Chapter 2

The county health department took up the first floor of the office building two blocks north of the square, past the courthouse and the drugstore and the insurance agency that still had Inez's name on a plaque from a fundraiser in 1998.

She got there at one-twenty and pulled a number. Forty-one. The board said thirty-six.

The lobby had twelve vinyl chairs, a water cooler with a paper cup dispenser, and a sliding glass window with a woman behind it who never once looked up. On the wall opposite the chairs hung a row of framed photographs, eight of them, evenly spaced, each with a small engraved plate screwed to the bottom of the frame.

Inez sat with her hands in her lap and watched the number board click. She filled out the appeal form twice because the first time her handwriting ran off the line. Section four asked for the appellant's signature. Section five asked who the appeal would go to for final determination, and a name sat in that blank already, typed in by somebody in an office she had never seen.

DR. EMMETT VOSS, DIRECTOR, STATE ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH.

She looked at the name a long time and could not place it. Then the board clicked to forty-one and she stopped looking.

The woman at the window took her form, stamped it, and slid a copy of the inspection report back through the slot without a word. Two pages. Inez folded it into her purse.

The woman said, "Appeals are heard by the commission. They meet Monday."

"Monday's my deadline."

"Then you'll want to be early."

Inez sat back down because her legs had gone strange on her. That was when she finally looked at the wall.

The fourth photograph had been hung recently. The glass was cleaner than the others. In it, Rufus Tillery stood in a dark suit with his hand out, shaking hands with a tall gray-haired man, both of them grinning at a camera in a room with a chandelier. Behind them a banner stretched the length of a ballroom wall. In the corner of the print, a date strip from the photographer's studio, the kind that burns the day into the film.

05.16.

Today. Friday, May sixteenth.

Under the frame the engraved plate read: INSPECTOR OF THE YEAR - R. TILLERY - STATE ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH ASSOCIATION, ANNUAL CONFERENCE.

Bay came in at three-twenty, still in her school hoodie, and found her grandmother staring at a wall.

"Mamaw."

"Look at that."

Bay looked. Then she took out her phone, stepped close, and shot it four times - one straight on, two at angles to kill the glare, one tight on the date strip.

"That's today," she said.

"That's today."

"Where is that?"

Inez didn't know. Bay was already typing with both thumbs, standing in the middle of the county health department lobby, and it took her less than a minute.

"Capitol City," she said. "The association's annual conference. It's three hundred miles from here."

Inez looked at the photograph again. At Rufus Tillery in a suit, in a ballroom, three hundred miles away, on a Friday he had spent standing in her dining room.

Bay turned the phone around. "Mamaw. Look in the corner."

On the right edge of the frame, half out of the picture, stood a man in a dark suit. The photographer had caught only his shoulder and the underside of his jaw. But the lapel was sharp in the shot, and pinned to the lapel, unmistakable, was a county commission badge.

Inez had lived in this county sixty-eight years. She did not know who it was.