Driving home, Nolan replayed the way Pike's face had changed when he saw the cut. He imagined the photograph had been taken an hour before something terrible, or an hour after something ordinary and happy. Its only certainty was that his father had once stood close enough to protect him. The apartment felt colder than usual when he returned. A radiator knocked behind the wall and offered almost no heat. He set the box on the kitchen table beside the last clean plate in the cupboard and turned on the overhead light.
This time he removed every object. He examined the folded map, the photograph, the cloth, and the corners of the box. He checked beneath the lid and along the edges where the metal curled inward. When he lifted the cardboard liner at the bottom, he found a cassette tape tucked into a shallow space beneath it. Its plastic case had been wrapped in tissue to prevent rattling. The label was blank, but the careful placement told him it had not ended up there by chance.
He sat down without reaching for his phone. A person could fake a photograph, he thought, but his mother had hidden a voice inside the same box. He didn't know whether it was hers, his father's, or someone else's, and the possibilities were too large to examine before morning. He searched his apartment for a cassette player and found none. There had been one when he was a child, a cream-colored machine his mother used to play old gospel tapes while cleaning, but it had vanished during one of their moves. He held the cassette against the lamp and watched its spools turn slightly when he moved it.
By two in the morning, he was still awake. He tried to remember Carla's last coherent conversation in the hospital, but the memory came in fragments: her hand reaching for the edge of his sleeve, a request to check the storage unit, a sentence broken by fatigue. He had promised her he would deal with everything, assuming she meant the rent and the boxes. Now he wondered whether she had been asking him to finish a task she had carried alone for most of her adult life. It was a painful thought, because it suggested he had been standing beside the secret all along without noticing its outline. He put the box beneath his bed and slept with the light on.
The Iron Ravens clubhouse was a converted auto shop twelve miles outside town, set behind a rusted fence and an uneven gravel yard. Its outer walls were sheet metal, but inside there were couches with patched upholstery, a wood stove, framed photographs, and workbenches crowded with the accumulated evidence of decades spent repairing machines rather than replacing them. Nolan arrived a little after eleven, carrying the metal box and the folded cut. Decker met him at the door. His greeting was a brief nod, but he moved aside before Nolan could ask to enter. Several motorcycles stood on lifts in the adjoining workshop, and the familiar smell of gear oil immediately made Nolan less aware of being a stranger.