Chapter 5 - THE SADDLE THAT DIDN’T FIT RIGHT
Richard went home that night but did not sleep.
By morning he had done something he had not done in years:
he entered the company archive room himself.
Hale Urban Development’s early records were stored in a climate-controlled basement beneath the headquarters building in Boston. Richard asked for everything from 1989 through 1997—partnership documents, warehouse leases, supplier ledgers, and Bernard Hale’s original expansion files.
Several boxes were missing.
That fact alone made him suspicious.
Richard also called the only man who might still know what Thomas had been thinking near the end of his life: Frank Mercer, Thomas’s older cousin, who still lived outside Columbus.
Frank answered on the fourth ring.
“I wondered if that bicycle would ever find you back,” he said.
Richard went cold.
“You knew?”
“Tom said if life had any sense of humor, the right man would see the plate one day.”
Frank told him one more thing.
A month before Thomas died, he repaired the bicycle seat himself and warned Frank never to throw it away, no matter how bad the frame got.
“He kept saying the truth was riding under the saddle.”
Richard was in Diane’s hospital room ten minutes later with a screwdriver in his coat pocket.
Leo watched curiously as Richard knelt beside the bicycle.
The black tape on the torn seat was older than the rest of the damage. The seat base had been resealed twice. When Richard loosened the bolts and lifted the underside, he found a narrow vinyl pouch tucked into the metal frame.
Inside was a small brass key.
An old folded photograph.
And a sealed envelope yellowed with time.
The photograph showed two nineteen-year-old men beside the same bicycle, laughing in front of a delivery truck with hand-painted lettering:
Hale & Mercer Supply
On the back, in Thomas’s handwriting, were six words:
In case the wrong man remembers.
Richard stared at the sentence for a long time.
May you like
Then he opened the envelope.
It was addressed to him.
