I set that trunk mat down real slow, because fifteen years of buying auction cars had taught me that a damp trunk and fresh fingerprints in an impound lot are how bad stories start.
Then I opened the bag, and it was not a bad story at all. It was a sad one, and then a good one.
Inside the trash bag, wrapped in a towel that was the source of all that damp, was a cigar box and a bank envelope. In the box, a womans wedding ring, a mans watch, and a bundle of photographs going back sixty years. In the envelope, a little over four thousand dollars in old bills and a slip of paper with a name and a room number at a care home outside Mansfield.
The registered owner had not abandoned this car. He was an old man taken from it by an ambulance, and everything he had left in the world was hidden in the one place he thought a thief would never look.
The fresh fingerprints, the recently set down bag, all of it fell into place when I called that care home. A relative had been coming to the impound lot, the staff told me, asking about a car and a trunk. The old man, before a stroke took most of his words, had managed to tell a nurse that his savings and his late wifes ring were in his car, and that a certain nephew must never get them.
The nephew had been to the lot twice. He never did figure out how to get into a locked impound. I got the car for eight hundred dollars at auction, and the thing he was hunting for came home with me by accident.
So I drove to the care home. I sat down beside an old man who could barely speak, and I put the cigar box in his lap, and the envelope, and I watched him find his late wifes ring with a shaking hand and press it to his mouth.
The nurse cried. I am not too proud to say I did too.
I did not keep a dime of it. A man does not get to find another mans whole life in a trunk and call it his because he bought the car. I had the ring, the watch, the photos, and every dollar put where only that old man and the home director could reach it, and I made sure the nephew never got within a mile of it.
Fifteen years of auction cars, and that damp trunk did put a chill in me, right up until it turned into the best thing I ever pulled out of one. Some cars come with a spare. That one came with a mans whole heart, and I got to hand it back to him.