Scott called that evening.
I was washing the dishes at Mom's house.
She had gone upstairs.
My phone was on the counter, and his name appeared just as I was drying a plate.
I looked at the screen.
For a moment, I considered ignoring it.
I was tired.
I was angry.
And I didn't trust myself to have a reasonable conversation with him.
But I answered.
"What do you want, Scott?"
He sounded offended.
"That's how you're answering me now?"
I put the plate down.
"You took Dad's watch."
He sighed.
I knew that sigh.
It was the sound he made whenever someone expected him to accept responsibility.
"Are you seriously going to keep bringing that up?"
"Yes."
He said he'd already explained.
He was short of money.
He needed gas.
He hadn't thought the watch had much value.
I reminded him that he had sold it and spent the money at a bar.
He went quiet.
Then he asked who had told me.
That question made me angrier.
He wasn't concerned that Mom had been hurt.
He wanted to know how I had found out.
"Does it change what you did?"
"People are acting like I robbed somebody."
"You took something from Mom's bedroom without permission."
He didn't answer.
"You sold it, Scott."
"I told you why."
"You told me you needed gas money."
"I needed money, Jen. That's the part that matters."
I stared at the kitchen sink.
There were bubbles clinging to the sides.
Dad used to leave the dishcloth folded across the faucet.
I had done the same thing without realizing it.
I suddenly missed him so badly that I had to close my eyes.
Scott was still talking.
He said I always made him sound worse than he was.
He said everyone struggled sometimes.
He said Dad would have understood.
That last part hurt.
Dad had understood Scott for years.
He had helped him through one problem after another.
And just when Dad could no longer protect his own belongings, Scott had taken advantage of Mom's grief.
I wanted to tell him exactly what I thought.
Instead, I told him about the note.
His voice changed immediately.
"A note?"
"Yes. Ed found it inside the watch."
"What did it say?"
I hesitated.
I didn't know how much I should share.
Mr. Cole was still investigating.
Mom was overwhelmed.
And Scott hadn't given me a single reason to trust him.
But he was Dad's son.
Whatever Dad had hidden belonged to our family history.
So I explained the basics.
The note had been addressed to Mom.
It referred to the old steel mill.
There was a locker number.
And a man's name.
Scott gave a short laugh.
"So what, Dad left directions to some buried fortune?"
I hated how quickly he turned everything into a joke.
"This isn't funny."
"I didn't say it was."
"You sound amused."
"Maybe because you're treating an old note like the biggest discovery in the world."
I tightened my grip on the phone.
"Someone went to a lot of trouble to hide it."
Scott asked whether there was money involved.
I didn't answer that.
Instead, I told him Dad had directed us to Locker 214.
Then I mentioned Daniel Whitaker.
Scott stopped laughing.
The change was so sudden that I noticed the television behind him.
I could hear people talking on whatever program he was watching.
Scott said nothing.
I waited.
"Scott?"
He cleared his throat.
"Where did you get that name?"
I frowned.
"I just told you. Dad wrote it."
There was another pause.
"Why?"
He asked me to repeat it.
I did.
Daniel Whitaker.
A man who had worked with Dad decades earlier.
Scott's breathing sounded different.
I asked whether he knew the name.
He said no.
Too quickly.
Then he corrected himself.
Dad had mentioned Daniel once.
A long time ago.
That was all.
I moved away from the sink.
"When did he mention him?"
Scott said he couldn't remember.
"What did Dad tell you?"
"Nothing important."
"Then why did you remember the name?"
He became irritated.
"People remember names, Jen."
I didn't argue with that.
But I knew my brother.
I knew when he was improvising an answer.
And I knew when something had frightened him.
He told me to be careful about what we might discover.
I asked what he meant.
He said we shouldn't start blaming people who were no longer alive to explain themselves.
I stood very still.
"Why would I blame anyone?"
"I didn't say you would."
"Then why bring it up?"
Scott told me to forget it.
I wouldn't.
"Have you heard something about Daniel Whitaker?"
"No."
"Did Dad tell you something about the mill?"
"I already answered you."
Then he said he needed to leave.
Before I could ask another question, the call ended.
I stayed in the kitchen holding my phone.
Scott had been dismissive until I mentioned Daniel.
After that, he sounded like someone trying to stop a conversation before he said too much.
I called him back.
No answer.
I sent a message asking what Dad had told him about Daniel.
The message went through.
Scott didn't reply.
I wanted to drive straight to his apartment.
But Mom was upstairs, and I didn't want to leave her alone after everything that had happened.
So I put my phone down.
I rinsed the dishes again, even though they were already clean.
Then I heard Mom on the stairs.
She was carrying Dad's wooden toolbox.
I recognized it immediately.
The corners were worn.
The handle had become smooth from years of use.
Dad kept his tools in the same order, and he disliked anyone moving them around.
Mom placed it on the kitchen table.
"What are you doing?"
"There's something I want to check."
She lifted the lid.
The familiar smell of metal and old wood came out.
Screwdrivers.
A small hammer.
Rusty nails.
A measuring tape.
Sandpaper.
I remembered sitting beside that box when I was young, waiting for Dad to finish some household repair.
He would give me a harmless object to hold.
Then he would thank me as though I had done half the work.
Mom moved the tools carefully.
At the bottom, under a few pieces of sandpaper, was a folded sheet.
She lifted it.
"I saw him keep this here years ago."
"Did you ever ask about it?"
"No."
She unfolded the paper.
It was an old photograph.
Three men stood outside the steel mill.
All three wore work clothes.
Each held a lunch pail.
Dad stood in the middle.
He looked younger than the father I remembered.
His face was slimmer.
His work shirt was dark around the collar.
One man stood beside him with a serious expression.
The other wore a baseball cap and had an arm around Dad's shoulders.
Mom turned the picture over.
There were names written on the back.
Harold Brennan.
Daniel Whitaker.
Robert Vale.
Beneath the names, Dad had left a sentence.
He had written that all three men had known what really happened.
I looked up.
"Robert Vale?"
Mom's face had changed.
She sat down.
I asked whether she knew him.
She did.
He had worked at the mill with Dad.
Later, he became an important executive.
By the time Dad retired, Robert was chairman of the company that owned the mill.
I looked at the picture again.
The man in the baseball cap had one arm casually resting on my father's shoulder.
He looked like a friend.
Someone Dad trusted.
Someone he might have shared lunch with after a difficult shift.
Years later, that same man held power over the company where Dad had spent his career.
I asked Mom whether Robert had remained close to Dad.
She looked uncertain.
She remembered the early years.
The visits.
The coworkers who came to our house.
Then those visits had stopped.
Dad never explained much.
Mom said she hadn't wanted to interfere with his friendships.
At the time, that seemed reasonable.
Now we were sitting at his kitchen table trying to understand why he had hidden a photograph in his toolbox.
I turned it over again.
Three names.
One statement about the truth.
One of those men had left a message in a watch.
One had vanished from our family life.
The third had risen to the top of the company.
I felt something unpleasant settle in my stomach.
Dad hadn't kept that photograph by accident.
He had written on the back because he wanted to remember something.
Or wanted someone else to remember it.
Mom touched his face in the picture.
"He was so young."
I nodded.
"He looks happy."
She gave a sad smile.
"He was tired most of the time, but he was happy at home."
I wanted to believe that.
I still do.
But I couldn't stop wondering what he carried back through our front door every evening.
The financial records.
The missing inventory.
Daniel's warning about management.
Robert's rise through the company.
And the date.
September 17, 1981.
Everything seemed to lead there.
A few days later, Mr. Cole called.
He had found someone who could authorize a visit to the old mill.
The property remained under management, although much of the original facility was no longer in use.
Some of the older structures had survived.
That included part of the locker rooms.
He couldn't promise Locker 214 was still standing.
But he believed we should check.
The visit was arranged for Thursday morning.
Mom agreed.
I asked whether she was sure.
She looked at Dad's watch.
"I need to know why he left this."
I understood.
I took the day off work.
We planned to meet Mr. Cole at the property gate.
That should have been enough for one week.
But Scott wasn't finished.
On Wednesday evening, a message from him appeared on my phone.
He told me not to go to the mill.
I read it twice.
He had ignored my questions for days.
Now he was giving orders.
I called.
He answered after several rings.
"Why are you telling me not to go?"
He said the visit would be pointless.
Dad had worked there a long time.
Anything left in an old locker would probably be junk.
I reminded him that Dad had deliberately written down the number.
Scott asked whether I expected to find a fortune.
I said I expected to learn what Dad wanted Mom to know.
He became quiet.
Then he said something that stayed with me.
Sometimes people left secrets buried for a reason.
I asked him to explain.
He said Mom had suffered enough.
That was when I lost my patience.
"You don't get to decide what's too painful for her."
"Jen, I'm trying to help."
"You took the one thing she kept next to Dad's glasses."
He told me not to start.
I couldn't stop.
"You let her search the house for it. You knew she'd be upset, and you said nothing until we confronted you."
Scott was silent.
"And now you're acting like you're the one protecting her."
He said Dad wouldn't have wanted us going through old records.
I asked how he could know that.
Dad had written directions.
He had hidden the message.
He had contacted a lawyer.
Every part of that told me he wanted someone to uncover the truth.
Scott raised his voice.
Then he lowered it again.
He asked me to leave the matter alone.
I refused.
The call ended badly.
My hands shook afterward.
I was angry, but that wasn't the only reason.
Scott knew something.
I no longer doubted it.
I just didn't know how much.
That night, I kept thinking about the photograph.
Three men standing outside the mill.
Dad between them.
A hand resting on his shoulder.
An ordinary picture from an ordinary working day.
Except Dad had kept it hidden at the bottom of his toolbox.
And on the back, he had written that those three men shared knowledge of something important.
I thought about Daniel's name.
The lawyer's folders.
The money.
The warning about losing their jobs.
Then I thought about Scott.
He had sold the watch even after Dad spent his life teaching us to respect what belonged to other people.
Now Scott was trying to stop us from following the directions inside it.
I didn't know whether he was frightened of the past or frightened of what it might reveal about Dad.
Maybe both.
But I made one decision before going to bed.
I would not let my brother's fear make the decision for Mom.
Dad had left her a message.
She deserved to know what it meant.
Source: psndaily.xyz
Click here to continue reading: PART 4: We Finally Opened Locker 214 at Dad’s Abandoned Steel Mill, and the Evidence Inside Led Us to a Man Who Had Vanished
My Brother Thought Dad’s Old Watch Was Worth Almost Nothing, Until a Stranger Brought It Back With Something Hidden Inside
Part 3 of 15
