Chapter 6

A week passed the way hard weeks do, slow in the day and gone by night.

Sable kept the room - the law gave a tenant more than a manager's temper did, and a legal-aid voice on the phone had told Odelle as much - but she took dish shifts two towns over for cash, and she stopped checking her phone for texts that weren't coming.

Then on Thursday the franchise group called her back to the Bluebird. Not to work. To answer.

The back office was a closet with a desk, a safe, and a corkboard of old schedules curling at the pins. A district manager named Fessler sat behind the desk, sleeves rolled, looking like he'd rather be anywhere. The auditor sat beside him with a laptop and a stack of register tapes. Odelle stood against the filing cabinet, arms crossed, the opal ring tucked into her armpit.

Cormac had made them let Sable in. He waited in the hall. She could see his shoulder through the gap in the door.

"I'll keep it short," the auditor said. "This is preliminary. The full report takes another couple weeks." She turned the laptop toward Fessler, not Sable. "But the pattern's already loud. No-sale voids. Register opened without a ticket. A short till at close, over and over, small enough nobody flags one night and big enough to add up."

"Register's busy," Odelle said. "People void things. That's a diner, not a bank."

"Sure." The auditor scrolled. "Except these cluster. Same shift. Over eleven months." She stopped. "Your shifts, Ms. Brant. Your login."

Sable watched Odelle's face do a thing she'd never seen it do. It stayed exactly the same, and that was the thing.

"She had a key," Odelle said, and jerked her chin at Sable. "Closing key. She closed plenty. You want voids, look at hers."

Fessler finally spoke. "Did she?"

"I'll pull the schedules." The auditor was already clicking. "The system logs who's clocked in against every transaction." She laid two sheets side by side and turned them, this time toward everyone. "Void dates. And Ms. Nance's time card for the same stretch."

Sable looked. She didn't need to. She knew her own weeks like she knew her own hands.

The void dates and her days off lined up like a key in a lock. Every one. The register had been emptying itself on Tuesdays and Thursdays she wasn't even in the building.

"She could've come in off the clock," Odelle said.

"To ring no-sales on your login?" Fessler rubbed his eyes. "Odelle. Stop."

For a second the little room was just the hum of the laptop fan and the fryer coming up through the floor.

Then Fessler said the careful words. Paid leave, pending the full audit. Corporate would be in touch. HR had their own process, separate from whatever the sheriff did, and both would take the time they took.

It wasn't an arrest. It wasn't a clearing. It was a door opening a crack.

Odelle pushed off the cabinet. She gathered her apron and her keys with slow hands, and on her way past the desk she bent down to Sable, close, under the noise of the fan, so Fessler wouldn't catch it.

"You think a swab makes you somebody," she said, low, her breath all cigarettes and coffee. The word had gotten out; in a town this size it always did. "You and that old woman's keepsakes. You and your little dog."

Sable kept her hands flat on her knees.

"Odelle."

"You'll wish you'd never opened that tin."