I asked the tire shop to give me the station number from the old inspection sticker, then called the shop in Arkansas. The man there pulled up the record and said my Buick had been brought in twice in 2023. I told him that was impossible because I was in the hospital both times. He checked the paperwork and said the person who brought it in had the keys, my registration, and a phone paired to the vehicle. Then he read me the name on the work order. It wasn’t my grandson, and it wasn’t anyone in my family. I asked what work they’d done. He said oil changes, tires rotated, and once a brake inspection. Somebody had been driving my car regularly while I was recovering.
I called my grandson and asked why he’d installed the maintenance app on my phone. He said he hadn’t, because the app had already been connected to the car when he helped me set it up. I asked him to pull the trip history and send me the address where the nighttime trips began. Every trip started from the same house eleven miles away. I drove there the next afternoon. There was a woman in the driveway washing my Buick. She looked at me, dropped the hose, and said my name. I asked how she knew me. She said my husband had told her all about me. I told her my husband had been dead for years. Then she said, “He wasn’t the one who gave me the car.”
I asked who did. She pointed toward the house and said the person who’d been bringing it over was my grandson. I called him from the driveway and he finally admitted he’d been lending the car out, but insisted he’d never driven it nine thousand miles. I asked why the woman knew my husband. She said he’d been coming there before he died and had paid for the car to be kept there “for emergencies.” Then she opened the garage and showed me a box containing my original registration, a second set of keys, and an envelope addressed to me in my husband’s handwriting. The letter was dated six weeks before his death. I opened it expecting an explanation about the car.
Instead, the first line said: “If you’re reading this, somebody has already started using the car again.”
