Chapter 3

I wasn't going to watch the rest on Charlene's kitchen table. That felt like something I should do standing up, in the building.

She loaded the whole file on a thumb drive and put it in my coat pocket and said, "You call me. You call me the second you get home." And then, because she's Charlene, she also put four of her own homemade rolls in a bag, because that's what she does with grief.

Sunday evening, dark by six. The alley was locked up. Rennie had the keys and Rennie had been at her apartment over the laundromat since five.

But in September I'd propped the fire door on the north side with a piece of two-by-four because the latch was catching, and then Rennie had told me not to spend money on a locksmith, and then I hadn't, and the two-by-four was still there.

Nobody had ever moved the two-by-four.

I let myself into the office. It smelled like fryer grease and cold. I didn't turn on the overhead light. I turned on the desk lamp and the old tower computer we keep for payroll, and I put Charlene's thumb drive in the front port and I sat down in the chair Rennie's father used to sit in.

The file opened. Two hours, thirty-nine minutes.

I'd been in the room when the stream started. At 7:02 the party room was nothing but empty tables and Della's own voice telling the camera we were going to do the trophy handoff in a minute. I used the arrow keys like I was defusing something.

9:14 through 9:18, Rennie practices. Same words, same delivery, tightening.

I let it run.

9:20 and four seconds. The picture doesn't change, but the sound does. A door, far off, and the lane lights going out in banks - you can hear the ball returns stop one at a time, then the cooler fan is suddenly the loudest thing in the room.

Then boots.

Trent Mabry walks across the dark lane floor on the recording. He's carrying the key ring with the bottle opener, and he goes past the glass wall, past the counter, to the front door, and he keys it and shoulders it until it clicks twice.

Then the lot lights. There's a window over the parking lot in the frame, and it goes from gray to black, and the wet asphalt disappears.

He's a hundred feet from the phone. He never looks up.

And while he's doing it, a woman's voice - close, off-frame, like she's standing right by the serving counter where the clamp is - says:

"Lock up early. I don't want anybody wandering in."

Trent says, "Yeah."

Then the recording keeps going. He walks back out of frame. Rennie's voice stays, humming, moving the chairs around.

I stopped it at 9:24 and sat back in the dead man's chair with my hands in my lap.

My husband locked the front door of our business because his sister asked him to, and never asked her why, and it wasn't a crime, and it wasn't the forgery, and it wasn't the mat, and it was somehow the worst thing I'd seen all weekend.

He had no idea he'd done anything. That was the part. He had no idea at all.

I copied the file onto the office computer and pulled the thumb drive out and put it in my bra strap like a woman in a movie, and I sat there in the dark with the payroll computer humming until the screen went black on its own.

Then I walked home and said nothing to anybody, because I hadn't decided what to do yet, and once I decide a thing, I don't un-decide it.

I lay awake next to Trent and listened to him breathe and thought: Monday, Rennie will move first.

Monday, Rennie moved first.