At eight the next morning, Jett called.
“Can you come in?”
“My shift doesn’t start until five.”
“I know.”
His voice sounded strange.
“Just come as soon as you can.”
Twenty minutes later, I walked back into Bellamy’s wearing yesterday’s jeans.
I expected another lecture.
Instead, I found Jett standing beside table twelve.
He looked pale.
“What happened?” I asked.
“The cleaning crew found something.”
He held up a small plastic bag.
“It was wedged behind the booth. They almost missed it.”
He hesitated before handing it to me.
I’m sorry about last night,” he said. “I should have checked the cameras.”
Then he looked at the bag.
“And after seeing this, I think you need to know what happened.”
Inside was a gold ring.
The second I saw it, I stopped breathing.
Thin band.
Three tiny diamonds.
A pale blue center stone.
One bent prong near the setting.
I knew every scratch.
Every flaw.
Every detail.
Because I had spent four months staring at photographs of that ring.
It belonged to my mother.
She had worn it every day for twenty-three years.
She wore it while cooking.
While sleeping.
While showering.
When Mom disappeared, almost everything valuable had been left at home.
Her jewelry.
Her purse.
Her belongings.
But that ring was missing.
Jett looked at my face.
“You recognize it.”
I nodded.
Of course he knew about it.
I had shown photographs of my mother and that
ring to almost everyone I worked with.
I grabbed the bag.
The couple from the night before had somehow possessed the one object Mom was wearing when she vanished.
My mind immediately went somewhere terrible.
If they had the ring, they knew something about her.
