Return to Owner

"I think we should close early," Toby said while glaring at the snow collecting over the edge of the glass outside the gas-station's front door, "or the roads won't be drivable."

"We close at midnight, Tob," you reminded him off-hand as you rechecked the number of milky-roos that were still by the register. Whoever had decided that a daily inventory of the open single item snacks by the register were a good idea was absolutely insane. You'd promised yourself after you turned twenty-five that you'd quit and move somewhere warm.

Like Ohio.

"Mira, will you drive me? My clunker won't make it if we get another inch," Toby rested his head on the broom handle in his hands and pouted at you. You glanced out the window at the snow. It was up to four inches at this point. Light, compared to prior Michigan winters. It didn't help that you were the only gas station for about 30 miles out this far north. Meant that if you couldn't get home, then you were sleeping here.

"We'll check in an hour. Here," you shoved the clipboard and inventory printout into his hands. He dropped the broom in surprise, which made you sigh, "–finish with the candy and the gum, It's Friday so I have to clear out the lost and found."

"Oh, yeah, poor Franky," Toby made a face in digust, "–you remember that time I found a dead possu–"

"–Yup," you cut him off and turned and walked towards the back office where the lost and found was situated. It was the one thing you hated more than anything when you were shift-manager, but there was no way around it. After Toby had found a dead woodland animal in the box a few months back there was now a policy that meant it had to be emptied every week on Friday.

And guess what day it was?

You stepped into the dimly lit little closet of a break-room and looked around.

"Now where are you?" You glanced at the back filing cabinet where it was supposed to be, "–not where you're supposed to be. What else is new," you opened the closet to your left with the cleaning supplies, but the box wasn't there.

Huh. Ok then.

You shut the closet and went looking in a couple of the larger cupboards.

"There you are–" you pulled it out of a bottom cupboard with a groan. The big, battered, double-duct-taped cardboard box had been repaired with bits of product boxes over the years. You think the owner had just started with a simple, brown, amazon box, but coffee spills, burst pipes during a winter or two, and a few other things had necessitated amputations. So the box was only about a third of actual plain, brown, cardboard, and a then the rest of it was donations from whatever different employees had thought might look cool. There was a little of an M&Um's box, Twits, a few odd imported beer icons or slogans, an image for Pocket-Sours brightened up this corner or that.

Toby called it "Franken-Box". "Franky" for short. You didn't dissuade him from it like your boss, his Dad, did. You thought there wasn't any harm in it as long as Toby understood that Franky had a shorter life-span than most humans and would one day need to be put out to pasture.

Setting the box on the table, right on top of other unfinished inventory reports for the back room that would be a Saturday chore, you started sorting through the top layer of discards.

First thing was a sweatshirt. It had a shark on it and some line about humans being junk food. Second was a couple of hats, some gloves, and other small items people often left on the counter. Lighters, pens, chapstick, a few key rings, and a couple of Swiss Army knives. Then came the bigger, harder to explain items. A single sock. A left boot. A whole coat. And a black backpack.

Ugh. You hated bags. Odds were always in favor of old food, and something that had been leaking for a few days being in there.

You unzipped the backpack, hoping for some sort of ID, or a name-tag for whatever high-schooler left it behind.

Instead, you found rolls of money, neatly curled and tied off with rubber bands.

You frowned and dug a little deeper into the bag, certain you'd just come across something from a drug-dealer or serial killer, but there wasn't anything else in the main pocket.

So you took the bag out of Franky, and started to unpack it. Pocket by pocket, zipper by zipper.

You ended up with about twenty rolls of cash, and what looked like a small, black, leather-bound notebook. You unrolled one of the wads and counted it. It was $1000, even. The whole batch was probably around 20k.

Holy shit.

You flipped opened the notebook.

The words "Return to Owner" were scrawled in Black in on the front page, but there was no information beyond that. So you turned the page.

It looked like names. Just a long, list of names. Each with a single, clean, red line through them.

Well that didn't bode well.

Nervous, you put the money back in the bag and stowed it under the table. There wasn't a security camera back here, but there was one in the Boss's office where the drawers were counted down each night. So no one would know you'd found the money yet. But the notebook had said "Return to owner". Did that just mean the notebook, or the whole bag?

Was there gray area?

You thought about all the reasons you had this job to begin with. Having to take the late shift so that you could pay for a run-down apartment. Needing the run-down apartment because you student loan repayment size had gone up when it was sold to a third-party a few year back. Not being able to even afford to move to a place where you could get a job that wouldn't pay you in peanuts because of the Car accident in 13'. It was a lot of reasons to do the wrong thing. A lot of things that could be solved by simply not trying to look for the person who left it here.

Problem was, you knew that money like that didn't just get lost. At least not without someone coming to look for it. Rolled money meant someone had either scrimped or saved, or, that they had prepped it for something.

"Dammit," you sighed, stepping out of the back.

"Toby, I need your help looking at the security footage for today to find someone–" You walked out into the main room, but Toby was no where to be found.

That was weird. Was he was trying to get his car started?

You grabbed the key to the Boss's office from the cash drawer and returned to the back room. You opened the back office and sat down at the desk, using the login on a sticky-note to open the Security-camera program.

You hated this thing. It always went a little too fast, or or slow, and never stopped right when you wanted it too. Normally you had Toby do this, but with him off doing something else you would just have to muddle through it.

You turned back to about ten minutes ago when you went in the back, just to see where Toby was.

You saw him doing inventory by the front, and then you saw only the clipboard and pen he was using on the counter.

You rewound it, watching more carefully this time.

You saw Toby. You saw him set down the clipboard and pen to stack something, and then he was just gone.

There was no jump in time-code, no fuzz or noise on the frame to show that something had been tampered with, nothing.

What. The. Hell.

You checked the security footage of the employee parking along the side of the gas-station. Toby's junker was gone. There was only your rusty, little, Honda with one mis-matched door that was a different color from the accident.

What was going on?

The little black notebook was still heavy, and now oddly cold in your hands.

You opened it once more and skipped to the back of the book in case any information was there.

There wasn't anything in the back, except for the end of the list of names.

There, staring back at you with icy familiarity was a single name.

Toby.

There was no line through it though. The name hadn't been checked off yet.

Was there still time? Time to stop whatever it was that was happening?

You dialed your Boss as you continued to comb through the footage of the day, trying to see if you'd get lucky and see who left the bag and the creepy little book.

"Mira? What's up, everything ok at the station?" Your boss didn't usually go to bed until Toby got home, so it wasn't a surprise that he was up.

"Just curious if Toby called to say he was on his way home or anything? His car is gone and I'm just worried..." you explained.

"Well, I'm sure, wherever your friend is that they're just fine, Mira." your Boss replied.

"Uh, very funny, sir," you chuckled, "–I'm talking about your son."

"Uh..what? Mira are you feeling ok?" You boss sounded concerned.

"You put him on night shift with me? Said it would teach him responsibility?"

"Mira, you're the only one who's been on the schedule for night-shift for the last three months. And I don't have a son."

"What?"

"I don't have a son. Mira, are you sure you're ok?"

You looked down at the book again.

Toby

The name looked back at you like a twisted chain of nonsense that you couldn't even begin to untangle.

Were you losing your mind?

"Ok, well let me know if you get stuck in the snow or something, and need a tow, alright? You know how my wife worries about you guys out in this weather. Drive safe." Your boss ends the call.

You sit in the office until well after closing. Trying to piece your thoughts together. Trying to ground yourself in the smell of the desk-chair, or the sound of the heater, or the vibration from the fan on the desktop computer.

None of it helps.

So you scroll back to earlier in the evening to see if you can tell where things started to go wrong. You only see yourself though. No Toby. No second car. No Nothing.

You'd lost somebody's kid, and now, for some reason, they couldn't even remember they ever had one.

How did you even begin to fix this?

Can you fix this?

You looked down at the little black book with a scowl.

Maybe.

You picked up a black pen that your Boss used for signing checks and flipped back to the last page of the book, where Toby's name was now crossed out.

There, you wrote six, simple words.

Owner of this little black book.

Then you took a red pen and put a neat, solid, single line through it.

It made you smile. It probably wouldn't do anything. Couldn't do anything.

But it made you feel better.

"Hey Mira, I can't find the salt for the front walk-way and the shed door is frozen shut. Can I do it in the morning?" Toby's voice called out from the front of the store.

You looked down at the book.

Now, instead of a list of names, there were only single red lines on each of the pages. The names had all disappeared.

Well, almost all.

The one you'd written was still there.

Owner of this little black book