St. Jude's service station had been boarded up for eight years, its gas pumps removed and its windows painted white. It stood beside a narrow county road where delivery trucks once refueled before entering Westbridge. Caleb remembered passing it with Arthur as a child, stopping for orange sodas in summer.
The map from Gabriel's envelope showed a back storage shed and a handwritten instruction: ASK FOR JOAN. Vale located Joan Fletcher, the retired station manager, through county tax records. Vale stayed beside them. She lived in a small farmhouse and initially refused to speak.
When Caleb told her who his father was, she invited them inside. Her kitchen walls held photographs of mechanics, truck drivers, and neighborhood children who had grown up near the station. She pointed to Arthur in one picture, smiling beside a repaired bicycle. "He always fixed the kids' tires for free," Joan said.
"Told me they couldn't get to school if their wheels didn't turn." Joan had found Gabriel sleeping in the station's office shortly before his arrest. He was injured and frightened. He told her men from Bellweather had followed him after he copied a set of private bank statements. Joan brought him food and offered her phone, but he would not stay after sunrise.
Before leaving, he asked her to keep a tool bag beneath the floorboards of the rear shed. "He said somebody might come looking for it," Joan recalled. "I thought he meant thieves. Then the police took him, and I was afraid to touch anything." They returned to the property with a deputy and a county investigator.
Joan unlocked the shed, revealing rusted shelves, old tires, and a wooden workbench. Beneath a loose plank lay a canvas bag stained with oil. Inside were a wrench, two mechanic's gloves, a worn family photograph, and a waterproof document pouch. The pouch held a flash drive and a notebook listing wire transfers between Bellweather and several shell companies.
At least one account had received money meant for emergency housing. A second page documented unexplained withdrawals made after Marisol's death. Gabriel had circled the same name repeatedly: R. KEENE.
Caleb tried to imagine Gabriel carrying those papers through the night, protecting them while his children waited at home. The man had been pursued not because he stole anything but because he had found a record others wanted buried. Yet there was still no evidence of what happened after his bus ticket was purchased. Joan touched the edge of the family photograph.
"He said if someone came for his boys, I should tell them something." She paused, struggling with the memory. "He said their mother wasn't the only person who knew where the missing money went.