part 3
Roger was suddenly sure that whoever was pranking him must be hidden nearby, maybe even filming him. He jerked upright and looked around. But no, how would anyone have known when he was going to open the garage? He hadn’t done that in years, and he’d just had the idea out of the blue this very morning.
The car wasn’t locked, so he checked the interior. It looked in just as perfect condition as the outside; just like his father had tried to keep it. He opened the glove box and found what looked like the original owner’s manual. The registration paperwork was there too. Thinking the registration might reveal the prankster, he took it out into the light to read. It was a very thorough prank; the registration bore his father’s name, and was dated the year of the accident. Somebody had gone to an awful lot of trouble, but why?
Roger’s eyes narrowed, and he suddenly spun around and marched back to the house. He had a passing thought that he hadn’t walked this determinedly for…he couldn’t remember the last time he did that, either. He went straight to his father’s old study, which was still pretty much the way it had been left — Roger tended to just use the kitchen table for anything requiring a desk. There was a metal two-drawer filing cabinet next to his father’s desk, and it took him only a minute to find the folder with all the records for the car. His dad had saved everything, including the original sales receipt. Roger laid the receipt on the desk with the registration on top, then adjusted them so the VIN numbers were as close together as possible.
The prank was next level. The VIN numbers on the sales receipt from 1982 matched the registration, dated years later. Roger was sure the receipt was original, and anyway, who would have known that Roger still had it? That meant the registration was a fake. An excellent fake, but a fake. He went back to the garage to check the actual VIN number on the car. He turned on the flashlight on his iPhone and peered through the base of the windshield. It matched the registration. This was officially the same car that had been virtually destroyed seven years ago. This was beyond prank territory; it was impossible. Faking the VIN number on an actual car would take an insane amount of effort. And again…who would bother?
He sat down in the driver’s seat. The keys, with a Ford keychain identical to the one he remembered his dad using, were on the dashboard. Of course the thing wouldn’t start. Whoever had engineered this thing must have done it quite a while back. The battery had to be dead.
The car started right up. The radio was on, still tuned to the FM easy listening station Roger’s father had favored. Roger thought it had more recently changed to a format featuring latin music, but today they seemed to be playing a retro set; it was the same boring music he remembered arguing with his dad about. He even remembered hearing the song that was playing; as it ended they even had brought in one of the old-school velvet voiced DJs who explained it was something by “Montovani,” whoever that was. Weird coincidence. Roger turned the radio off.
Since the car was already running, and actually sounding pretty good, he decided to back out of the garage and take a little ride around town. He had to maneuver onto the lawn to get around his Prius, but it hadn’t rained in weeks and the ground was firm.
The old LTD was like he remembered; a cushy land yacht that soaked up the potholes and bumps. It was really pretty comfortable. In most of Roger’s memories of the car he had been riding in the back seat. He had driven it a few times, though. Or “been allowed’ to drive it. He supposed that since whoever had set up this ridiculously elaborate hoax had provided an expired registration in his dad’s name, and left the car in his garage, it must be his car now. Huge, compared to most things on the road, and he had to admit it was ..well “mushy” in terms of steering and suspension, but pretty relaxing. of course it was probably burning as much gas every ten minutes as his Prius could even hold.
Roger drove aimlessly, having noticed that the gas gauge was point to “Full.” He was pretty sure gasoline can expire, but the car was running perfectly, so he didn’t worry about it. He found himself cruising through the center of town. He got several waves from people who noticed the car. He returned the waves by reflex, then thought to wonder why they waved at all. His father had been pretty well known and liked in town, so maybe they were just operating on their own reflexes. After all, it’s not every day you see an enormous, decades-old car in museum condition tooling along Main Street. Especially one that was a perfect copy of a car that was once seen around town.
