I couldn't stop thinking about what Brix had told us.
The diner.
The argument behind the kitchen.
The words about something being found before Saturday.
And the questions about Reed and the motorcycle.
They kept circling in my head.
I wanted them to form a clear picture.
They didn't.
The shop felt different now.
Nothing had changed physically.
The tools were still where we had left them.
The workbench still carried the same marks.
The Shovelhead stood in the same place, its engine finally doing what we had wanted it to do.
But none of those familiar things made me feel settled.
I looked at the motorcycle and tried to remember whether anything about it had seemed unusual.
I couldn't identify anything.
That bothered me.
If someone had been asking questions about the bike, I wanted to know what they thought they might find.
More than that, I wanted to know why they cared whether Brix had seen it.
Reed remained near the motorcycle.
He wasn't working on it anymore.
He was looking at it.
There is a difference.
When you're repairing something, you search for what is broken.
When you're suspicious of something, you start wondering what you have failed to notice.
I had seen Reed do both kinds of work before.
This was the second kind.
Odom stood beside the workbench, his phone resting where he had placed it.
He glanced at Brix.
"Think carefully about the conversation you heard."
Brix nodded.
"I am."
"Did the man sound afraid?"
Brix took a moment before answering.
"He sounded angry."
"Angry at the other man?"
"I think so."
Odom waited for him to continue.
Brix shook his head.
"That's all I know."
I could tell he wanted to give us something more useful.
He kept searching his memory, as if the missing detail might appear if he thought hard enough.
It didn't.
I knew that feeling, too.
Sometimes people expect the truth to arrive as a complete story.
They want a name, a reason, and an explanation that makes every other detail fall into place.
But the truth often begins with a few things that don't seem connected.
A question.
A strange conversation.
A man who cares too much about an old motorcycle.
We had those things.
We didn't have an answer.
Reed finally moved away from the bike.
He walked toward the front of the shop and looked through the window.
I watched him check the road.
He wasn't looking casually.
He was searching.
That made me more uneasy than anything Brix had said.
Reed was not a man who usually let a suspicion control his attention.
He liked things he could test.
A problem had to have a cause.
A repair had to have a result.
If something didn't work, he kept at it until he understood why.
Now he was looking outside as if the answer might be standing on the other side of the glass.
Odom picked up his phone.
He checked it briefly, then set it down again.
I wondered whether he had intended to contact somebody.
If he had, he seemed to reconsider.
Brix stayed where he was.
Nobody told him to leave.
Nobody asked him to sit.
I realized that we had all become careful around him, even though he was the one who had come to us with the warning.
We were trying to decide whether his information was important.
He was trying to decide whether he had made a mistake by sharing it.
Neither side knew how to make the next move.
I finally spoke.
"Did the diner man ever mention this shop by name?"
Brix looked at me.
"No."
"Did he ask about the memorial ride?"
He shook his head.
"Not that I remember."
That left Saturday hanging between us.
The argument might have had nothing to do with the memorial ride.
We knew that.
But the timing was difficult to ignore.
The event was close enough that we had been measuring everything against it.
We had been thinking about getting the motorcycle ready.
Now somebody else might have been thinking about what would happen before that same day arrived.
I didn't like the possibility.
Still, I had to remind myself that a possibility wasn't proof.
I had seen people turn a small piece of information into an entire story because uncertainty made them uncomfortable.
I didn't want to do that.
Neither did Reed.
He came back from the window and stood beside the workbench.
"Let's not decide what this means yet."
Odom gave a small nod.
Brix looked relieved, though only for a moment.
I understood why.
Being believed and being understood were not the same thing.
We believed that he had heard an argument.
We believed that the diner man had asked questions.
But we didn't understand what those things meant.
And until we did, there was no honest way to tell Brix that everything would be fine.
I looked toward the motorcycle again.
The metal caught the light from the shop windows.
A little while earlier, I had thought the machine represented progress.
Now it reminded me of the question we couldn't answer.
What had the diner man expected Brix to see?
I tried to imagine the conversation from the man's point of view.
Perhaps he had been curious about the shop.
Perhaps he had heard something about Reed.
Perhaps the motorcycle had some ordinary detail that had attracted his attention.
Every explanation I came up with depended on information we didn't have.
That was the problem.
We could invent reasons all day and still learn nothing.
Odom broke the silence.
"Did he ask you about anything else?"
Brix shook his head.
"Mostly the shop and the bike."
"Mostly?"
Brix looked down.
"He kept coming back to the same questions."
That made me look at Reed.
The repetition mattered.
A person could ask about a motorcycle once out of curiosity.
Asking repeatedly whether someone had been inside a shop, spoken to its owner, or seen something on a particular machine suggested a different level of interest.
It didn't prove anything.
But it was enough to make me stop dismissing the conversation as ordinary.
Reed rubbed his jaw.
"What did you tell him?"
"Nothing useful."
"Why?"
Brix looked at him as if the answer should have been obvious.
"Because I didn't know anything."
Reed held his gaze.
Then he nodded.
I wondered how often Brix had been forced to explain himself to people who had already decided he was lying.
He didn't seem comfortable defending his own actions.
He spoke carefully, watched our faces, and held his bag close.
There was something sad about that.
He had brought us information that might matter, yet he looked like he expected to be blamed for it.
I felt ashamed of how quickly I had started thinking about what he might be leaving out.
Not because caution was wrong.
Because suspicion was easy.
It required less effort than understanding somebody else's position.
I had to remind myself that Brix had nothing to gain by making the story more complicated.
At least, I couldn't see what he would gain.
Reed walked back to the motorcycle.
He didn't touch it.
He simply stood beside it and looked at the engine.
I knew he was thinking about the same thing I was.
If the diner man had been interested in what Brix saw, then the motorcycle was not just a motorcycle in this situation.
It was the one object connecting the questions, the shop, and the approaching Saturday.
That connection might have been innocent.
But we couldn't treat it as meaningless anymore.
I glanced at the clock.
The hours until the memorial ride suddenly seemed too short.
We had work to do.
We also had something we didn't understand.
For the first time since we began working on the Shovelhead, I couldn't tell which problem deserved our attention first.
The machine needed to be ready.
That much hadn't changed.
But the questions surrounding it had become part of the job, whether we wanted them there or not.
I looked at Reed.
He looked back at me.
Neither of us said anything.
We didn't have to.
The motorcycle was running, but the situation around it was getting harder to understand.
And Saturday was coming whether we were ready or not.
Click here to continue reading: PART 3: Forty-Nine Hours Before the Memorial Ride, We Had a Running Motorcycle and a Warning Nobody Could Afford to Ignore
I Thought Getting One Old Motorcycle Running Would Solve Everything, Until a Hurt Boy Told Us What He Heard
Part 2 of 20
