Chapter 3 - The Three Gray Stitches
"Wait," I said. "Tell me your name."
The caller breathed once into the line.
"Beth Garner. Fleet administration. If they ask, I never spoke to you."
"Why did you send Owen Bell's coat?"
"I didn't know it was his. They told us the bags were cleared for the winter clothing drive."
"Who cleared them?"
The call ended.
June looked at the dead phone.
"You should call Mr. Bell."
"He won't answer."
"Then go to him."
I found Elliot in the detached garage behind his small house on Sycamore Street. A school bus engine sat half-disassembled on a stand. He had been a mechanic for thirty-two years, and his hands still reached for a wrench when there was nothing to fix.
"I know I was wrong," I said before he could close the door. "I was frightened. But I did keep pictures."
He looked at my phone without touching it.
"Owen worked summers at the shop while he trained for the county garage. That jacket was the first thing he bought with his own paycheck."
Elliot opened a metal cabinet and removed a photograph. Owen stood beside an orange road-service truck, smiling into the sun, his right sleeve rolled high enough to expose three uneven lines of stitching at the cuff.
The same stitches.
"He wanted me to replace them," Elliot said. "I said they were strong enough."
I had expected an accusation. This small memory was harder to bear.
"The county marked it as evidence," I told him.
"Then why has Harlan kept telling me there was no evidence Owen was hurt?"
On the garage wall hung a calendar opened to last November. Elliot had circled the day Owen vanished and never turned the page.
He showed me the final message Owen sent him at 9:14 that night: Running late. Something wrong at Graystone. Don't wait up.
"The sheriff said my boy was stealing from the county," Elliot said. "Owen spent three years refusing to round up hours on his time sheets. He wouldn't steal a screwdriver."
I told him about Beth Garner and the clothing drive.
For the first time, he pulled up a chair for me.
"We'll start with what can be proved," he said.
I borrowed a pen and wrote down the time of the delivery, my photographs, the name on the original bag, and Voss's exact words as best I could remember them.
When I reached the bottom of the page, Elliot pointed at a notation on my intake ticket.
"What's 'C-17'?"
"The laundry bundle number. Why?"
"That's the number of the storage bay where Owen parked his county truck."
May you like
I checked the ticket again.
Underneath C-17, in a different hand, somebody had written a second instruction: DO NOT OPEN LINING.
