CHAPTER FOURTEEN B: THE YELLOW COAT
Warren was opening the diner when Jake arrived that afternoon.
The manager saw him through the window and briefly considered leaving the door locked.
He opened it anyway.
“You here about your final check?” Warren asked.
“I’ll collect that when it’s ready,” Jake said.
“I came to ask about the picture by the register.”
Warren turned toward the photograph.
“What about it?”
“Who is the woman in the yellow coat?”
Warren’s expression closed.
“My sister, Beth.”
“Does she still live around here?”
“Why are you asking?”
Jake told him that a witness had described a similar coat at the packing plant.
Warren moved behind the counter and gripped its edge.
“Beth worked there for a while,” he said.
“She packed fruit during the harvest.”
“Is she safe?”
“She moved away.”
Jake waited for more.
Warren stared at the coffee machine instead of answering.
“You can tell the deputy whatever you know,” Jake said.
“I don’t know anything about Russell’s business.”
“I didn’t say you did.”
Warren looked at him then.
The anger Jake expected was absent.
In its place was the frightened exhaustion of someone who had spent too long rehearsing an explanation.
“Beth called me last month,” Warren admitted.
“She asked whether I could pick up a woman and her daughter from a motel near the interstate.
”
“Did you?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“She said there might be trouble, and I couldn’t leave the diner during the breakfast rush.”
Jake said nothing.
Warren seemed to hear his own answer for the first time.
“I told her to call a taxi,” Warren continued.
“She said the woman didn’t have enough money.”
“What happened after that?”
“Beth stopped calling.”
Jake glanced at the photograph.
The woman in the picture stood between two friends, laughing with her head tilted backward.
She looked like someone who would have carried a stranger’s groceries without being asked.
“Have you tried reaching her?” Jake asked.
“Every day.”
Warren took out his phone and showed him a row of unanswered calls.
Jake noticed that the most recent one had been placed ten minutes earlier.
“Tell the deputy,” Jake said.
Warren shook his head.
“They’ll ask why I didn’t help.”
“They probably will.”
“What am I supposed to say?”
“What you just told me.”
Warren sat down on the stool behind the register.
The dining room was empty except for a truck driver finishing coffee near the window.
“I keep thinking I can make the call again,” Warren said.
“I keep thinking if she answers this time,
the first call won’t matter.”
Jake understood the impulse.
He had spent months wishing he could answer his mother’s last voicemail with something more useful than a promise to visit after his shift.
“You can’t change the first call,” Jake said.
“But you can make the next one to somebody who can help.”
Warren looked at the phone in his hand.
He dialed the sheriff’s office before he could talk himself out of it.
