Part 5
At three o'clock, during the dead hour between lunch and closing, Lou left to go to the bank.
"I'll be an hour," he said, pulling his flat cap down over his forehead. "Keep the register closed unless someone’s paying. And don't give away the pie."
The moment his car pulled out of the lot, Clara went to the back hall where the old employee lockers were. They were green metal, dented and scratched, most of them rusted shut from the moisture of the dish station.
The locker at the very end had no lock. It had been jammed shut for as long as Clara had worked there. Lou had told her once that the latch was broken and to leave it alone.
Clara went to the kitchen, fetched the heavy ice pick from the prep drawer, and came back to the locker.
She jammed the point of the pick into the seam above the latch, using the heel of her hand to drive it deep into the rusted metal. She leaned her weight into it, prying upward with a sharp, splintering screech of old paint and iron.
The door popped open with a hard thud.
A cloud of grey dust and the smell of rot spilled out into the narrow hallway.
The locker was mostly empty. A pair of rotted work shoes at the bottom, a petrified tube of lipstick, and a small, square tin that had once held throat lozenges.
Clara reached for the tin. It was covered in a thick layer of grime that turned her fingertips black. She wiped the lid with her apron and pried it open.
Inside was an old newspaper clipping from the Alderton Gazette, dated November 14, 1976.
The headline was small, buried on page six: Local Diner Employee Sought for Questioning in Theft. There was a photo of Teresa—the same face from the coin purse, but here she looked terrified, caught in the harsh flash of a photographer’s bulb outside a courthouse. The article stated that Teresa Marcone, twenty-four, was missing along with four thousand dollars from the safe of Maple Street Diner.
Beneath the clipping was a piece of paper, folded into a tight square.
Clara unfolded it with slow, deliberate care. It wasn't a note. It was a receipt from a local locksmith, dated two days before the alleged theft. It was made out to Ruth Vance—Clara’s grandmother.
The receipt was for the installation of a deadbolt and a duplicate key for 412 Maple Street.
At the bottom of the receipt, in her grandmother's blue ink, were three numbers written in a heavy, angry hand: 11 - 24 - 76.
The date Teresa disappeared.
Clara heard a sound from the front of the diner—the heavy rattle of the front door handle. Her heart leaped into her throat. She jammed the tin back into the locker, pushed the door shut until it clicked, and hurried back to the counter, stuffing the newspaper clipping and the receipt into her pocket.
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It wasn't Lou. It was a delivery boy with a box of paper napkins, but Clara’s hands were shaking so badly she could barely sign the clipboard.
She stood by the register, looking out at the abandoned building across the street. The gap in the plywood door seemed wider now, like an open mouth waiting for her to ask the right question. She knew what she had to do after four o'clock. She didn't care about the rain, she didn't care about the alley flooding, and she didn't care about Lou’s warnings. She was going across the street.
