Page 51 of Pieces of Her (Andrea Oliver 1)

Which meant that her mother had packed this bag before the cancer diagnosis three years ago.

Andy turned the suitcase over. She unzipped the other side.

Holy shit.

Stacks of money. Twenties again, each bundle wrapped with a lavender strap that said $2,000. The bill design looked like the old kind before all the new security features had been added. Andy counted the stacks. Ten across, three wide, four deep.

Two hundred and forty thousand dollars.

She zipped up the bag, pulled the vinyl cargo cover over everything, then closed the hatch.

Andy leaned against the car for a moment, her mind reeling. Was it worth it to wonder where her mother had gotten all of this money? She would be better served wondering how many unicorns were left in the forest.

The shelves behind the car were empty but for two jugs of bleach, a scrub brush and a folded pile of white cleaning rags. An upside down mop and broom were in the corner. Andy ran her hand along the particleboard shelves. No dust. Her mother, who was not a neat freak, had scrubbed this place top to bottom.

Why?

Andy sat down at the desk in the corner. She turned on the lamp. She checked the drawers. A box of pens. Two pencils. A legal pad. A leather folio. The keys to the Plymouth. The file drawer was packed with empty hanging files. Andy pushed them aside. She reached into the back and found a small shoebox with the lid taped on.

Andy put the box on the desk.

She opened the leather folio. Two pockets. One held a car registration receipt from the Province of Ontario for a blue 1989 Plymouth Reliant. The owner’s name was listed as Daniela Barbara Cooper. The original registration date was August 20, the day Andy had always thought was her birthday, but two years from her birth, 1989. The annual car tag receipt was clipped to the corner. The printout listed the date it was processed as May 12, 2017.

Last year.

There was no calendar to confirm, but the date had to be around Mother’s Day. Andy tried to think back. Had she picked up her mother from the airport before taking her to lunch? Or was that the year before? Laura didn’t often leave Belle Isle, but at least once a year, she attended a professional conference. This had been going on since Andy’s childhood and she’d never bothered to look up the events because why would she?

What she did know was that the annual pilgrimage was very important to her mother. Even when Laura was sick from the chemo treatments, she had made Andy drive her to the Savannah airport so she could attend a speech pathologist thing in Houston.

Had she really gone to Houston? Or had she skipped over to Austin to see her old friend Professor Paula Kunde?

Once Andy dropped her off at the airport, she had no idea where Laura went.

Andy dug around inside the other folio pocket. Two laminated cards. The first was a light blue Ontario, Canada, enhanced driver’s license.

The enhanced part meant the license could be used for sea and land US border crossings. So, no taking an airplane to Canada, but a car could get through.

The photo on the license showed Laura before the cancer had taken some of the roundness from her cheeks. The expiration date was in 2024. Her mother was listed by the same name as the owner of the Reliant, Daniela Barbara Cooper, born December 15, 1964, which was wrong because Laura’s birthdate was April 9, 1963, but what the hell did that matter because her mother, as far as Andy knew, was not currently residing in apartment 20 at 22 Adelaide Street West in Toronto, Ontario.

D.B. Cooper.

Andy wondered if the name was some kind of joke, but given where she was sitting, maybe it wasn’t crazy to wonder if Laura was the famous hijacker who’d parachuted out of a plane with millions of dollars and never been heard from again.

Except Cooper was a man, and in the seventies Laura was still a teenager.

This was ’77, so I would’ve been fourteen years old, more Rod Stewart than Elvis.

Andy pulled out the other card. Also from Ontario, also with Daniela Cooper’s name and birthdate. This one said HEALTH • SANTE. Andy had taken Spanish in high school. She had no idea what sante meant, but she wondered why the hell her mother hadn’t used Canada’s national insurance program instead of depleting most of her retirement savings to pay for her cancer treatments in the United States.

Which brought her to the shoebox. Taped closed, hidden in a desk drawer inside a locked, secret storage facility. The logo on the outside was from Thom McAn. The box was small, definitely not for adult-sized shoes. When Andy was little, Laura always took her to the Charleston mall to buy shoes before school started.

Whatever was inside was lightweight, but felt like a bomb. Or maybe it was more like Pandora’s box, containing all the evils of Laura’s world. Andy knew the rest of the myth, that once you let out the evil, all that was left was hope, but she doubted very seriously that anything inside the box would give her hope.

Andy picked at the tape. The tacky side had turned to dust. She had no problem slipping off the lid.

Photographs—not many, some in black and white, some in faded color.

A bundle of Polaroids was held together by an old rubber band. Andy chose those first because she had never seen her mother look so young.