Chapter 5

By Sunday afternoon, everybody on the square had an opinion, and every opinion was about fifty-eight degrees.

Miss Alma Dees came by after church with a covered dish and the news that the department was being reasonable. Junior Pate said his cousin's wife had gotten a placard in the next county over and paid four hundred dollars and it was over in a week. Ellis Ward said, "Inez, honey, just get the cooler looked at and let them look at it, and it'll be done."

Vonda Simms called at two o'clock. She was apologetic and she was reading from something.

"The department can offer a civil penalty of twelve hundred dollars, and you can reopen Tuesday. No admission of fault."

"Twelve hundred dollars."

"I'm just passing it along, Miss Inez."

"And the placard?"

"Comes down Tuesday."

Inez stood in the kitchen with the phone against her ear and looked at the walk-in door, thirty-eight degrees, humming.

Hoyt Dandridge, the attorney over on Depot Street, took her call and listened all the way through. Then he said, "Inez, I've known you twenty years and I'm going to be straight with you. I can't take a case against the county health department. Not in this county. Not with a commission seat on the line next spring."

"You can't or you won't."

"Both."

She hung up and sat down at the counter and put her face in her hands for exactly one minute. Then she got up, because there was a Sunday to get through.

She spent it the way she knew how. She called Hollis Bean back and asked for a written statement on letterhead. She found the receipt for the door gasket she'd replaced in March. She wrote down, in her own hand on a lined pad, every hour of Friday morning - when Bay opened the door, when the chicken came in, when the delivery truck left.

Bay watched her do it from the end of the counter.

"Grandma, that's not going to matter."

"It's what I've got."

"It's not what you've got."

"Bay-"

"You have a picture of him three hundred miles away and you're writing down when the chicken came."

Inez kept writing. "A picture of a picture won't feed anybody."

At seven o'clock the phone rang again. Hollis Bean, and he sounded like a man who had stayed late at the shop on purpose.

"I pulled the memory off your unit," he said. "The little computer in there keeps a log. High and low, every day, thirty days."

"And?"

"There's your problem, Miss Inez. Your box never got above forty-one degrees. Not Friday. Not any day in the last month."

"Forty-one."

"The readout said fifty-eight because the door was open. The box never moved." He paused. "Whoever wrote fifty-eight on that report either never looked at the box, or never looked at anything."