Tiger Bound by Tressie Lockwood Page A

you,” Deja announced, and disappeared from the room. When she returned, she held a hammer. “Want me to do it?”
    He chuckled. “I think I have it. Thanks.” With a well-placed bang, he broke the lock and twisted it off. Anticipation quickened his breathing as he opened the lid.
    “Is it porn?” Deja asked, her eagerness clear in her tone.
    “Deja.”
    “What? You know you’re thinking the same thing. How freaky would it be if we found out your dad liked, I don’t know, um, grannies in sexy panties?”
    He had to pause before searching the contents at the picture she drew in his mind. “Only you would suggest something like that.”
    She shrugged. “I’m just saying you never know.”
    When he opened the lid, he discovered no magazines had been squirreled away inside. A stack of papers, bound together with string, lay on top. Under those, a couple of journals, and at the bottom, an envelope addressed to him. Heath pulled it out and stared at it. Deja slipped off the couch where she’d been sitting and curled beside him on the floor. She looped her arm through his and waited in silence. She always knew when he needed her the most.
    From the dullness of the paper and dog-eared edges, he concluded the envelope wasn’t new, but flipping it over, he found it unsealed. He wondered if that meant his dad never finished whatever he wrote inside or intended to include it in a will to give to him after his death. Over the years, it was as if his dad never intended to own anything in life, so he neglected to leave a will. A plot of land bought at the cemetery years ago and a small insurance policy paid for the funeral. “When I go, don’t do anything elaborate,” his dad had always told him. Heath declined to talk about it, but promised his dad after he harangued Heath about it enough times. Against the old man’s wishes, he’d purchased a better quality casket than the style already paid for with the plot. That was the least he could do.
    Heath laid the letter aside. “I’ll read that after going through this. I’m hoping he included information on my medicine.” He undid the string on the papers. “You take some, and I’ll take the rest.”
    “Deal.”  Deja scanned quickly over the words. He knew her ability to process written information came from being so long on her job. “What kind of work did your dad do?”
    “You know what kind,” he told her, not looking up. “He was an assembly line worker at a car factory. Nothing important. By the time I came along, he’d retired.”
    “Well, this is really weird then because these notes look like a doctor’s.”
    “That might be it, the information about my medicine. The doctor who prescribed it might have given him a copy of the report.” He laid his pages aside and glanced over her shoulder.
    “No, this is your dad’s handwriting. I know because I always thought it was funny how he wrote so much neater than any man I’ve seen, and he came in like clockwork every month with a letter to mail. For a couple years, I worked in the back at the post office, so I knew when his letters came in. I mean, there’s not much else around here to entertain us, so on slow days, we made up stories about what people wrote others about. I learned a lot of different people’s handwriting that way.”
    Heath nodded, but he wasn’t really listening. His dad’s notes all referred to one “subject” with a long number as an identification, and page after page including the name of an organization he’d never heard of before.
    “What’s Spiderweb?” Deja asked, echoing his thoughts.
    “I don’t know, and I’m beginning to wonder if I knew my dad as well as I thought.” The stress of thinking that way brought pain to his temples, and he rubbed them, closing his eyes. He willed himself to relax, but a sensation like being struck by lightning shattered his peace, and he winced.
    “Let me get your pills.” Deja jumped up and ran for the bathroom. She returned