An hour later, Patrick was back on Baden Avenue. He pulled his truck up in front of his father’s house.
It was after 2:00 P.M. He hadn’t assigned any work crew for today. Patrick went in through the kitchen and checked out what they’d done. A whole wall of new drywall had gone up yesterday. The kitchen island would be new, as well as a new fridge and the stove. And he’d also put new wood facings on the cabinets, which were probably from before the war. He pulled out a utility drawer in the counter where his folks kept loose things they used around the house: calculators, picture hooks, thumbtacks for the bulletin board. The ferry schedule.
He had to find his dad’s GPS. But this was also where they threw their old cell phones.
The more he thought about it, the more he knew Hilary had to be right. His dad was contacting someone. He was trying to tell someone what he had.
He rummaged through the drawer. When the police in Westchester returned his father’s belongings, the phone was in the box, along with his wedding ring, his Longines watch, and his wallet—all of which Patrick had given to his sister as keepsakes.
All except the phone, which they had no use for, and which Patrick was pretty sure they had tossed in here.
His mom and dad weren’t exactly tech savvy—they honestly didn’t even know how to get on a computer—but you could literally trace the evolution of cell phone evolution by pawing through the kitchen drawer. There were a bunch of them in there, all sizes and weights. He searched around for the BlackBerry his dad had had with him that night. It had been a Christmas gift from him and Annette a couple of years back, and while his dad first claimed he had zero use for all this new technology crap, as he called it, within a month, he was looking up the weather anyplace Patrick or one of the grandkids would go, as well as pointing out constant weather reports on some app along with all the cheap garages wherever he went.
Where the hell was it? Patrick said to himself, sifting through the drawer. It had to be in here. They’d just thrown it in a week before.
He turned over a calendar and there it was.
He took it over to an electrical outlet and plugged it in. It took a few minutes for the phone to come to life.
The first thing he did was look for the text message Hilary said that his dad had sent from the car.
He found it. To Paula. Just as Hilary had said. To his mom?
I’m on my way it read. He’d probably been writing it just as the deer bolted out. Maybe his attention had been diverted. It probably killed him. And Hilary was also likely right about what he was saying:
I’m on my way with the money.
So who could he possibly have been telling? Patrick leaned against the counter. His mom had been dead for two years.
Paula.
He pushed the button on the upper-left-hand corner of the keyboard. It displayed the history of recent calls and texts.
He saw three or four calls that were to him, going back maybe a week. And there were a couple to Annette, his sister, two days before the accident, and one to Chris, his grandson. Probably to discuss the Knicks, Patrick smiled.
Then something took him by surprise.
He counted them: five alone over the three days leading up to the accident. Five calls from his mother’s old cell phone number.
That phone had been inactive for almost two years.
It didn’t make sense.
Who the hell could be calling him from there? And why?
He put his father’s phone down and dug through the utility drawer again, looking for his mom’s old Nokia, which he knew was in here somewhere too. Joe would never throw it away or close down the number. For sentimental reasons. It was a memento for him. Patrick could visualize the damn thing. They didn’t throw out anything. This was definitely where it had to be.
One by one he removed each old phone from the drawer and placed it on the counter.
It wasn’t there.
A numbing feeling rose up in Patrick’s gut as he stood there staring at the counter full of phones.
Either his father was calling a ghost to say he was on his way back with a half million dollars.
Or he’d given the phone out. And he was in this, this scheme that had gotten him killed, with someone else.