Page 51 of Buried Too Deep

Phin set the box on the window seat. “You sit and search this one. Rest your feet. We’ll check the others.”

She did as he said, and it was a relief to take some pressure off her feet. She’d been lucky she hadn’t broken an ankle during her run that morning. So many sidewalks in the Quarter needed repair.

She wondered what the man would have done had he caught up to her.

She wondered if he would have killed her.

And that kind of thinking was unproductive. Focus, Cora. She opened the box and stared at the contents, her heart hurting once more. On top of a stack of folders were the photos her father had kept on his desk. They were framed in a set of 3D twenty-sided photo cubes…or whatever a twenty-sided thing was called. Pictures of her, John Robert, and her mother filled each of the twenty faces. Another held photos of her parents when they’d been much younger, back when they’d met in college.

She remembered sitting on her father’s lap, playing with the photo displays when he was on the phone with clients. She’d roll them like dice, needing both hands to hold each one back then. She’d march her Barbie dolls across his desk, making them take whatever number of steps she’d rolled. The dice had no numbers, just photos, but she’d made numbers up.

All while her father cradled her in his arms, dropping kisses on her hair from time to time. And when he’d ended his call, he’d tell her what a good girl she’d been. How proud he was of her. What a good helper she was.

Her eyes burned once more and she let the tears fall.

She knew the others could see that she was crying, but they left her to her grief and she appreciated it. For so long she’d hated her father for leaving. Now she knew the truth and it would take some time to fully process.

Except she didn’t have that kind of time. Not right now. She had to find out who was after…whatever they were after. She would cry later.

She wiped her eyes, put the photo cubes aside, then pulled out the folders that were stacked beneath them. She glanced up, again unsurprised to see Phin watching her.

“I’m okay,” she mouthed, then tried to smile.

He gave her a nod, then went back to moving boxes so that the others could search them.

She focused on the folder in her hand, startled at the three words written in her mother’s looping scrawl—For Divorce Attorney. Her heart hurting anew, she opened the folder to find it filled with old credit card receipts. Like really old. They’d been created on the old card imprinters, the carbon copies faded. She pulled a receipt aside. It was signed J. Elliot. She turned on her phone’s flashlight, squinting to see the vendor and the date.

She pictured her mother looking through these receipts, believing her husband had left her for another woman. Oh, Mama.

Steadying her voice, she called out, “Um, everyone? These are old receipts. This one’s from a few weeks before my father was killed. A gas station in Baton Rouge. I think my mother thought they were evidence of my father’s cheating. They might be useful.”

Molly was at her side in seconds, gently taking the receipt from her hand and using her own phone’s light to study it. “Did your father do business there?”

“I don’t know. Like I said, he worked from home, but he sometimes went to see clients. I have no idea if they were all local. The first letters he wrote were postmarked from Baton Rouge. Maybe…” She winced. “Maybe he really was seeing someone else and got shot by a jealous husband.”

“Possibly,” Molly allowed. “We’ll go through all of these and see if there’s a pattern to his travel. Don’t touch any of the other receipts. I’ll go through them wearing gloves.”

“I should have thought of gloves,” Cora said with a sigh. If they’d simply been old papers, wearing gloves might have caused more damage than the oils from her fingers, but these were no longer simply old papers. Now they might be evidence.

“You’ve also had a pretty crappy day,” Molly said kindly. “Cut yourself some slack.”

Phin brought her another box and the search continued until Antoine crowed, “Bingo! Found them!”

In his gloved hands, he held a half dozen three-and-a-half-inch floppy disks, fanned out like cards from a deck. “They’re all labeled ‘Client Files.’ There have to be fifty disks in this box.”

Cora rose and carefully made her way through the maze of boxes littering the floor. She stared at the old disks. “Do you have a computer that reads disks? Because I haven’t seen the old computer my dad used anywhere. I hope someone didn’t pitch it.”

Antoine grinned. “Of course I have one, expressly for this purpose. Don’t you worry.”

“What’s wrong, Burke?” Molly asked, because Burke was staring at his phone in horror.

“I just googled ‘do people still use floppy disks.’ ”

“And you didn’t like the answer,” Cora said knowingly. “Some airplanes still use them for their navigation systems.”

“I’m never flying again,” Burke muttered.

“Or you’ll just get super drunk at the bar before you do,” Molly said soothingly.

---