The Lucky One by Lori Rader-Day

Author:Lori Rader-Day
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2019-12-18T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Alice

When she got back from lunch, Alice found the trailer locked. A few of the crew paused in their work high up in the top deck of the parking structure to wave. She waved back, shamed to be returning to the site so late. She’d finished that flamingo drink, too, on an empty stomach.

She opened the door. The wind started up at once, the papers on her desk rising and starting to dance. She slammed the door behind her, found the trailer empty. She could hear Jimmy and Gus talking as they walked past on the way to the fence, but neither came in.

She locked the door, closed the window behind her desk at last, threw the to-go container in the trash.

On the table, the ledgers from the safe still sat out where Jimmy had left them, though the safe had been closed and covered. He expected her to pick up after him? Christ, I might as well marry him. Oh, except she could just hire better help, now that she was in charge.

Alice moved the ledgers to her desk and dumped her backpack in the empty spot on the table. She pulled out the pages she’d taken from her dad’s closet, the articles she’d printed in the library, and the work Lillian and Juby had generated. It was a lot. Pages and pages of material, and some of it just as indecipherable as the cryptic handwriting of her dad’s interview notes.

Where to start?

She was reminded of the Doe Pages themselves, the world’s most horrifying deck of cards, shuffled and cut, shuffled and cut, to sort the information through different lenses.

She had already seen the article from the library and had studied the notes her dad had taken as best she could, so she put these aside and started paging through what Lillian had found. Slapdash! She’d heard Lillian was the best among the Does for digging out the primary sources on any subject and for the pure heft of information she delivered, and now Alice believed it. She just . . . couldn’t find the thread to pull, the place to start that would lead methodically through the pile. Her sorting stacks took up the entire table. She moved to the floor. She couldn’t seem to find a beginning, to make sense of it.

The materials weren’t slapped together at all, but the accumulation was somehow a disaster. On purpose? What had they been fighting about? We disagree on some of the interpretations.

If they had interpretations, though, she couldn’t make any. What she needed was Juby’s talent for divining the river of truth that flowed through the pages. Alice didn’t have it. She sat back on her heels.

Why couldn’t they have talked her through it? Instead, she was supposed to wade through faxed documents, printed-out spreadsheets that went for twenty pages, copies of handwritten forms, and—what was this?—U.S. census records, newspaper articles, and obituaries for people she’d never heard of.

She dug further: Newspaper articles about drug busts and small

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