Page 100 of Courage, Dear Heart

And had my father not done what he did that day, I don’t think I would have the memory of him hiding books under false bottoms in a drawer.

Bingo!

Thanks, Dad.

FIFTY-SIX

Elliott

I shinethe red light in the drawer. Here we go. Six small black notebooks sit at the bottom. I hold the small flashlight with my mouth and grab my phone and take a picture before I touch any of them.

Placing my phone on the floor, I take a notebook out, the one closest to the back. Open it.

This one is old. Dating years back. I flip through the pages and look at the last entry. Dated five years ago. I put it back in place and move to the next one and do the same. This one is a little more recent but still nothing that can help me figure out how to stop him from screwing with Jillian. I put it back in place. I skip the notebooks in the middle and pick up the one closest to me. Open it. This must be it. The dates start a year or so ago. I grab my phone and start taking pictures. This will take too long. I think better of it and put my phone in video mode. Balance it over the edge of the desk while still holding the flashlight in my mouth. Take a video of each page, pausing for a coupleseconds on each so I can easily get screenshots later. I pause when I see an address I recognize.

Jillian’s flower shop.

Beads of sweat run down my forehead. My hands shake. My father has been trying to buy the building for over a year. Mrs. Caruso, the owner, has refused all offers. And during this entire time, he’s also been plotting with someone on the city council to use eminent domain as a backup plan. If this goes through, Jillian will have no recourse. She’s a tenant. She has no say in what happens to the building.

There’s a list of all the times the owner was contacted. Dates and amounts offered. Why is this information in this book? There’s nothing illegal about it. I need to wrap this up. I finish getting images of the notebook and put it back in place. Stop the video on my phone and open the Photo app. Make sure the notebooks are perfectly placed and match the picture I took.

I replace the false bottom, put the notepads back into the drawer, flushed with the corner. Close it gently.

Time to get into his computer.

Sitting at his desk, I turn off the flashlight and put it next to my phone. Power the computer up. Again, glad my father is a man of habits and never got into laptops. The screen loads, the cursor blinking in the password box. “Please, please, please, be the same I remember.”

I type and watch the box fill with ***************.

The computer logs on.

Both my hands come to my face. Tension eases my shoulders. I plug a thumb drive into the USB port. TheMission: Impossibletheme song plays in my head. I resist the nervous laugh, trying to burst out. “Focus.”

Emails first. I search his Outlook folders for any names that may jump at me.There.I click on it, open the folder, and go down the list of subject lines. “There must be a way to forward this whole thing to the flash drive.” I should have thought of this before.

I grab my phone and go on Google and type.

How to move folders from Outlook into a flash drive?

And smile when I see the answer. “That’s easy.”

To move folders from Outlook to a flash drive, you can export them as a PST file and then copy the file to the flash drive:

Open the Outlook desktop app

Select File > Open & Export > Import/Export > Export to a file > Outlook Data File (.pst)

Choose the folders or emails you want to export

Save the PST file on your computer

Copy the PST file to your USB flash drive

I move everything that looks remotely fishy to a folder I created on the desktop and then move it to the flash drive. Close Outlook and open Documents. There’s too much here. “How big is this folder?”

I check the folder size and do some quick math in my head. I could fit it all in the two-terabyte drive I got along with the red flashlight, but it would take hours. I sort the folders and documents by date and look for a date thatmatches the first entry on the little black notebook. “There you are. Not so many, after all.”

I copy the twenty or thirty documents to the flash drive. Resort the folder to what it was before. Wait for the transfer to finish. Less than a minute now.

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