I asked the manager to read the first name on the legal pad. He said it was a man I’d never heard of, but the second name was my mother’s old accountant, a man who had died in 2018. I looked at the dates on the boxes again. Every one was from the store my mother closed in 1997, and several had been opened recently. The manager checked the access log and said someone had entered the unit six times since 2022 using a code attached to my account. I told him I’d never given anyone permission. He pulled up the signature from the first visit, and I knew the handwriting immediately. It was my mother’s.
I called the nursing home and asked whether my mother had ever mentioned the storage unit. The administrator said my mother had asked about it twice in 2022, even though her memory had already deteriorated badly by then. She’d apparently insisted that someone was going to “take the blue boxes” and told them not to let her daughter sign anything. I asked who had visited her around that time. There was one visitor listed who wasn’t family. The name matched the first name on the legal pad. I drove back to the unit and opened the nearest banker box. Inside were payroll records, old invoices, and copies of checks from 1995 and 1996. Someone had marked certain transactions in red pencil. Then I found a folder with my mother’s name on it and a note clipped to the front: “Do not give this to her until she asks about the second account.”
I asked the manager whether there was another unit under my mother’s name. He checked the system, went quiet, and said there had been one — but it was closed in 2022. I asked who emptied it. He said the contents had been transferred into my current unit because the person who rented it had claimed to be my mother’s daughter. I told him I was her only child. He looked at the legal pad again and said, “That’s what makes this strange.” The third name on the list was mine, but beside it was a date from 1996 — and beneath my name was a handwritten account number I had never seen. I took a photograph of it and called my mother’s old bank. The clerk searched the number, then asked me to sit down before she told me the account was still open, and someone had been making withdrawals from it every month for twenty-nine years.
