Garrett Asked For My Files And Received A Demand For His

“He wants the originals?” I asked.

Alma pushed the letter across her desk.

“Every copy, every backup, and a promise that you've destroyed any others.”

I read the words beneath her finger. Garrett called the files shop property again. He offered $1,260 for my unpaid invoice if I signed.

He had raised the price of silence. He still hadn't reached the price of my rent and the work I'd lost.

“Those pictures belong to me,” I said. “His initials haven't washed off the contract.”

“Then our answer is no.”

She wrote that answer while I sat there. She also asked his lawyer for the shop's purchase records, shipping records, and messages about both customers' stones through the civil case.

“He asked for your whole cabinet,” she said. “He gets the records that matter to the claims. We ask for the same.”

I tapped four beats against my apron. I had started wearing it to meetings because the seam gave my fingers somewhere to land.

Nora was waiting downstairs with a tube of building photographs. She had a paid shoot near Livingston that afternoon.

“I can cancel,” she said.

“Don't.”

“You sound certain.”

“One of us should earn something today.”

She smiled, but she stayed until my car started in the cold.

That week, Garrett filed a statement saying his camera system had stopped working before Nora's visit. There would be no video of him opening the safe.

For an hour, that blank space swallowed everything I knew.

Then I put his shipping receipt beside his signed intake receipt.

He had accepted Nora's sealed pouch at 10:31. The parcel bound for Helena had been accepted at 12:44. I had left the shop at eleven, as my parking payment and a customer at my workroom could confirm.

The sapphire had traveled whether a camera watched or not.

I made a clean copy of that small timeline. Beside eleven, I added the name of the customer who had met me at my workroom. She supplied her appointment email and her payment receipt. I didn't ask her to judge Garrett. I asked her to say where she had seen me, and when. She wrote three plain sentences and signed them. I put her account behind the parking record.

“We don't need to invent the missing film,” Alma said when I called. “Keep the documents you have.”

Detective Voss asked for an index of the jobs Garrett had sent me. I supplied the dates, numbers, and customer references. I didn't send strangers copies of everyone's jewelry.

Under the court's order, the relevant image files went to the lawyers and experts. Other customers' details stayed out of the public papers.

A bookkeeper later compared the shop's repair ledger with my forty-three job entries. The investigator contacted the customers whose return records had gaps.

Thirty-seven jobs had signed returns. Four stones were still at the shop, with work waiting on approval. Those owners got their property back through arranged pickups.

The remaining two entries were Nora's and Evelyn's.

That count mattered. We could show two thefts without claiming forty-three.

One afternoon, Evelyn brought me the sweater that had caught on her ring.

“I'm having the prongs fixed somewhere else,” she said. “When they release the stone.”

“I can recommend a setter.”

“Will you check the stone first?”

“With you watching.”

She folded the sweater across her knees.

“I used to think asking for a receipt made me difficult.”

“It makes a receipt.”

She laughed. I liked how easily that laugh came now.

My own bills weren't becoming easier. I paid the $390 motor repair from savings. For three days, I used the spare wheel, which rattled before it reached speed.

A jeweler in Belgrade sent a small quartz job worth $95. I finished it as carefully as any sapphire.

On the invoice, I wrote the stone number, the finished weight, and the date. Fear hadn't earned the right to change my habits.

Garrett's document production arrived almost a month after his accusation. It filled a box and a secure folder. Alma hired a bookkeeper for six hours at $125 an hour to trace the two stones through the records.

We found the broker's fees. We found the auction account. We found the sheet on which Garrett had called Evelyn's natural sapphire “discarded imitation.”

Then we found a payment for $72 to a dealer in damaged stones.

The item description read: Blue Sapphire, Fractured Table, 3.86 Carats. Cutter Practice Only.

I put my hands flat on Alma's desk.

“The dealer kept photographs,” she said. “We've requested them.”

The reply arrived while we were still looking at the bill. The broad white crack crossed the dealer's photograph in the same place as the stone Garrett had blamed on me.

The invoice named Garrett as the buyer.

It was dated six days before Nora entered his shop.