Three Baby Cribs and a Missing Set of Car Keys

The county courthouse in Craig was a two-story red brick building with high arched windows that rattled in the morning wind. It was eleven o’clock on January twenty-one when we walked through the heavy oak doors, our boots leaving wet tracks on the worn marble floor. The heating system in the lobby hissed like a…

I walked down the concrete stairs toward the loading dock, the weight of the keys heavy in my coat pocket. The lobby of the State Bank of Hartford smelled of old paper and furniture polish. A bank officer named Mrs. Gable, no relation to my lawyer, sat behind a glass partition, her fingers tapping a…

“On a Tuesday morning,” I said, remembering the day of my surgery. “Exactly,” Brandon said. “While you were still in the recovery room.” I rubbed my left wrist, the skin there feeling cold. “We need to let her go to Aspen,” I said. “Vance agrees,” Brandon said. “He wants to see if she meets anyone…

The board lifted easily, revealing a dark, dusty gap between the joists. Inside, resting on top of a gray dust bunny, was a small, tightly rolled strip of register paper. Carter pulled the paper out, his fingers catching on the rough edge. It was a physical register tape from three days ago, showing a voided…

“People have strange ways of protecting what they value,” Richard said, his pen resuming its rhythmic tap. “But this paperwork is the only thing that will hold up in a court of law.” He turned to the last page and pointed to a line near the bottom. “Once we sign this, we have to record…

“Did he ask you to do something specific?” I asked. Marcus nodded, his fork hovering over his plate. “He told me to take pictures of you. He said if I saw you near the state highway, I should get a shot of you looking toward the woods. He wanted it to look like you were…