Webster Daily's Arc

Chapter 7 of 13

Webster never made it to his car. Rosie stepped out from behind the hotdog cart with her arms crossed, calm as a closed door. "I know what Barry showed you," she said. "One conversation. Ask me anything you want. After that, you decide what kind of writer you are." Webster's hand tightened on the diary under his arm. He nodded once. Rosie walked him across the lot to an old phone booth slumped in the weeds. Faded paint, a dead receiver, glass that watched the road in every direction. She tucked a worn sketchbook under her arm, its leather strap buckled tight. "Pages of every shift I ever drew," she said. "Names, hours, who came home. I brought it so you'd know I'm not guessing." She waited. Webster asked the only question that mattered. "Did Sherrie kill the woman's son?" Rosie opened the sketchbook to a marked page and turned it toward him. A diagram. A date. A name circled twice. "He saw what the plant really powers," she said. "Sherrie didn't pull the trigger. She decided he couldn't leave the hill." She closed the book. "Write that and you won't make it to the county line. Don't write it and you're one of us." Webster looked at the diary, then at the booth's cracked glass, and understood the choice was already made. He had his story. Now he had to survive telling it.