Seventeen Years Earlier

Scott found a few more pictures of his grandfather in his father’s tackle box. That and a few other objects he couldn’t quite understand.

He might have gone fishing with his father, and grew up in a home where fishing was important, so Scott didn’t know what every single lure, reel attachment or gadget for fishing was. But he had seen a few of those objects quite by accident one afternoon when he’d been looking for a simple pin.

Scott was home for a visit with his parents; he had recently graduated from university and had been working part-time at a local Radio Shack as a sales clerk while taking on simple computer repair, home networking setup and illegal satellite and digital receiver card hack jobs on the side.  Due to the part-time nature of his weekly commitments (which saw him working less than twenty-four hours each week) and the fact he could set his own hours for the side-jobs, Scott could easily craft four day weekends, making the trek from Toronto to his parent’s home simple enough.

Being the only son of Lionel and Jeanette Desmond, Scott was regularly guilt-tripped into making the trek back home, and he did so at least once a month. It wasn’t much of a hardship actually, but still, the fact that he had always felt obligated to do so was like a ball and chain that slowed him down, held him from being able to really branch out.

Not that he’d had any real ambitions.

He was content to do the computer mucking and hacking that he liked so well and spend the majority of his free time playing video games.

And, since most of the games he was currently into could be played on his laptop, it didn’t matter whether he was in his own apartment or in his parent’s basement for the weekend.

And that’s what had happened. He’d been playing a hacked version of Battle Warworld, an online immersive 3D first person adventure game; but somewhere in the middle of the adventure he was on, the sysops updated the game – they did that often, pushing down updates into the legitimate system paths that the hacks didn’t always pick up on – preventing him from moving further.

Scott had to pause the game and figure out a way to bypass the latest security install.

And that’s when he realized he needed a stick-pin, a long sharp and pointy object, in order to pop open the side of the drive case so that he could fiddle with the modified RAM sticks he had been using.

And, though he did have plenty of tools with him – he rarely traveled without the basic core requirements for most of the jobs he performed – he didn’t have all the necessary ones to perform the task he’d been hoping for.

And that led him to his father’s workshop, and his tackle box. And something a bit more confusing.

The first shock came when he got to the tackle box and saw that the lock his father normally kept on it was detached. The lock had been something that had confused Scott for a long time, despite his father’s explanation that it was always on, even when he was at home, out of habit.

He had never seen the tackle box left unlocked – heck, it was rare that his father was ever not at home without his tackle box – so he did what any curious young man would do.

He opened it up, slowly methodically, and a bit worried that there might be an alarm that was set off when the box was opened.

It felt odd, doing this, and Scott had to look back over his should as he was doing it, almost as if he were fourteen and had found his father’s secret stash of Playboys and was filled with an excitement mixed with an intense fear of getting caught.  He laughed at himself for having that reaction, but still, it had been a completely unexpected thing.

He stared down at the box.  Sure, he had seen it opened before, many time. But never when he wasn’t in the presence of his father.

He looked down at the tri-sectioned part of the box that folded up and back when the lid opened. It contained about three dozen little inch-wide by inch-long compartments filled with bits of metal, feathers, twigs, ribbons, and other assorted objects. It reminded him a little of his mother’s jewelry box, filled with earrings of all shapes, makes, and sizes.

He rubbed his chin, realizing, immediately, that it was the same gesture Indiana Jones had used in The Temple of the Lost Arc in that classic scene where he was about to lift the idol off of the temple, before carefully reaching out and lifting off the top compartment.

On top were a couple of topographic and hydrographic fishing maps folded and layered onto the top of the main compartment.

Scott carefully lifted them out and placed them beside the tackle box.

Beneath those maps were two additional compartments with a click-down lid.

He opened the one on the right and saw that it contained a bunch of larger items, pieces of reels, rods as well as a whistle, a mini flashlight, a bottle of bug-spray, a smelly oil-stained rag, some pencils, a pen, a carpet knife, and a half-used pack of throat lozenges.

The right side contained more of the same type of items – a mishmash of fishing and toolbox materials.

Scott frowned, wondering what was bothering him about this set up.

When he leaned back he realized what it was. Despite the space required for the top compartment and the additional pair of larger compartments underneath, there was still at least two and an half inches unaccounted for in the bottom of the tackle box.

Carefully removing all of the miscellaneous objects from both of the compartments, he quietly closed the box and lifted it up to look at the bottom and see if, perhaps, the design left some hollow spaces underneath it.  Being empty, the partially plastic and partially metal box should have weighed no more than a couple of pounds. But, instead, it weighed perhaps five or even ten pounds.

He placed it back down and picked it up again.

Yeah. Almost ten pounds.

He tilted it first to the left, then to the right. Something heavy slid around inside, metal clinked on metal.

“There is something else in there,” Scott said, even more curious now.

He placed the tackle box back down on the workshop bench, again opened it and pried open the lids of the two interior compartments.  He slid his fingers around the sides, looking for a gap, a line, anything that might indicate how those compartments opened or lifted out.

Solving this wasn’t all that different than looking at the code in a program and understanding how it operated. Through a simple trial and error series of logical steps, Scott fiddled and played with the compartment.

After a few minutes, still not having any success, he heard footsteps upstairs.

“Oh, oh.”

He rushed over to the door to the workshop and stuck his head around the corner. His father had been at work and his mother was home.  Could his father have returned early?

He heard the sounds of a door opening, the clattering of cups. More footsteps and the sound of coffee being poured.

It was his mother getting a coffee from the kitchen. He followed the sounds of her footsteps back into the living room where she was most likely sipping at her coffee and enjoying a paperback romance novel.

He should have known it wasn’t his father from the sound of footsteps. His father had always walked with a distinct and unique lurch-step, the side effect of a motorcycle accident he’d had when he was a young man. Of course, with his nerves running on edge, he forgave himself for being a bit overly sensitive and paranoid.

He let out a deep breath he hadn’t realized he had been holding, realizing just how anxious he was.

This was, indeed, more than finding his father’s stash of porn magazines. This was a deeper secret, part of the cards Lionel Desmond held close to his chest.

Yes, fishing had always been a significant priority for the man – but this was something more, something that went a lot deeper than the desire to pursue, in Moby Dick fashion, the big one, the one that got away, the elusive perfect catch.

Scott returned to the “empty” tackle box and resumed his exploratory investigation, determined he would get into the secret lower compartment.

Running a list of the various ways he had already poked and prodded, he made a mental tick mark into the concepts and ideas he had already run through so that he wouldn’t duplicate his efforts and waste time.

This was, despite the nervousness, despite the fear of being caught, an intriguing and satisfying challenge.

He fiddled for another five minutes, continuing to tick off each new idea of things to try, before he finally figured it out.

It was a trick bottom that operated on a similar principal to the Chinese finger trap puzzle.

Placing just the right amount of pressure using opposing forces on the top diametrical corners of the box, he heard a distinct click. And that’s when the compartment snapped open and he was able to lift the false bottom out.

This is not a standard tackle box that you can buy at a place like Ramako’s Scott thought, as he lifted it out and glanced at the curious objects hidden beneath.

On top of the compartment were some additional maps; ones that seemed to be topographical and hydrographical like the other ones. But they were printed in a different fashion and on a thicker type of paper that the others.  He placed them aside and there he spied a series of old brown photographs.

Pictures of his grandfather. He recognized the man’s distinctive well-packed eyes. At least, that’s how his father had described his dad, when he spoke about him. It was one of the main features he could remember from his father, and in the few pictures Scott had seen, the man’s eyes, slightly droopy in nature, seemed to always have large wrinkly sacks under them, as if the man were perpetually overtired.

“My old man’s eyes looked like they were always packed and ready to go,” Scott’s father had said on those occasions where Desmond senior had come up in conversation or reminiscences.

Scott had only ever seen perhaps half a dozen pictures of his grandfather in the various photo albums on the bookshelf in the family room – but here, tucked away and hidden in this secret location of his father’s tackle box, were at least a dozen shots he had never seen.  The photos were of the same brown and white quality of the ones he had seen before, and featured Reginald Desmond in various stages of his life. 

One featured him as a young man, posing with a couple of buddies, shit-eating grins on their faces, their arms draped over one another’s shoulders. All three were crew cut like Scott’s grandfather, who was in the middle – his swollen eye bags immediately revealing him as the man to the left of the trio. In Reginald’s right hand was a beer bottle that he was lifting and tipping towards the camera as if offering a toast.

Another picture was a solo one of Reginald, dressed in his military gear – unlike the bust portrait Scott was used to seeing, this was a full-on full body shot. Reginald was in full dress uniform, hat, tie, etc.; he looked proud to be wearing the uniform.

The picture under that was Reginald, in a picture that had to be of him ten years earlier – this one was of him in uniform as well, but not a military uniform. A Boy Scout uniform. He wore the rounded small cap atop his head, the elegantly tied kerchief around his neck, the dual shaded brown shirt and pant combination. He looked like a soldier in training in that shot. Scott grinned, remembering some professor from an English class he had taken talking about how the Boy Scouts had indeed been a pre-training ground for young men to begin to learn the discipline of joining the military and serving their country.

Several other pictures featured Reginald at about the same age he looked to be in the Boy Scout photo – somewhere in the realm of ten to twelve years old.  In them he was either holding a fishing rod in one hand and a tackle box in the other – a shot likely taken when he had been about to embark on his fishing expedition – or he was posing in a shot obviously taken when returning from the trip, holding a swath of eight fish of various sizes dangling beside him.

One of the pictures featured Reginald as a toddler, dressed in a fancy little sailor suit complete with a Donald Duck cap propped on his head. He was sitting back on a couch, his little legs not even reaching to the edge of the couch, and he was leaning forward, his right arm extended toward the camera and in his right hand, an unlit cigarette held between two fingers, as if he’d been an experienced smoker. He looked about to say something he imagined was quite amusing.  And, even though he couldn’t be much more than a year and a half old, his identity quite clear by the fact that his eyes, though not as puffy and packed as they became later in life, were still full and pronounced.

“What are you doing with all these hidden photos of Grandfather, Dad?” Scott wasn’t sure why his father would have gone to such trouble to keep these pictures hidden and in such a secure spot.

Putting the photos aside, he looked down into what else was inside the tackle box, and started pulling them out one by one.

The first object looked like a hearing aid. It had the little ear, shaped crescent that would fit over the top of a person’s ear, then a little rounded nub that you might stick inside your ear.  Strange, his father had never had or at least spoken about any hearing problems – why, then, would he have this hearing aid? And why would he keep it in his tackle box.

The second object Scott pulled out of the tackle box was a silver metal box no more than an inch high by two inches wide and long. It had a little extendable aerial that you could pull out of the top, a small screen that seemed to be some sort of digital display as well as a couple of analog meters; one rounded one with a pair of small hands and the other that looked like the partial crescent shape of a voltmeter. Below that were a cluster of nine small buttons that looked like a digital telephone keypad, the top six buttons black and the bottom row of three red. Below that was another small screen.  Scott lifted the box up, figuring it was about two pounds – pretty dense – and saw that on the left side of the box there were a couple of audio jack ports – two different sizes – one that appeared to be for 3.5 MM mono plugs and the other for the much larger and thicker 35 MM stereo plug.  As he twisted it around, he noticed the on/off switch at the back near the top.

“What the hell is this?” Scott mumbled, putting it back down on the workbench.

He wanted to turn it on and play with it, but there were several other strange devices in the tackle box that he was curious to look at.

The third object looked to be some sort of handgun shaped object, except the pistol part ended in a tiny umbrella-shaped object and the butt had a thin antenna. There was an on/off switch.

There was a gold-banded watch inside as well – there appeared to be nothing unique about that.

The last large object was a pill bottle, a somewhat translucent brown plastic and a white lid – but no label and nothing written on the top. He shook it and could hear the pills rattling around inside. Then he pushed down and twisted the lid, but it didn’t come off the way a standard child-proof lid was supposed to be removed. The pill bottle seemed to have, much like the false bottom of the tackle box, some special secret way of opening it. Scott fiddled with it for a minute but was unable to decipher the manner by which he could open it.

Finally, in the bottom was a syringe, a couple of bolts, a pen, a pair of cufflinks, a tie clip, and small pile of lose change, both American and Canadian money; mostly nickels and quarters.  Scott picked up one of the dimes and noticed there were a series of silver rings near them. He fiddled with one of the silver rings, eventually figuring out there was a thin ring he could pop off to reveal the coin was hollow inside.

“Holy shit, Dad,” Scott said. “What the hell would you need hollow coins for? Passing on information about secret fishing spots?”

That’s when he heard the front door upstairs open and close, and his father’s voice.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Scott said, scrambling to place all of the objects back into the bottom of the tackle box.  The coins, the pill box, the pistol-shaped object, the watch, the metal box and the hearing aid.  Once they were inside, he carefully put his grandfather’s pictures back on top, then set the false bottom object back in.

He could hear his father and mother speaking upstairs.

“Don’t come downstairs,” Scott said. “Don’t come downstairs.” He repeated that as he struggled with the false bottom, trying to get it to properly latch back into place.  It wasn’t working. Nothing he tried seemed to be getting it back into place.

The sound of a drawer squeaking open and the clinking of cutlery filled the kitchen, familiar sounds of Scott’s mother preparing a meal.

“I’ll heading downstairs for a minute before dinner,” Scott heard his father, the voice coming from the top of the stairs, announce.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Scott said, trying to guide the tiny ridges along the side that he had to line up with tiny little tongues that further popped in and locked the false bottom section securely into place.  Nothing seemed to be working.

As he struggled with the false bottom, he could hear his father’s footsteps coming down the stairs.  The one saving grace was that his father walked terribly slowly due to his one bad leg, but the rhythmic two-toned thumb of his one normal shoe, the other built-up heavy Frankenstein monster shoe pattern sounded, to Scott, like the rising anxiety-inspiring beat of tension music in a movie like Jaws or a horror flick where the creature was getting ever closer.

His father had descended at least a half dozen stairs, before the false bottom settled into the right position and finally clicked into place.

Scott breathed a sigh of relief as he placed the top section of the tackle box back inside and closed the lid.

He managed to get himself across the room and over to his father’s toolbox area, pulling out one of the small cabinets holding a miscellaneous selection of tiny nails, screws, and bolts, when his father walked in.

“What are you up to, chief?” his father asked.  Chief was one of the nicknames he’d regularly called his son when he was a kid. It had started off as Chip, but then it migrated to either Chief or Sport or Boss or Partner. For a while, during Scott’s teen years, he hated whenever his father used those terms. Now, though, that he was a little bit older, hearing his father calling him Chief was somehow comforting – something that seemed of definite importance, particularly now that he’d learned his father was keeping something rather odd from his family.

“Oh,” Scott said, trying to sound casual. “I just need a sharp object to pop open the hard drive on my laptop.”

He proceeded to start explaining some of the technology about the problem he’d been having earlier, knowing full well that his father would begin to fade out, stop paying attention to his computer-babble.  Sure, the man had been proud that his son was so knowledgeable about computers, but he’d never been interested in hearing him talk about it.

As Scott watched his father’s face fade into the standard bored look he got when Scott spoke about