years.
"Mark is out of town," I said, the realization forming like a cold strategy in my mind. "He went to Albany for a three-day regional accounting convention. He doesn't come back until Tuesday night."
Maya’s expression hardened, caution warring with a desperate need for closure. "What are you saying, Diane?"
"I'm saying we are going to the bus station."
She stood up abruptly, pacing toward the small window that looked out onto the overgrown front lawn. "And do what? Walk up to a clerk and ask for a lost locker key? Caleb died three years ago, Diane. That locker has been cleared out, rented to someone else, or emptied by sanitation months ago."
"Maybe," I said, standing up and sliding Caleb’s notebook securely into the inside pocket of my coat. "Or maybe Mark didn't know about the notebook. If Mark didn't know Caleb kept a written record of the drop-offs, he wouldn't know to check for a physical stash."
I looked at Maya, seeing the fierce, intelligent spark in her eyes that I had been too blind to notice when she was just the grieving teenage girlfriend three years ago. We weren't enemies anymore. We were the only two people left who loved Caleb enough to want the truth, no matter how ugly it turned out to be.
"Buster," I called softly.
The scruffy mixed breed trotted out from the hallway, his tail giving a tentative, rhythmic thump against the floorboards. He looked up at me with those wise, sorrowful brown eyes, as if he understood that the game of hide-and-seek was finally over.
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"Come on," I said to Maya, grabbing my car keys from the counter. "Let's go see what my husband has been hiding in a bus station locker for three years."
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