Bullies Spit On A Waitress — Unaware She Was A Commander For 10 Years!
Chapter 19
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He was quiet for a long time. Outside, it had gotten dark without either of them noticing."James would have done it," Kevin said."James isn't here," Claire said."No," Kevin said. "He's not." Another long quiet. "I want to call the investigator's office myself," Kevin said finally. "I don't want someone else to do it for me.""Okay," Claire said."Tonight," he said."Whenever you're ready," she said.She gave him the number: she wrote it on a piece of paper—not on her phone, on paper, because some things feel more real when they're written down.She stood to leave. She was at the door when Kevin said, "Claire."She turned. He was still sitting at the table, his right hand flat on the surface."What you did," he said, "coming here, taking a waitress job in this town for three months, watching and waiting... nobody asked you to do that."She didn't answer."James was lucky," Kevin said, "having someone like you."She looked at him for a moment. "So was I," she said.She walked out into the night.She was halfway back to her room when her phone rang: a number she didn't recognize. She answered.A voice she didn't know—male, young, and with the careful, neutral tone of a person delivering a prepared message: "Miss Harmon, Sheriff Mace would like to speak with you first thing in the morning."She kept walking. "That's fine," she said."He'll send a car at 8:00," the voice said."Tell him I'll come on my own," she said.A pause. "All right," the voice said, and hung up.She stopped walking. She stood on the sidewalk for a moment in the cold dark of a Keswick Falls Thursday night. She thought about Tyler's face when she told him he still had a chance to walk out. She thought about the way he'd laughed. She thought about the clock stopped at 11:47 p.m.Then she went home.She sat at her small table by the window. She opened her laptop. She pulled up a file she'd been building for three months: cross-referencing public records, accident reports, land title histories, and county meeting minutes. She added what Lena had told her; she added what Frank had shown her. She saved it.She sent a copy to an email address that she hadn't used in eight months—one that existed on a server that had nothing to do with her personal devices, an address attached to a name that was not her name, accessed through a routing protocol she'd been taught in the first year of her service and had never stopped using out of a habit that had saved her more than once. She sent it without a subject line; she didn't need one. The person on the other end would understand.