"Jesse's pictures," he said.
They all looked at him.
"He tried to send them," Toby said. "From the office computer. It didn't go through. But he was back there a long time." He looked at Hollis. "Maybe they're still on there."
* * *
The computer in the office took four minutes to wake up, groaning and clicking like an old man getting out of a chair, and while it did Ferris stood in the doorway of the office and watched the front of the diner through the hall, and Bev stood by the kitchen's back door and watched the employee lot, and Renée sat in the desk chair with Toby on her lap even though he was too big for it, and Hollis stood behind them with one hand on the back of the chair.
"Password?" he said.
"Hemlock1," Renée said. "Shuler's son-in-law set it up."
The desktop was a mess of icons: the schedule, the inventory, the produce order, a folder called TAXES, a solitaire game. And in the lower right corner, a folder Hollis would have missed. It was called JK.
Renée double-clicked it.
There were sixty-one files. Most of them were photographs. Some of them were short videos. Renée opened the first one and the screen filled slowly, line by line, the way pictures load on old machines.
It was a night shot, taken with a phone held low. Floodlights. A muddy clearing in the woods. A green tanker truck with SHULER WATER & HAUL on the side and the cartoon drop with its smile. A hose running off the back of the tanker down a slope, into what looked like a pipe sticking out of the ground, a rusted steel casing a foot across.
"That's the old Bucktail Coal bore," Ferris said from the doorway. He had come over to look in spite of himself. "Off Kettle Creek Road. They drilled that in the thirties. My granddad worked it. It's been capped fifty years."
"It's not capped now," Hollis said.