“You want to start there?” Joe asked.
“I don’t want to start anywhere, but we don’t have a choice.”
“We have a choice,” he said. “We can leave right now and hire someone to do this.”
“Then we have to put our trust in someone else.”
“True, and I’m not overly comfortable with that.”
“Neither am I,” I said. “Let’s do it.”
“It’s odd that the Feds didn’t already dig this stuff up. This was your dad’s cabin, after all.”
“Except that it’s owned by the Tamajor Corporation, and we still have no idea what that’s about.”
“The PIs are on it. Surely the Feds checked this place out,” Joe said.
“They might have, but they probably didn’t pull up floorboards. Obviously they didn’t, or they’d have found this stuff already.”
“Maybe they didn’t come here,” Joe said. “When was the last time your father used it?”
“I have no idea. He kept Colin at that Fleming Corp house.”
“Maybe this place didn’t appear anywhere in your dad’s papers. Maybe the Tamajor Corporation was something he kept entirely to himself.”
“There has to be a person behind every corporation.”
“But it doesn’t have to be your dad.”
“True. I’ll have to ask my mom if she mentioned the cabin to the Feds when they talked to her. I never mentioned it. Honestly, I never even thought about it.”
“All this stuff was so long ago,” Joe said, his voice echoing of memory.
“It was.” I cleared my throat. “Let’s look in my father’s room. We’ll have to face it eventually. I’d just as soon get it over with.”
“I hear you.” Joe followed me out of the small bedroom and into the larger one where my father had slept during our many camping trips.
It looked the same.
An eerie feeling of unease swept over me. Ghosts lived here. My father’s presence was unmistakable in this room. No, I didn’t believe in ghosts, but this room reeked of Tom Simpson. I inhaled. It even smelled like him. Cigar smoke, sweat, and woodsy cologne. My mother hated cigars, and when we were at the cabin without her, my father had never failed to indulge.
Years and years had passed, and my father still existed in this room.
“You okay?” Joe asked.
“Fine.”
“You looked a little off for a minute. Like you were somewhere else.”
“I was. I can smell him here, Joe. It’s like it was all yesterday.”
“You’re imagining things.”
“Maybe. You didn’t live with him twenty-four-seven. I did. I know his scent. I know the feeling of being around him. I’m feeling that now.”
Joe didn’t reply. He no doubt thought I was crazy, and perhaps I was. As far as I knew, my father hadn’t been here in years, and definitely not recently since he was dead.
Still…