Chapter 3

The deputy let them go a little after four.

He took the watch in a plastic bag, took six statements, and told Sable the county would be in touch. Not arrested. Not cleared. Just told to stay reachable.

Odelle waited until the gravel lot emptied and the last taillights swung up the ramp.

Then she found Sable by the time clock.

"You're done," Odelle said. "Effective now. Policy lets me let you go for any reason, and I've got better reasons than most."

"Odelle." Sable kept her hands at her sides. "You know I didn't take it."

"What I know is the watch was in your bag." Odelle pulled Sable's name tag off the board and dropped it in the trash by the register. "You've got till Friday on the room. After that I rent it to somebody who doesn't steal."

The room was up a back stair over the kitchen, close enough that the fryer hum came through the floor.

Sable climbed it slow.

Cinder met her at the door, all elbows and tail, the worn collar tag clicking. She got down on the floor, let the dog push its head under her chin, and stayed there a while in the dark without turning on the light.

Rent Friday. No job. A watch with her prints nowhere on it and her name all over the report.

She thought about the man in the navy suit. Lassiter. The name sat in her like a stone she couldn't swallow.

I buried her twenty years ago, and you have her face.

Gramma's tin was on the closet shelf where it had sat since the funeral. An old shortbread tin, the lid soft at the hinge, rust in the seams. Sable had looked inside twice in three years and both times closed it fast.

She set it on the bed and opened it under the lamp.

A church pamphlet. Gramma's reading glasses. A lock of baby hair taped to an index card in Gramma's shaky hand. A key to nothing Sable had ever found.

And under all of it, wrapped in a square of flannel, something that gave off a dull silver shine.

A baby's ID bracelet. Finer than the kind a hospital clamps on, bought, not issued. The links were small and tarnished. The flat plate in the middle was worn soft at the edges from somebody's thumb.

Sable turned it to the lamp and read the engraving up close.

Briony Grace Lassiter.

She sat very still.

Lassiter.

Under the bracelet lay a sheet of newspaper, folded in quarters, gone the color of weak tea. She opened it along creases that wanted to tear.

The Dayton Daily. March 2005. A bridge out over a swollen creek, cars like toys against the rail. BRIDGE COLLAPSE CLAIMS TWO; CHILD STILL MISSING.

Her gramma had kept this. Twenty years, in a shortbread tin, three feet above where Sable slept.

She read the gray column. A woman lost. A man who survived. A little girl, three years old, swept off the bank, never found.

There was a photograph with the article. A studio portrait of the missing child, the kind parents hang in a hall.

She brought the photo close to the lamp.

The toddler held one hand up near her face, the way babies do.

On the child's wrist, pale against the skin, curved the same half-moon.