Chapter 9

"I'd like to say something about that photograph," Rufus said.

The chair nodded.

"That's from the conference. I was there. I was there Thursday, I drove down Thursday night, I was back Friday-" He stopped. Started again. "That picture could be from any day. They hand out that award Friday, but there's a breakfast Friday and there's a banquet Friday night. It proves nothing."

"It's stamped," Bay said from the pew.

"Miss Kimbro, you're out of order," Prewitt said.

"Let her finish," the chair said.

Bay stood up with her phone. "The program's online. Awards breakfast, Friday, eight-thirty a.m., Grand Ballroom. His name's in it. R. Tillery, Marrow County." She held up the phone. "He was three hundred miles away at eight-thirty in the morning. He wrote down nine-forty in my grandmother's kitchen."

The room made a low noise.

"Then he drove," Prewitt said. "Or he flew. A man can be in two places in a day."

"Five hours," Bay said. "It's five hours. He couldn't get here before two."

Nobody said anything.

Then the door at the back of the commission room opened.

The man who came in was tall and gray and wore a suit that had been good for a long time. He carried a leather bag and he walked to the front of the room like he'd been in a hundred of them.

"Madam Chair. Emmett Voss, state Office of Environmental Health. We received an appeal copy last night. I'm here to review it."

Prewitt sat up. "We weren't notified-"

"You're notified." Voss set his bag down. "This county is under a routine review of its inspection numbers, which is why I came myself. Go on."

Inez looked at him.

She had not seen him in twenty-eight years. He'd been a boy then - long hair, no money, a graduate student doing soil samples for the state out of a rented room over the feed store, eating at her counter twice a day because his fellowship check hadn't come and wouldn't come and he never once said so.

He had never asked for credit. She had just stopped handing him a ticket.

She reached into her apron pocket and took out the index card and held it up.

"Dr. Voss."

He turned. He looked at the card. He took it, and turned it over, and read his own name in her handwriting, and stood very still for a moment in front of forty people.

"Nineteen ninety-four," he said quietly. "You kept it."

"I keep everything."

Voss looked at the card a while longer. Then he set it down on the table, on the record, next to the appeal file, and straightened up, and his voice changed.

"Madam Chair, I'd like the county's travel file for the health department for that week. Purchasing, reimbursement, flight records, everything with a signature on it. And I'd like it now."

The clerk looked at the chair. The chair nodded.

"Twenty minutes," the clerk said.

Inez sat back down next to Bay. Bay took her hand.

"Grandma. Who is he?"

Inez watched Voss spread the photograph flat on the table under the light.

"A boy who ate chicken and rice for two years," she said.