I kept coming back to the same thought.<\/p>\n
We had fixed the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
We had not fixed whatever was happening around it.<\/p>\n
Those were two different things, and I had spent too much of the morning pretending they were connected.<\/p>\n
The Shovelhead had been a straightforward problem in one important sense.<\/p>\n
It was a machine.<\/p>\n
We could examine it, work on it, and see whether our efforts made a difference.<\/p>\n
The questions Brix had raised were nothing like that.<\/p>\n
We couldn't open them up and inspect the parts.<\/p>\n
We couldn't replace something and listen for a change in the engine.<\/p>\n
We couldn't even be sure we understood the problem.<\/p>\n
All we had was what Brix remembered.<\/p>\n
The diner man had questioned him about the shop.<\/p>\n
He had asked about Reed.<\/p>\n
He had wanted to know what Brix had seen on the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
And before the man struck him, Brix had overheard an argument about something being found before Saturday.<\/p>\n
That was the information we had.<\/p>\n
Nothing more.<\/p>\n
I tried to remind myself of that whenever my imagination started filling in the gaps.<\/p>\n
Odom seemed to be doing the same thing.<\/p>\n
He had stopped moving around the shop and settled near the workbench.<\/p>\n
His phone remained beside him.<\/p>\n
He looked at it once, then turned his attention back to Reed.<\/p>\n
"How much time do we have?" he asked.<\/p>\n
Reed understood what he meant.<\/p>\n
"Forty-nine hours from when we counted it."<\/p>\n
Odom nodded.<\/p>\n
The memorial ride was still approaching.<\/p>\n
That part of the situation hadn't changed.<\/p>\n
We still had a motorcycle that needed to be ready, and we still had a reason to get the work finished.<\/p>\n
But we couldn't ignore Brix's warning simply because we had other responsibilities.<\/p>\n
Reed looked toward the front door.<\/p>\n
"I don't want to make assumptions."<\/p>\n
Neither did I.<\/p>\n
The problem was that avoiding assumptions didn't make the situation feel safer.<\/p>\n
It only kept us honest.<\/p>\n
I had to respect that.<\/p>\n
A person could turn uncertainty into a weapon against himself.<\/p>\n
He could decide that every passing vehicle was suspicious.<\/p>\n
He could interpret every ordinary question as proof of something terrible.<\/p>\n
I didn't want us to start doing that.<\/p>\n
But I also didn't want us to dismiss a warning just because it was inconvenient.<\/p>\n
There had to be a way to take Brix seriously without pretending we knew more than we did.<\/p>\n
I looked at him.<\/p>\n
He was standing quietly, still holding the canvas bag.<\/p>\n
He seemed tired.<\/p>\n
Not just physically tired, but tired of having to explain himself.<\/p>\n
I wondered how the conversation would have gone if the diner man had never asked those questions.<\/p>\n
Brix might never have mentioned the shop.<\/p>\n
We might have finished the motorcycle without giving the incident another thought.<\/p>\n
Saturday would have remained Saturday.<\/p>\n
The memorial ride would have remained the reason we were working so hard.<\/p>\n
Instead, a few questions had changed the way we looked at everything.<\/p>\n
I felt uneasy about that.<\/p>\n
Not because Brix had done anything wrong.<\/p>\n
Because we were now involved in a situation whose beginning we hadn't witnessed.<\/p>\n
We didn't know what had happened before the diner man confronted him.<\/p>\n
We didn't know what the other man behind the kitchen had said.<\/p>\n
We didn't know what anyone expected to find.<\/p>\n
We were trying to understand a conversation through the memory of someone who had only overheard part of it.<\/p>\n
That wasn't much to build on.<\/p>\n
But it was enough to make us pay attention.<\/p>\n
Reed stepped closer to Brix.<\/p>\n
"Did the man ever say why he wanted to know what you'd seen?"<\/p>\n
Brix shook his head.<\/p>\n
"No."<\/p>\n
"Did he explain why he was asking about me?"<\/p>\n
"No."<\/p>\n
Reed waited.<\/p>\n
Brix looked at the floor.<\/p>\n
"He just kept asking."<\/p>\n
That was all.<\/p>\n
No hidden explanation.<\/p>\n
No name that suddenly made everything clear.<\/p>\n
No additional detail that settled our concerns.<\/p>\n
I watched Reed absorb the answer.<\/p>\n
He looked frustrated, but he didn't direct that frustration at Brix.<\/p>\n
I was glad.<\/p>\n
Brix had told us what he knew.<\/p>\n
Demanding more would not make his memory more complete.<\/p>\n
Odom picked up his phone again.<\/p>\n
He glanced at the screen, then set it down without saying anything.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether he was checking the time.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he was thinking about the same forty-nine hours.<\/p>\n
The number had become a quiet presence in the room.<\/p>\n
It reminded us that the memorial ride wasn't far away.<\/p>\n
It reminded us that whatever had been discussed behind the diner was supposed to happen before then.<\/p>\n
And it reminded us that we might not have much time to understand the connection.<\/p>\n
I looked at the motorcycle.<\/p>\n
The engine had stopped by then, leaving the shop quieter than before.<\/p>\n
Without the sound, I could hear small things I had ignored earlier.<\/p>\n
A tool shifting on the workbench.<\/p>\n
Someone moving a foot across the floor.<\/p>\n
The faint noise from outside.<\/p>\n
I had always liked the silence that followed a successful repair.<\/p>\n
It meant the work was done.<\/p>\n
This time, the silence felt unfinished.<\/p>\n
Reed ran his eyes over the Shovelhead.<\/p>\n
He had put too much effort into getting it running to abandon the job over a suspicion.<\/p>\n
I knew that.<\/p>\n
But he wasn't acting as if the motorcycle was all that mattered anymore.<\/p>\n
He had heard Brix.<\/p>\n
He understood that the questions might be connected to something beyond our work.<\/p>\n
And he wasn't willing to ignore that possibility.<\/p>\n
I respected him for it.<\/p>\n
I also wished the situation had stayed simple.<\/p>\n
There was no point pretending otherwise.<\/p>\n
We had wanted to finish the repair, prepare for the ride, and move on.<\/p>\n
Instead, we were standing in a shop trying to make sense of a stranger's interest in a motorcycle.<\/p>\n
I looked at Brix's canvas bag again.<\/p>\n
It seemed like such an ordinary thing.<\/p>\n
Just a bag he carried with him.<\/p>\n
Yet he held it with the same care he had shown while telling us what happened.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether the man at the diner had treated him like somebody whose words didn't matter.<\/p>\n
If he had, then Brix might have been accustomed to keeping quiet.<\/p>\n
I couldn't know that for certain.<\/p>\n
I only knew that he had come forward when he could have said nothing.<\/p>\n
That deserved more than suspicion from us.<\/p>\n
Odom seemed to reach the same conclusion.<\/p>\n
"We'll keep what you've told us in mind."<\/p>\n
Brix nodded.<\/p>\n
He didn't smile.<\/p>\n
Neither did I.<\/p>\n
There was no reason to pretend that those words had solved anything.<\/p>\n
But they meant we weren't going to brush his account aside.<\/p>\n
Reed turned toward the motorcycle one last time.<\/p>\n
For a moment, he looked almost disappointed.<\/p>\n
Not in the machine.<\/p>\n
In the situation.<\/p>\n
We had done the work.<\/p>\n
We had gotten the engine running.<\/p>\n
We had reached the point where we could finally begin thinking about Saturday as an event we were prepared for.<\/p>\n
Then Brix had told us what he heard, and the whole thing had changed.<\/p>\n
I understood why Reed looked at the motorcycle differently now.<\/p>\n
He wasn't only thinking about whether it would be ready for the ride.<\/p>\n
He was thinking about why a man at a diner had been so interested in it.<\/p>\n
I wanted an answer as badly as he did.<\/p>\n
But wanting an answer didn't mean we had one.<\/p>\n
The only honest thing we could do was keep the facts separate from our fears.<\/p>\n
A man had asked questions.<\/p>\n
A second man had argued with him.<\/p>\n
Something was supposed to be found before Saturday.<\/p>\n
And the motorcycle was somehow part of the conversation.<\/p>\n
Somehow.<\/p>\n
That was the word I couldn't get past.<\/p>\n
We didn't know how the pieces fit together.<\/p>\n
We only knew they belonged to the same troubling account.<\/p>\n
I took one last look around the shop.<\/p>\n
The tools were still in place.<\/p>\n
The workbench hadn't changed.<\/p>\n
The Shovelhead stood where we had left it.<\/p>\n
Everything looked ordinary.<\/p>\n
That was almost the worst part.<\/p>\n
Nothing in the room explained why the diner man had cared so much about what Brix had seen.<\/p>\n
Nothing told us what was supposed to be found.<\/p>\n
Nothing gave us a clear reason to believe the trouble would end when the motorcycle was ready.<\/p>\n
For the first time that day, I stopped thinking about the repair as the main problem.<\/p>\n
It was still important.<\/p>\n
But it was no longer the only thing we had to consider.<\/p>\n
Saturday was getting closer.<\/p>\n
And we had to face the possibility that getting the motorcycle running had brought us to the beginning of a problem we hadn't even known existed.<\/p>\n
I kept coming back to the same thought. We had fixed the motorcycle. We had not fixed whatever was happening around it. Those were two different things, and I had … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40041,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40045","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40045","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40045"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40045\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40065,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40045\/revisions\/40065"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40045"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40045"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40045"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}