PART 19:

Could it just be that the records are old and lost? Evelyn said, “Maybe,” Adrienne said, but a commercial storage facility fire in Chicago in 1974 should have a record. The Chicago Fire Department kept records. If the building existed and burned, there’s a report somewhere. She was looking at him with an expression he’d come to recognize.

The one she wore when she was two steps ahead of where he was going. “You think the fire didn’t happen?” she said. “I think it’s possible,” he said carefully. The car wasn’t destroyed in the fire, which either means it escaped the fire by coincidence, someone moved it, sold it, it ended up in Houston somehow, or the fire was a story that some people believed, but that wasn’t entirely what it claimed to be.

If the fire was a story, Evelyn said slowly, then someone made it up or let it be believed. Yes, welder, she said. It would explain the disappearance, Adrienne said. If you want to vanish and you want to make sure nobody comes looking for something specific, you tell a story about a fire. He paused.

It would also explain why the car ended up in a salvage yard in Houston rather than destroyed. Someone moved it. Someone who knew what it was decided to hide it instead of destroy it. Mason, who had been eating pie with what appeared to be full concentration, said without looking up, “Why would someone hide a car instead of just driving it?” Adrienne and Evelyn both looked at him.

Because it was too valuable to drive, but too important to destroy, Adrienne said. So they put it somewhere it would be safe without being findable. A salvage yard is a good hiding spot, Mason said thoughtfully. Nobody looks at broken things. The kitchen was quiet for a moment. He’s right, Evelyn said. He usually is, Adrienne said.

He was on the phone with the Chicago Fire Department’s historical records division at 9 the next morning, which turned out to be a phone call that required four transfers before reaching a person who understood what he was asking for. The person who understood what he was asking for was a woman named Gloria, who had been in the records division for 23 years and had the specific competence of someone who knows exactly where everything is in a filing system that nobody else understands.

1974 she said storage facility fire Chicago area. Do you have an address? No address. He said I have a business name Caldwell Rice Motorsports and a general time frame sometime in the fall of 1974. Hold on. Gloria said he heard the sound of someone who was actually going to look rather than telling him to submit a written request. He waited 4 minutes.

I’ve got 1974 commercial fires index by business type and general area. Gloria said storage facilities. He heard paper. I don’t see a Caldwell rice. Try just the street or district if you have anything in the motorsport or automotive category. He said more paper. I’ve got a garage fire in Bridgeport in August, a service station on the north side in November.

Nothing that matches motorsport storage. She paused. I can do a broader search, but it’ll take a few days. I’d need to go through the unindexed 74 logs. Please, he said, I’ll leave my number, he hung up, sat with what he had. No fire report, which didn’t confirm anything yet. Records from 1974 were incomplete. Things got lost.

The fire might be indexed differently or in a different jurisdiction, but the absence of the expected record combined with the car’s existence was starting to form a shape that he was trying not to jump toward before the evidence supported it. He called Lauron. I can’t find a fire report, he said. Laurent was quiet for a moment.

What does that mean? I don’t know yet, Adrien said. But I’m starting to think the fire might have been a way for Welder to disappear the car and himself at the same time. Make everyone believe the prototype was gone, put it somewhere it would be safe but invisible and walk away. A long silence on Laurent’s end. Why would he do that? Lauron said, and his voice had changed slightly. Not suspicious, but careful.

Careful in the way of a man who is recalculating something he thought he understood. I don’t know his reasons, Adrienne said. But if I’m right, it means the car’s survival wasn’t an accident. It means he chose to save it and chose to let the world believe it was gone. He paused, which means he might have always intended for someone to find it eventually.

He left the authentication plate where only someone really looking would find it. And the build log at the Chicago Racing Federation archive, Laurent said slowly. He contributed material to their archive himself. in 1973 before the fire. I always thought it was routine documentation. A pause.

But if you’re right, he was leaving a trail. A trail that only someone who already knew what to look for could follow. Adrienne said he wasn’t advertising the car’s existence. He was leaving the evidence for someone who deserved to find it. The line was quiet for long enough that Adrienne checked that the call was still connected.

Francis Welder, Laurent said finally in the tone of a man revising a decadesl long understanding of something may have engineered his own disappearance as carefully as he engineered the car. That’s what I think, Adrienne said. Which means, Laurent said that he might have always planned to come back into the story at some point under the right circumstances.

Another pause. Or he might have died waiting for circumstances that never came. It was the thing Adrienne had been trying not to sit with and it sat with him now regardless. “I’m going to keep looking,” he said. Deborah called on Thursday afternoon. “I found something,” she said, and her voice had the specific quality it had carried in her email when she’d written, “You need to be extremely careful about who you tell.

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