“Well, there wasn’t a lot. Let me get the whole thing.” Antony leaves the office to retrieve the file.
“You think you’re playing her,” Pops says, “but maybe it’s the other way around.”
“Fuck you,” I mutter. “Whatever is going on here, I don’t think Cherry knows anything about it.”
Even as the words come out of my mouth, I’m starting to doubt them.
“You’re even more naïve than she appears to be.”
Antony comes back into the room with a file folder in his hands. He drops it on the desk and opens it up.
At the front of the file is one of those advertising mailers full of coupons to various local businesses, unopened. The postmark date on the envelope is the second of March, last year. Antony flips the small stack of papers to the back and finds that the last item in the file is an empty business envelope, also postmarked during the previous March.
“If Micha wanted to date his research without putting a date on the file, this is how he’d do it.”
“Yeah, Pops has talked about doing things like this before. March second to March tenth. What else is in there?”
“The original birth certificate and the copy were right after the first envelope,” Antony says. He places the documents back where he found them. “Then there’s the rest of it.”
He flips through each item slowly.
The first is a group of receipts stapled together. When I pull them apart, I find a receipt from a Mexican restaurant in Cascade Falls and two invoices addressed to the Big O. One is a shipping invoice for various bottles of wine, and the other listed a variety of cheeses and their price per pound.
“I remember this,” I say, holding up the invoices. “Micha wanted to do a wine and cheese pairing at the club.”
“Yeah, that sounds familiar.
I thought it was a stupid idea. Did you notice the address on the cheese receipt?”
I take a closer look at the receipt and immediately see what he’s talking about. I let out a long breath.
“A cheese shop in Accident, Maryland.”
“Yeah. Weird, huh?”
“Too weird.” I shake my head. “What about the restaurant?”
“No idea why it’s in there.”
I replace the receipts and look at the next item. Behind the invoices is a grainy, black-and-white photo of a man ushering a very pregnant woman into a boxy, nineties-style sedan. On the back of the photo is a sticky note with “72 S. St” written on it. I pull it off and hold it up to Antony.
“What do you think this is?” I ask, and Antony takes the paper from my hand.
“Do we have a family code I don’t know anything about?”
“Not unless no one told me, either.”
“The ‘S’ could stand for south.” He hands the paper back to me.
“South Street?” I flip the paper over, but there’s no other information.
“Yeah. It could be an address.”
“Is this on the west side? I didn’t know there was a South Street in Cascade Falls.”
“There isn’t.”
“If it isn’t a street in Cascade Falls, where is it?”