On the Sunday when everyone came to work, they’d cleared out full bookcases into boxes for storage. The boxes still sit in the corner, neatly filled with books, a big Hebrew-English dictionary at the top of the box closest to him, and a Tanach just beneath it.

He rearranges them, disturbed. Even the youngest kids who’d been packing books would have known to put the Tanach on top. And if he’d noticed it so quickly today, then he would have noticed it then, too.

Had someone gone through the boxes? Someone who wouldn’t have known to put a Tanach at the top of the pile?

He’d laugh it off as a mistake if not for the car that had been following Hillel and him last week. That might have been road rage, someone infuriated by something as innocuous as being cut off and overreacting. There are lots of simple explanations for everything that’s been going on. But the coincidences are piling up, and Gabe can’t help but feel apprehensive.

Why would someone break into the house? Why would someone follow him?

Is this about Abba?

He tries to put it aside. The front door is locked now, and no one was hiding down here with a wild squirrel or the squirrel would have run long ago. Right now, he’s got to find out more about Abba, why he’d stolen Avigdor’s identity, and what happened to Avigdor.

There were old family mementos in a clunky cabinet down here. It’s where he found that old family tree before Abba took it away. Now, it’s full of photo albums of Rivi and Gabe, and there’s no sign of anything else—

But no, Gabe remembers, there had been a false bottom to the cabinet that he’d been excited about when he was a kid. He’d been disappointed to open it and find nothing more exciting than older photo albums of young Avigdor Cohen and his family, but he digs them out now, stacks all the albums together in a box. Avigdor Cohen and Moish Garfinkel’s lives, forever intertwined, even in death. It’s poetic and morbid at the same time.

There are no Cohen albums past Avigdor’s early childhood, a gap that Gabe had never thought about before he’d known the truth. Abba must have gotten rid of them before they could incriminate him. The photos in the albums don’t give anything away, and he packs them up, defeated, when another thought occurs to him.

There’s a false bottom to the cabinet, yes. But why should it stop there? There’s so much excess wood on the outside, and the interior is small. Gabe tests the sides, finds them firm, and then he feels around at the roof of the cabinet.

There. His fingers tug at the edge of the roof, and the whole roof comes off. It isn’t the top of the cabinet. It’s the bottom of a drawer, safely interred inside, and there’s only one item in the drawer.

It’s a round medal, heavy and dull gold, just about the same size as Gabe’s palm. On it, it reads, EPHRAIM COHEN, FOR HIS TIRELESS SERVICE TO LENAPE FALLS.

Penina had mentioned a medal, but she’d said that it was displayed at Town Hall. Gabe remembers it from Town Hall, from a class trip in high school where he noticed it and thought that it was his grandfather’s. Had it been returned to the family since then? Why would Abba have hidden it if it were?

He tucks the medal into his pocket, troubled, and does a little more packing. But the weight in his pocket is a constant distraction, leaving him with more questions. He’d seen the medal at Town Hall when he was in… tenth grade, 11th? So about 15 years ago. It makes no sense.

When he makes it back to Rivi’s house that evening, Ezra is puzzled by the medal, too. “You found it in the house? But it’s in Town Hall. At least, it was last Chol Hamoed. We took a trip to the park by Town Hall last Succos, and we went to find it. He was the kids’ great-grandfather,” he says, and there’s a sense of pointedness when he says it, though Rivi, working at her laptop in the corner, doesn’t acknowledge it. She only stares at her screen, wan and distant, and she stays out of the conversation.

“Town Hall as a Chol Hamoed trip?” Gabe asks in an attempt to lighten the mood. “That’s creative.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Ezra’s face tightens. “Rivi was working. We made do.” Rivi types mechanically at the table. Ezra stares at the medal. Gabe makes an excuse and escapes to the guest room.

The next morning, he tucks the medal back into his pocket and heads to Town Hall.

There’s only one clerk present, shuffling papers behind a desk, and he looks thrilled to have a visitor. “What can I do for you? Traffic complaint? Garbage complaint?”

“Actually, I was hoping to take a look at the medals in the display case.” Gabe pulls Ephraim’s medal from his pocket. “I found this in my father’s house. It belonged to… family,” he says finally. “Do you know if the recipient got a copy?”

“Oh, never. We don’t have that kind of budget.” The clerk examines the medal. “It does look like one of ours. But none are missing.” He looks disappointed. “Are you sure you don’t have a garbage complaint?”

“Sorry.” Gabe wanders over to the medal case. Town Hall is a small one-story building, just a few offices, a library through a back entrance, and a lobby, and the medal case is the only interesting thing in the lobby. It sits against the back wall, and there are twenty-four medals inside on three shelves, all of them the same dull gold.

“I’ve been filing the request to polish them for years,” the clerk informs him. “Never makes it through. I’m half-ready to do it anyway. I do have the key.”

“Do you?” Gabe asks, distracted. There’s a medal in the second-to-last space on the first row, dull and gold and reading EPHRAIM COHEN, FOR HIS TIERLESS SERVICE TO LENAPE FALLS. Tierless, a tiny typo that might be an innocent mistake, or… “Hey, do you think you could open it? I think I might have the original.”

The clerk looks thrilled to have something to do. “So strange! Why would someone swap the medals?” Gabe shrugs, his mind spinning with new theories. The clerk pulls out a key with much pomp and unlocks the case.

Gabe takes out the misspelled medal, and he immediately feels the difference. It’s much lighter, without that smooth texture. It feels cheap. A fake.

He tests the weight of another one. Heavier, real gold. “Here.” Gabe thrusts the real medal at the clerk. “You can put this one back in. It’s where it belongs.”

“Oh, the kids are going to love this when we do the civics tour in May. Let me know if you figure out how it happened.” The clerk beams at him, locking the case back up. “I’ll file for an inquiry, but no chance it’ll go anywhere. Nothing ever does.”

“Sounds like government.” Gabe offers him a smile. Outside, there’s a mid-February chill, and his fingers are red and freezing as he examines the fake medal. It might be nothing, some ancient request from Ephraim Cohen that the town had honored.

Or maybe not, he thinks, twisting the fake medal over. There, on the back of it, two sets of initials have been etched. AC. MG.

Avigdor Cohen. Moish Garfinkel. Gabe’s thumb runs over the letters, so engrossed in the medal that he bangs into a sidewalk bench. He stops, sits down heavily, stares at the medal again.

When were they in Lenape Falls together? He tries to remember Penina’s timeline. Until sometime in high school? When they’d been teenagers, the boys had swapped the medal in the case with a copy. This copy. Gabe has been looking for his father, had gone to Bearwood to walk his path and cleaned out shelves and shelves of clutter, but this medal feels more connected to Abba than any piece of his false life.

He squeezes it in his palm, traces the seam of the metal around the edge, and wonders. The boys had stolen the medal. They hadn’t sold it, hadn’t done anything with it but hidden it away. Had they done it just for the thrill, a bit of harmless teenage mischief?

He brings it back to Rivi’s house, keeps it in his pocket and focuses on work. He’s editing a piece for a colleague, and the premise is weak. They email back and forth, debating different points. He’s slower than usual, still distracted by this new turn of events.

“Did you ever figure out what that medal was?” Ezra asks at dinner. He’s snippier lately, worn down and stretched thin. It’s strange, how they seesaw to balance each other. When Rivi is at her most impatient, most harried, Ezra is a calm presence in the house. But now, when Rivi has withdrawn, Ezra seems stressed even when she isn’t around, terse and tired and unhappy.

Gabe doesn’t comment. It isn’t his business.

“I returned it to the case. I have some theories about how it got there, but nothing real.”

“Tell me.” Ezra brightens at the hint of a mystery, and he deflates when Gabe shakes his head.

“I’ll tell you when I’m sure,” he promises. When Rivi lets me, he thinks silently. But that seems less and less likely to happen with each passing day.

He doesn’t bring up his suspicion until after Rivi gets home. She rushes upstairs to put the girls to bed, and Ezra leaves with Meir for Maariv soon after. While they’re out, Rivi takes some chicken from the dinner leftovers and sits down in the kitchen, and Gabe seizes his chance to speak to her alone.

He sits down next to Rivi and lays the medal down, upside down, to show her the initials etched into the back. Rivi’s eyes narrow as she takes them in. “No,” she says immediately.

“Do you think…” Gabe hesitates. It feels verboten to say it, to suggest something so unfair of someone who can’t defend himself. But this is something, a kernel of doubt, and he ventures, “Do you think Abba might have had a background in petty theft?”

Rivi’s fork hits her plate. Her face goes hard, her eyes flashing. “No,” she says again, more vehement this time.

“But it might explain… something.” If Abba had a criminal record, maybe he’d wanted to hide it. Maybe he’d wanted to start fresh. But why would he start fresh with his fellow criminal’s name? Wouldn’t Penina have found all this in her database?

“It explains nothing. This is what you do, Gabe.” Rivi’s jaw tightens. “You search the world for narratives. Everything has to make sense, has to come together perfectly, and then there’s another article written, another tribe understood. But sometimes — some things just don’t make sense. This isn’t going to make sense, and you aren’t going to figure it out no matter how deep you dig. Let it go.”

“Rivi—”

“Abba might have been a liar,” Rivi says with finality, and she pushes her plate away. “But he wasn’t a thief.”

To be continued…

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 922)