The Diamond Point Favor

Alison Clarke was thirty-six years old, and she still owned a scribe she'd bought at a county fair fifteen years ago. It was a rusted thing with a diamond point, meant for etching glass. She'd paid two dollars for it from a man with a folding table full of tools.

She had bought it for a stupid reason. A guy at the fair, a summer intern like her, had been admiring the same table. He'd picked up the scribe and said, "This one's got a real diamond point. You could write your name on anything with this." She'd been twenty-one, sweaty, sunburned, and completely incapable of speaking to him in a normal manner.

So she'd bought the scribe, held it up like a trophy, and said absolutely nothing else. He'd smiled. She'd walked away. The entire summer was contained in that single purchase.

(Well. Not the whole summer. But the important part.)

The scribe sat in her purse now, of all places. She'd brought it to the vial factory by accident, left over from a museum workday when she'd been labeling slides. Alison was the curator at the Gothenburg Heritage Museum, thirty-six years into a life that had not gone the way the twenty-one-year-old version planned.

She was standing in the front office of the Diamond Point Vial Factory in Gothenburg, Nebraska, waiting on a security audit that was going very badly.

"Where's your badge reader?" the auditor had asked, twenty minutes ago. His name was Kowalski. He had a clipboard and no sense of humor.

"It was right here," Alison had said. "On the filing cabinet."

It was not on the filing cabinet now. It was not anywhere. She had looked in the office, under the desk, in her purse, in her coat pockets, and twice in the wastebasket. Somewhere between the loading dock and the office, the badge reader had vanished.

"Ms. Clarke," Kowalski had said, "if the museum loses its audit certification, that's on you."

Yes. Her job. On the line. Over a plastic box the size of a paperback.

Alison stood among the filing cabinets and breathed. Then she did what any sensible person would do. She retraced her steps.

* * *

The factory floor was long and loud-adjacent, quiet now for the audit, with rows of glass vial racks stretching away under fluorescent lights. Thousands of little glass tubes in wooden racks, waiting to be shipped off to labs. The morning light came gray through high windows.

Alison walked the aisle she'd come in by, checking the concrete floor, checking the racks. She dug the scribe out of her purse without thinking, just to have something in her hand. She always did that when she was nervous. Fifteen years of holding a two-dollar scribe instead of saying words to people.

"Lost something?"

She turned. A man was standing at the end of the rack, holding a clipboard of his own. Tall-ish, mid-thirties, work jacket, a lanyard with a temp badge. He had a face she almost knew.

"I lost my badge reader," Alison said. "Have you seen a plastic gray box, about yea big?"

"Nope. But I'm looking for my own lost stuff, so we're in the same boat. I'm Earl. Earl Jamison. I'm logging cellar temps at the pub this month, and they drafted me to do inventory counts for this audit."

"Alison. Clarke." She said it like it meant something, because it did. "Wait. Earl Jamison. County fair. Summer of, God, fifteen years ago?"

He squinted at her. Then his whole face changed.

"Alison? Museum intern Alison? You bought the last diamond scribe right out from under me?"

"I did not buy it out from under you, you were just holding it, you weren't buying it."

"I was absolutely about to buy it." He was grinning now. "Two dollars. I had two dollars in quarters ready."

"You should've spoken up faster, then." She held up the scribe. "Anyway. I still have it. Rusted and everything. I bring it to work like a weirdo."

"You bring a fair scribe to your job?"

"I bring it everywhere. It's a bad habit. It's a reminder of the time I chickened out of kissing a cute boy at the fair, which is a great motivator for never chickening out again."

Earl laughed. Then he went a little pink.

"So you remember that, huh," he said.

"Earl. I fled the building. I remember everything." She turned the scribe over in her fingers. "You were working the visitor-escort booth. You walked me to the gate because I said my car was far away and it was actually very close."

"Best escort shift of my whole summer," Earl said. "I stood there like an idiot after you left. My boss thought I'd gotten heatstroke."

Alison laughed, and it felt good, and then she remembered the badge reader and her job and felt worse.

"Okay, tragic reunion later," she said. "Help me look. If that reader doesn't turn up before Kowalski finishes his clipboard, I'm unemployed."

"Kowalski? Little clipboard guy, no jokes?"

"That's him."

"Yeah, he did our pub audit in March. He wrote up our walk-in cooler for having a calendar from two years ago." Earl pocketed his own clipboard. "Where'd you last have it?"

"Loading dock. I signed a delivery form for the museum order, then walked to the office. It's got to be between here and there."

"Then let's retrace you. And hey, look at that, we're already combing racks together. Just like old times."

"We never combed racks in old times."

"Give it an hour," Earl said.

* * *

They started at the loading dock. Alison checked the dented forklift, under the seat, behind the mast. Earl checked the pallets of incoming crated vials. Nothing.

They worked back up the aisle. Alison walked one side of a rack, Earl the other, calling out things they found that were not a badge reader. A dried-up roll of packing tape. A coffee cup with a pencil in it. A single work glove.

"You know what's funny," Earl said over the racks. "I thought about that fair for years. Years. And I never once thought, hey, maybe she works at the museum ten miles from here."

"Because that would've been too easy."

"Way too easy. Whereas losing your job over a gray box, that's the hard way."

"Thank you, Earl, very comforting."

"Anytime." He ducked under a rack shelf and came up dusty. "So what's the museum got in this order anyway? Vials for the heritage museum?"

"Empty display vials. We're redoing the farm tools exhibit. Scythes, seed drills, that kind of thing. Don't ask me why a scythe needs a vitrine, the board decided."

"Sounds about right. The pub's got a board too. They decided the cellar needed a humidity log every four hours, which is how I got this glamorous temp gig."

"Do you like it? The cellar?"

"I love it, actually. It's quiet, it's fifty-five degrees, and the beer kegs don't talk." He grinned at her over the rack. "You like the museum?"

"I love the museum. Less than I used to, this morning."

They hit a close call on the next rack. A gray box, exactly the right size, sitting on a lower shelf. Alison grabbed it and had her heart up around her ears before she opened it. Fuse assortments. Somebody's electrical kit.

"Oh, come on," she said.

"Cruel," Earl agreed. "The universe is toying with you."

"The universe and Kowalski both."

They kept going. Rack after rack. Alison found herself doing the thing she used to do at the fair, which was talking more than she meant to because Earl actually listened. He asked questions. He remembered her name without checking her badge.

"So the almost-kiss," Earl said, somewhere around the fourth row. "I've replayed that a bunch of times. Was I wrong about it? Was there even an almost?"

Alison stopped walking.

"There was an almost," she said. "There was a full almost. There was a ninety-five percent almost. I got to ninety-five percent and my brain went, nope, and I said I had to go water a ficus."

"A ficus."

"At the museum. I didn't even water the ficus. I made it up and then I felt bad about the ficus."

Earl leaned on the rack and laughed until he had to wipe his eyes.

"Fifteen years," he said. "I've wondered for fifteen years, and the answer is a ficus."

"It wasn't about you! I was twenty-one and dumb. I'd like to think I'm better now."

"You buying the scribe instead of kissing me says otherwise."

"That was a strategic purchase."

"Sure it was." He straightened up. "So what happens now? We find your reader, you keep your job, and then what, you water a ficus and vanish again?"

Alison turned the scribe in her hand. Fifteen years of carrying it around.

"Not this time," she said. "This time I'm gonna say the thing. When we find it. When my heart isn't pounding about Kowalski."

"Deal. But first, reader." Earl pointed down the aisle. "Because I think I see something gray over by the loading dock door."

Alison looked. Her chest did a thing.

"Earl, if that's it, I owe you a coffee at least."

"Coffee I'll take," he said, and started walking.

It was it. The gray box, wedged under the rack skid at the end of the row, half hidden by a folded tarp. Earl got down flat on the concrete and hauled it out with both hands.

"Badge reader," he announced, holding it up. "One dusty badge reader."

Alison grabbed it and checked it over like it was a museum artifact. Intact. Powered off. Hers.

"Oh my god. Oh my god, Earl!" She hugged it to her chest. "You found it. I'm not fired. I could literally hug you."

"You are literally hugging a box," Earl said, getting up and dusting off his knees. "But I'll take the thanks."

"Take it." She put the reader in her tote bag, careful, like it might escape. "Kowalski gets this back in one piece and nobody has to know it went on a tour of the factory floor."

"That's the spirit. Cover your tracks. That's what I learned from the pub board." He shrugged. "Sorta. They taught me the opposite of that, actually."

Alison laughed, then didn't stop as fast as she should