Richard decided to disassemble the changing table first. I sat down on the floor next to him and handed him tools. “You’ll never guess where I found the flash drive,” I said to distract myself from the sadness I could feel overtaking me.
“Where?” he asked, removing the bottom shelf.
“In here,” I said, holding up the empty diaper caddy. He looked at it quizzically. “It’s for diapers. It attaches to the side of the table. That way you can hold onto the baby with one hand while you reach for a clean diaper with the other.”
“I guess that makes sense.”
“It’ll make a lot more sense when you change your first diaper.”
Richard laughed. “I’m sure it will.”
Neither one of us spoke as he unscrewed the second shelf and placed it on the floor on top of the first. Then he turned to me. “Isn’t a diaper bin kind of an odd place to store a flash drive?”
Chapter 11
“Thank you!” I shouted, and Richard leaned away from me, startled by my sudden outburst. “Sorry. It’s just nice to have someone agree with me for a change.”
“You mean no one else thinks it’s odd? Storing flash drives with diapers is common?”
I stared at Richard. This was my chance to get an objective opinion. I really wanted one, especially from a man.
“Let me get this straight,” Richard said. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, his hands wrapped around a coffee cup, all the pieces of what had once been Amelia’s changing table stacked in a neat pile next to him. “Your husband bought a five-million-dollar life insurance policy and he never told you?”
“Not only did he not tell me,” I said, “he hid it in our safe deposit box behind the one-million-dollar policy I did know about.”
“So you’d likely never find it unless he died.”
“Exactly,” I said. “Now isn’t that suspicious?”
“I don’t know if it’s suspicious, but it does seem odd.”
“It’s more than just odd when you combine it with all the other facts.” I started counting them off on my fingers. “The key he gave his brother, Jake sneaking into the house and refusing to tell me why, the flash drive. All circumstantial evidence, sure, but that’s what cases are built on.”
“And what case are you building?” he asked.
The million-dollar question.
Richard glanced down at his watch. “Oh shit. I’m going to be late for work.” He set his coffee cup down on the dresser and started snatching up the pieces of the changing table. “Do you have something I could put these in?”
“Leave it,” I said. “I’ll drive it over to your house later with the bassinet.”
“Are you sure?” he asked, but he was already setting the pieces on the floor again.
“Yes. Go to work. You have a baby to support!” It would also give me an opportunity to stop at the store first and buy them a gift.
I arrived at Tim and Richard’s house later that morning with the bassinet, a shopping bag filled with all the pieces of the changing table, and an infant car seat, my gift to them. I would’ve stayed and helped Tim install the car seat, but I had a court appearance in half an hour, and I couldn’t be late.
After my hearing I drove to the office, but I couldn’t concentrate. All I could think about was the flash drive. I finally gave up on work and went home. I retrieved the flash drive from Amelia’s room, plugged it into my laptop, and started guessing. I was no more successful this time than I had been all the other times before.
I was still typing in random numbers, letters, and special characters when Daniel called.
“How was your day?” he asked.
“Okay,” I said, then pulled the flash drive out of my computer and threw it across the room. It bounced off the closet door and landed on the rug. “Yours?”
“Great,” he replied. “Hey, do you like Peruvian food?”
“I don’t think I know what Peruvian food is,” I answered as I retrieved the flash drive and plugged it back into my computer. Thankfully, I hadn’t damaged it. The password prompt popped up on the screen and I sighed.
“The most well-known dish is ceviche, but there are many others.”
“I didn’t know ceviche was Peruvian. I thought it was Spanish.” I typed ceviche into the password box and, unsurprisingly, it spit back the same password incorrect message it had given me thousands of times before.
Daniel kept talking but I stopped listening until I heard him shout, “Hello? Grace, are you there?”
I hit enter on my latest password attempt and was greeted with the same error message. “Yeah. Sorry, I got distracted.”
“I asked if you wanted to come over tonight. I’ll cook you my Peruvian roast chicken. It’s my mother’s recipe. Or something else if you prefer.”
“Actually, I think I’ll take a raincheck if you don’t mind.” I typed in a combination of my and Amelia’s birthdates, which I knew I’d tried before, but this time I added random characters at the end. Fail.
“Oh. Okay. Is another night this week better for you?”
“I’m not sure. I’m kind of in the middle of something right now.” This time I typed in our birthdates in reverse with an exclamation point at the end. That failed too. There had to be a better way.
“In the middle of something. Is that your way of telling me you don’t want to see me again?”
“No, I’m just busy that’s all.”
