Chapter 9 - A Small Town Chooses Sides
The television reporter stood outside Second Shift while customers carried bags of shirts past her camera.
Sheriff Harlan spoke from his office beneath a wall of commendations.
"I understand Mr. Bell's pain," he said. "Unfortunately, speculation by local business owners can compromise legitimate investigations."
A second clip showed Voss carrying the jacket out of my shop.
I recognized the angle. Somebody had filmed through the bakery window across the street.
June muted the television.
"People are leaving comments about you."
"Don't read them."
She turned the screen toward me anyway. One woman said I was chasing attention. Another asked why the sheriff had an evidence bag ready for a coat that supposedly wasn't evidence. Both comments made me feel sick for different reasons.
By afternoon, three customers had canceled service. A county maintenance account that normally supplied a quarter of our pressing work was put on hold "pending review."
Rosa stood beside the empty commercial rack.
"I can take fewer hours," she offered.
"No. You worked for them. I'm the one who made calls."
"That's not how payroll works, Mara."
She was right. Courage did not pay rent.
Elliot came in carrying a folder of records. He had obtained road-board minutes showing that Graystone's closure contract had been accelerated one month after Owen disappeared. It wasn't proof of wrongdoing, but it meant the ground where Celia heard the ambulance call might soon be disturbed.
"I want to tell the whole town," he said.
"We need a lawyer first."
"By the time a lawyer sends a letter, they'll have filled the quarry."
He looked at the silent television, then at the dark coat hanging from a hook near the door.
"They think if they keep calling my son a thief, everyone will stop asking."
I called Miriam Blake, who ran the Bellwether Ledger with one photographer and an old printing press. She had been requesting the sheriff's missing-person files for months.
We met after closing. Miriam listened to the timeline, examined photographs of the coat, and asked careful questions about what I saw versus what I suspected.
"There was also a dispatcher," I said. "She heard a canceled ambulance request."
Miriam put down her pen.
"Would she talk to me?"
"Not yet. She's scared. Her attorney said not to publish her identity."
"Then don't give it to me."
I should have stopped there.
Instead, desperate to prove I wasn't lying, I told Miriam the woman's first name and the month she resigned.
Miriam's expression tightened.
"Mara, I didn't ask for that."
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The next morning, before the article appeared, a text arrived from an unknown number.
TELL CELIA TO STOP TALKING.
