Page 74 of Inevitable Secrets

Derrick sneered. “The beatnik?” he asked in a growl.

Henry nodded, “I figured this would help me keep tabs on him, some manual labor.”

Derrick liked the idea of that loser having to lug heavy furniture around. “Just him?”

Henry shook his head. “I had him hire out a crew, kept us out of the loop. Fletcher staff emptied it here. It lets him think I trust him, giving him a task,” he explained to Derrick.

“Do you trust him?”

“Not yet, maybe not ever,” Henry said.

“Same,” Derrick said.

“Aha!” Taylor called from an aisle of furniture in the back, and suddenly her hand appeared over the top and threw notebooks towards Derrick. “Help me,” she said as she opened and closed more drawers.

“Yes, dear,” Derrick said and off he went to help his wife find notebooks from her dead uncle whose head was bashed in by potentially the same person who had shot him and drugged her employee.

Sometimes life was complicated.

* * *

Two hours later,Taylor, Derrick, and Henry had opened every drawer and cabinet that had been brought in from the storage facility and had come up with one hundred two books of varying shapes and sizes. There had been no rhyme or reason to where the books were stashed in the furniture. Some of the furniture had none, and some pieces held five. They were scattered in the cabinets and drawers of the new and old furniture. It took a long time, and Taylor could only guess it had been Cedric’s way of keeping the wrong person from finding them all. A few together may not have made any sense, but all together she hoped and prayed they told a story. Once the journals were collected, they loaded them into boxes and carried them upstairs to the office.

“Now we have to get them in order,” Taylor muttered as she plucked the first book from the box before her and started flipping quickly through it.

“What are you doing?” Derrick asked, noticing that Taylor wasn’t even stopping to read anything in the books as she picked them up, flipped through them, and then set them down.

“I’m trying to figure out a time order for these,” she said like it was obvious.

“Without reading them?” he asked.

Taylor threw a book at Derrick, “Flip through it. I don’t need to read the words, I can tell by the pictures.”

Derrick flipped through the journal that had been flung at him. “Holy Christ,” he muttered as he gazed upon beautiful sketches of Taylor as a baby. “Look at these, Tay,” he said, pulling her attention to the book. He stopped on one picture of Baby Taylor holding a leaf and he read the neat penmanship on the back. It read:

Her beautiful blues,

Are so full of life,

They make me believe,

I’m not dead inside.

That’s deep, Derrick thought. He looked up to Taylor perplexed.

Taylor shrugged, “Apparently he was crazy about me when I was a baby, then I guess he was just crazy.” Taylor reached out and grabbed a stack with one hand and slowly flipped through them. “This one looks like it was drawn by a kid using a pencil for the first time,” Taylor said.

Derrick came over and shook his head. These pictures were not the near photographic quality of the others. “Are they even by him?” he asked, but Taylor just pointed to the signature in the corner, which was the only thing that semi-resembled the other works. “What happened to him?” Derrick muttered.

Henry’s phone chimed, booming around the office walls. “Taylor, Dr. Mellon is here to speak with you,” he told her after checking the message.

“Oh yeah,” Taylor said. She had forgotten all about her appointment with him when she was on her book hunt. “He can come here,” she said gesturing to the room.

“He might even be able to help us with organizing these,” Derrick offered. Seeing his wife become instantly tense at the mention of Mellon, he was trying to ease her.

“Maybe,” she said, nodding, but he knew she hadn’t really heard him.

Mellon came in followed by Mick and surveyed the books and boxes around them. “You found them,” he said in awe. “Well, that didn’t take long.”

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