Decker made calls outside where the cell signal was better. The work was practical and unglamorous: dates written on yellow paper, accounts matched against receipts, names corrected when memories disagreed. Nolan found himself oddly relieved by its ordinariness. A mystery that had lived like a monster inside his head was becoming something people could examine and challenge.
Yet he saw a tension in the room that he couldn't explain. Boon avoided his gaze whenever the old accounts were mentioned. Two members who had been present the previous evening spoke quietly by the workshop door, then separated when Nolan entered. He didn't assume everyone was hiding something. He had learned working in garages that people often looked guilty when they merely disliked being watched. But he also knew the difference between an ordinary silence and one shaped around a specific fact someone didn't want to say.
When Silas stepped into the back office, Nolan sat across from Boon. The treasurer was an older man with broad, square hands and a weathered face, holding an empty cup as if there were still something inside it worth keeping warm. Nolan set his own coffee down between them.
"You were here when my father vanished," Nolan said.
"I was."
"Did you believe he stole that money?"
Boon looked into the empty cup. "I believed what the figures seemed to say. That doesn't mean I ever made peace with it."
"Why not?"
"Because the numbers looked too convenient," Boon answered. "A theft that points precisely at the one man somebody wants discredited isn't always proof of guilt. Sometimes it's proof somebody understood how you'd look at it."
Nolan waited. Boon's shoulders shifted, and for a moment he looked decades younger, like the man who had once seen something wrong and been frightened by the consequences of saying it.
"I told the road captain we should check the records again," Boon said. "His name was Garrett Cole. He told me I was letting sentiment interfere with arithmetic. A few weeks after Elias disappeared, Garrett bought himself a new motorcycle with cash. He had never been a man with spare money."
"Did you say anything?"
"I said I was concerned. I couldn't prove more than that. Then the years went by, and Garrett eventually left. Every year made saying it harder, because every year I'd also have to explain why I hadn't said enough the year before."
"You think Garrett betrayed him."
"I think the books were changed by somebody with access. Garrett had access, and afterward he had money he never explained. I'm not going to pretend that adds up to proof, Nolan. I made that mistake once already."
Nolan looked at the empty cup in Boon's hands and understood that guilt didn't always belong to the person who committed the worst act. Sometimes it stayed with the person who had seen the edge of a wrong and chosen not to follow it into the dark.
He went to the back office and found Silas examining a ledger beneath a work light. "Garrett Cole," Nolan said. "Boon thinks he changed the accounts."
Silas stopped turning pages. The expression on his face was so still that Nolan knew the name had not surprised him. "I've thought about Garrett for years," Silas said. "I never found enough to confront him without tearing the club apart."