Chapter 4

By noon the rain had thinned to a cold mist that beaded on everything and soaked through nothing all at once.

Sable waited by the dumpster at the edge of the lot, where the camera over the door couldn't reach and the smokers stood in summer. She'd pulled her hood up. Cinder sat on her boot.

She'd texted two of the girls that morning. Dana, then Rae. Both read. Neither wrote back.

Around eleven she'd figured out why.

A line cook named Petey had answered instead. Odelle's telling everybody you've got a record, he wrote. Theft. Says she's seen the papers. That true, Sable?

She hadn't written back. There was no clean way to answer a lie already dressed up as a warning.

Clem came out the kitchen door at a quarter past, hauling two bags to the dumpster. He saw her and almost turned around.

"Clem."

He stopped. Looked back at the door. "I can't be out here long. She counts minutes."

"I know." Sable kept her voice down. "Your phone. Yesterday. You had it up on the napkin thing."

The boy's shoulders came up around his ears. "I don't want trouble."

"I'm already in the trouble," she said. "I'm just trying to see how deep."

He stood there with the garbage bags dripping at his sides. Seventeen and carrying something too big for him, she thought, and she almost told him to forget it.

"I saw a hand," Clem said finally. Barely over the hum of the exhaust fan. "At your bag. The ring. Before she ever called you out." He set the bags down. "I started recording because something felt off. I didn't know what I was getting."

He pulled the phone out. The corner was cracked into a little spiderweb. His thumb shook scrolling back.

"I only looked once," he said. "Then I shut it off so it wouldn't eat the battery and she wouldn't see it on me."

He found the spot, stopped it on a single frame, and held the phone out so she wouldn't have to take it from his hand.

Sable leaned in.

The shot was from across the room, low, through the gap between the register and the pie case. Grainy. The counter light blew out the top of the frame.

But there, dead center, was the backpack, hanging square from the hook by the register, one strap pulled out from the wall.

And a hand reaching into it.

A right hand. On the second finger, catching the counter light the way only one thing in that diner caught light, sat the opal ring. The fingers were curled around something flat and steel, working it down through the open zipper into the dark of the bag.

The face above the hand was a smear of orange polo and nothing more.

"That's her," Clem said. "That's the ring. You can't see her face, though. I kept trying and you can't."

"You don't need her face." Sable couldn't look away. "You can see the ring. You can see the watch. You can see my bag."

She made herself look at the whole frame, the way Gramma used to make her read a whole page before deciding what it said.

The bag on the hook. The steel going in. The opal ring, bright and still.