Chapter 6

They sat at the kitchen table Sunday night with the report spread flat and the phone between them, and Inez told it from the beginning.

"Ninety-four," she said. "He was a graduate student over at the extension office. Twenty-six, twenty-seven years old, skinny as a broom, and he ate here four days a week. Always ordered the same thing. Chicken and dumplings, no dessert, water."

"Did he pay?"

"He tried. Every Friday he tried, and every Friday I told him to sit down and eat." She turned the register key over in her fingers. "Calvin kept asking me why the Voss line never came off the ticket. So I wrote that card and taped it in the lid, and that settled it."

"How long?"

"Two years. Then he graduated and left and I never saw him again." She looked out the window at the square. "I didn't even know he'd gone into health work."

Bay was quiet for a second. Then she said, "Mamaw, his name is on your appeal."

"I know it is."

The rain started around nine, close and steady, the kind that comes in late May and stays.

Bay got up and went into the office, and came back three minutes later holding a clipboard.

"Look."

The cooler log. It had been in the drawer under the register the whole time, buried under the deposit slips, with a grocery list written on the back in a teenager's handwriting.

"Dalton," Inez said. "He used the back for the truck order and never put it back on the hook."

Bay flipped through the pages. Four times a day, every day, in Inez's hand. 38. 38. 39. 38. Friday morning at 7:40 - 38.

"It's right here," Bay said. "It's all right here."

"It's my own handwriting." Inez took the clipboard and set it on the table. "Anybody can write thirty-eight in a log, Bay. That's what he'll say, and he'll be right."

"Then it's the picture."

"Then it's the picture." Inez looked at her. "So make it big enough to read."

Bay did not go to bed. She sat at the kitchen table with her cracked phone and the laptop from school, and she worked.

She pulled the association's conference program off their own website - State Environmental Health Association, sixty-first annual conference, Capitol City, May fifteenth and sixteenth. Awards luncheon, Friday, twelve noon to one-thirty p.m., Ballroom B. She pulled their photo gallery, and there was Rufus Tillery at a podium with a placard in his hands, and the metadata on the gallery file said 12:20 p.m.

Then she opened the lobby photograph on her laptop and blew it up, corner by corner.

The date strip. 05.16.

The banner. STATE ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH ASSOCIATION - 61st ANNUAL CONFERENCE.

The placard in the picture. INSPECTOR OF THE YEAR - R. TILLERY.

And in the right-hand corner of the frame, cut off by the edge of the print: a dark suit jacket, a white shirt cuff, the underside of a jaw, and the small enameled rectangle of a county commission badge.

At ten o'clock the phone rang. Delia Fannin.

"I checked the agenda list," she said. "Dr. Voss's office confirmed he'll be at the annex for the annual review at eight. He signs off on appeals, Inez. If he doesn't hear you tomorrow, nobody will."

Inez thanked her and hung up.

She took the index card out of the register, and she put it in the pocket of her Sunday dress.