Walter slowly shook his head. “Because after that week, everything just got cloudy in my mind.”
Clara pulled out the USB drive. “He gave me this before he disappeared.”
Walter stepped back as if the small drive might burn him. “Do not you dare plug that thing in.”
“Why are you so afraid of it?” she demanded.
He did not answer her, but Clara saw something in his eyes that made her heart race. It was not anger, but pure, unadulterated fear.
“Dad, I spent ten years believing you hated me because I got pregnant, and I thought you chose your pride over your daughter, but now I can see there is something you know that you have been hiding.”
Walter sank into a kitchen chair, defeated. “I do not know if I actually know it, or if they made me forget it entirely.”
Irene shivered in the corner. “What on earth are you talking about?”
Walter covered his face with his heavy, calloused hands. He explained that ten years earlier, workers had accused the Blue River Chemical Plant of dumping toxic waste into the town river.
Several townspeople had become mysteriously sick, including children with skin conditions, women losing pregnancies, and elderly people suddenly developing cancer. But no official report ever moved forward because the owner, Frederick Sterling, paid off doctors, lawyers, police officers, and political campaigns.
“Silas started asking questions, checking reports, collecting water samples, and recording secret conversations,” Walter said. “One night, he came to me and said he needed my help.”
Clara tightened her grip around the USB drive. “And did you help him?”
Walter began to cry, his shoulders shaking. “I think I did, but I do not remember the end of that night.”
The words seemed to split the room open. Jacob stood silently nearby, his small fists clenched at his sides.
“What do you mean that you think you helped him?” Clara asked.
Walter struggled to breathe. He said he remembered seeing Silas that night, and he remembered a folder, some maps, and a sharp chemical smell in the air. After that, he remembered nothing at all.
He only remembered waking up in his pickup truck on a lonely dirt road, mud on his shoes and dried blood on his sleeve.
“Whose blood was it, Walter?” Irene whispered, her voice trembling.
Walter lowered his gaze to the floor. “It was not mine.”
Clara went cold all over. “Did you kill him?”
Walter lifted his head, looking completely shattered. “I do not know.”
Irene let out a broken, sharp sob. Jacob moved closer to his mother. At that exact moment, the landline on the wall rang.
All four of them turned toward the phone, startled. Nobody used that landline anymore. It rang again, harsh and demanding.
Walter slowly got up to answer it.
“Do not answer that phone, Dad,” Clara ordered him.
But he picked it up anyway. His face changed color within seconds as he listened to the voice on the other end. The voice on the other end was male, calm, and old.
Walter barely managed to speak. “How did you know she was here?”
Then he listened for a long time and hung up the receiver.
“What did they say to you?” Clara asked.
Walter looked at Jacob with a hollow expression. “They said that Silas should have stayed buried.”
Irene screamed in terror. Clara grabbed Jacob’s backpack. “We are leaving right now.”
“Where can you possibly go?” Walter asked.
“To someone who does not owe Sterling any favors,” she said.
They left the house in the light rain. Clara drove to a nearby city called Farmington, where her college friend, Sarah Miller, an independent journalist, lived.
Sarah already knew part of the story. In fact, she had been the one to warn Clara not to hand the USB drive to just any local police officer.
“In this country, honey, there are good cops, and then there are cops who belong to somebody else,” she had warned.
When they arrived, Sarah opened the door with her laptop already running. “I copied all your files, but there is one folder I could not open,” she said.
Walter looked at the screen, and his face turned pale. The folder was labeled: LIGHTOFPORT.
“That name,” Walter said, his voice barely audible.
Sarah looked at him. “Does it mean something to you?”
Walter moved closer to the screen as though a memory were pulling him forward. “It was an old warehouse near the bus terminal where we used to store supplies when we worked double shifts.”
Clara felt the truth moving toward them like an approaching storm. That same night, three of them went there: Sarah, Clara, and Walter.
Irene stayed at the house with Jacob, even though the boy begged to come along. “This is my story too,” the boy had said.
Clara touched his hair gently. “That is exactly why I am coming back alive to tell it to you later.”
The old terminal was almost abandoned. A security guard who recognized Walter let them in after hearing two sentences and seeing Silas’s photograph.
“I never thought this would ever come out,” the man muttered as he opened the gate.
Inside a warehouse with rusted doors, they found locker 214. Walter cut through the heavy lock with a pair of pliers. Inside was a cardboard box filled with old newspapers, a yellow hard hat, and a handkerchief stained with dark marks.
Beneath a false bottom in the box, they found another USB drive. It was black and unmarked.
