Page 40 of The Woman in the Garage

Was it linked to the weird charges at the garage somehow? If so, did that mean that the person who’d stolen from me and had knocked me over was one of the mechanics?

I mulled that over for hours before I finally fell asleep, racking my brain to try to remember any detail about my attacker that I could use to disqualify the men at work.

In the end, though, it had all happened too quickly.

I felt reasonably comfortable saying it wasn’t the two older guys. But there was no way to rule out anyone else.

Which meant that my stomach was in knots and my heart was firmly lodged in the back of my throat at the idea of going into work, of being alone with those men.

I’d dragged my feet all morning, spending too much time on my hair and makeup, packing my lunch, lingering over my morning coffee—anything I could do to excuse not arriving before the men, before the inevitable customers.

When the trip to the storage unit to check out the footage showed me nothing but a man in a black hoodie and jeans who was clever enough to keep his head ducked to avoid being directly seen by the cameras, I was even more anxious as I strolled into the garage.

I beelined for my office, closing and locking the door before sinking into my chair, feeling like I’d worked a full day just from the stress alone.

And as I sat, poring over the various graphs and notes I’d drawn up about the weird charges for basic servicing, something occurred to me.

While I hadn’t seen the face of the thief, I had noticed something.

He’d been a reasonably average-sized man.

But he’d struggled to not only lift the totes off of the shelves, but he’d needed to drag them out of the door.

The cameras had caught his vehicle.

Which meant nothing.

Because he’d brought a damn rental truck to clear out my storage unit.

My storage unit with severalveryheavy totes.

What could have been in them?

I’d assumed it was just all junk, given my uncle’s house and office.

But what if it wasn’t junk?

What if it was something valuable?

Something worth stealing.

My gaze slid to the key ring on my desk, seeing it with new eyes.

Half of those keys? They weren’t for buildings or cars.

Those were padlock keys.

My hand shot out, dragging the ring closer, flicking through the keys, counting.

Twelve.

There weretwelvepadlock keys on the ring.

Sure, it was entirely possible that he’d just had twelve different padlocks for his one storage unit over the years.

But…

But what if they were all for different units?

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