The man who bought my truck sent me a photo of the odometer. He had taken it in for an inspection after buying it from me in April, and the shop pulled the vehicle history. There was an eleven-month gap in 2018 where that truck was registered in another state under another name. I had owned the truck from 2015 until April, and it never left my county for more than a weekend. He wasn’t accusing me of anything, and I believed him, but then the shop found something welded underneath the bed.
The mechanic said it looked like someone had deliberately hidden a compartment there. He cut through the old welds and found a small metal box sealed inside. There was no rust on it, which meant it had probably been placed there long after the truck was manufactured. The buyer asked if I wanted it, and I told him to open it while I stayed on the phone. Inside was a set of keys, an old prepaid phone, and a folded registration document. The name on the registration was the same name that appeared during those missing eleven months.
I searched the name online and found almost nothing. Then I noticed the address listed on the registration was only twenty miles from where I lived. I drove past it the next day and found an abandoned mechanic’s shop with the windows boarded up. There was a faded sign above the garage, but one part of the name had been painted over. The buyer called me while I was standing outside and said the phone inside the box had suddenly turned on. It had one saved message, dated from 2018.
I asked him to read it to me exactly as it appeared. It said, “The truck is clean. Keep it until he comes back.” I didn’t know who “he” was, and neither did the buyer. Then he told me there was something else inside the box that he hadn’t mentioned. It was a photograph, folded in half and tucked underneath the registration. The photograph showed my truck parked outside that same mechanic’s shop in 2018. Standing beside it was a man I had never seen before. He was holding a clipboard, and written across the bottom of the photograph were five words: “He still thinks it’s his.”:::
