"He brought motorcycles here over the years. A decent man. Worked on anything that would sit still long enough." Reese looked toward the framed picture on his kitchen wall of the club's charity ride several summers earlier. Grant was somewhere near the back of the photograph with a little girl grown almost into a woman beside him. Reese had not recognized her standing cold and exhausted beneath his garage lights.
Aldis went on. Grant had died of pancreatic cancer the previous winter. His business had transferred to a partner named Harlon Neil through an amended agreement executed during Grant's illness. Willa had challenged the transfer and claimed the final paperwork differed from the agreement her father had intended to sign. Two attorneys in West Haven had reviewed what she could obtain and declined to pursue the case, and one had told her she would need stronger original evidence before anyone could reasonably challenge a registered transfer.
Harlon Neil, Aldis explained, was well regarded in the local business community. He sat on the chamber board, sponsored junior hockey teams, and had helped finance a new wing at the public library. His name appeared in photographs beside mayors, school trustees, and owners of businesses he had supported. None of that proved wrongdoing, Aldis said, just as Willa's allegations by themselves did not prove fraud. What interested him was that a private investigator named Daniel Tulloch had been asking about Willa in several towns and appeared to be driving the navy sedan near the garage.
"What does Neil think she has?" Reese asked.
"I can't tell you. But a man doesn't usually keep paying a private investigator to follow somebody who has no significance to him." Aldis paused. "The important thing is to speak to her before you do anything. If there are documents, she needs a lawyer. And if she's being threatened, she needs to make a record of that rather than relying on a bunch of bikers to scare a car away."
"That's why I called you."
"I know," Aldis said. "And that's why I'm telling you what I know, not what I suspect."
Reese remained at the kitchen table for some time after the call. He thought about Grant's hands, always slightly stained around the nails, and about a roadside repair the man had done for Fig once without charging him. He remembered Willa's answer about the frame crack, the calmness that seemed borrowed from a place she had once known, and the way she had stared at a locked bedroom door as if safety were a language she had forgotten how to speak. He wondered whether Grant's daughter had arrived at Northern Shields entirely by chance or whether some part of her had been looking for a place her father once trusted.
The next morning Reese asked Willa to come into the office before work. He left the door open, and Fig remained at the parts counter outside, close enough to hear if she needed him but not so close that the conversation would turn into a public examination. Willa came in carrying an intake folder and did not sit until Reese asked. She had begun to learn the shop's habits, but the request still made her wary.