Chapter 2

The health department was on the first floor of the county annex, past the tax office and the room where they stored the voting machines.

Inez filed her appeal at 1:20. Vonda Simms took the papers and dropped them in a wire tray and said, not unkindly, "You'll want to call Monday, Miss Inez."

"I'll be here Monday."

She wanted a copy of the inspection report. Vonda said she'd have to ask the director, and the director was in a meeting. So they sat.

The chairs were plastic. The light was fluorescent and it made everybody look faintly sick. Bay lasted eleven minutes before she got up and started reading the walls.

She read the immunization schedule. She read the hand-washing poster. She read the notice about septic permits. Then she stopped in front of the framed photograph.

It was big - twenty by thirty, maybe - in a gold frame, hung six feet from the door with the director's name on it. The kind of thing that gets hung where people who come to complain have to look at it.

Rufus Tillery in a suit, shaking hands with a tall man wearing a state pin. A ballroom behind them, round tables, a banner. A small engraved placard held between them, angled to the camera.

Bay took a picture of it with her cracked phone.

"Grandma. Come here."

Inez came. Her knees were tired from the plastic chair. She put on her reading glasses, the ones on the beaded chain.

The banner read STATE ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH CONFERENCE. The placard between the two men's hands read INSPECTOR OF THE YEAR. And in the bottom corner, printed by the camera in small orange digits, was a date.

Friday. That Friday. The one they were standing in.

"Three hundred miles," Inez said. She wasn't sure how she knew. Somebody at the counter had said it once, about the capital.

Bay was already pinching the screen, zooming, dragging with two fingers. "There's another guy. Half out of the frame, on the left, by the table. Look."

A shoulder. An arm in a suit sleeve. The edge of a jaw.

And on the lapel, small but there, a county commission badge - the enamel kind, the kind that comes in a blue box with a pin back.

"Who is that?" Bay said.

"Somebody from the county."

"At a health conference? In the capital?"

Inez didn't answer. Vonda came back with the report - two pages, stapled, signed at the bottom. Inez folded it into her purse without reading it.

On the way out, Bay stopped her by the door. "Grandma. Who's Voss?"

"What?"

"The card in the register. Voss - no charge. I've been asking you since I was nine."

"Eat your sandwich."

"Grandma-"

"Bay."

The girl's mouth closed. She looked back once at the photograph on the wall, and then they walked out into the bright square together, past the bank, past the monument, past the window of Kimbro's Kitchen with the red placard taped to the glass like a wound.

Inez got in the truck and put both hands on the wheel.

"Grandma?"

"If he was in that ballroom on Friday," Inez said, "who wrote down nine-forty in the morning?"