Chapter 5

Route 7 north out of Cedar Hollow is eleven miles of two-lane with a guardrail on one side and nothing on the other. Skaggs Auto Sales sits on a flat gravel pad with thirty used cars in a row and a trailer with a window unit and a plastic flag on a pole that says DALE'S.

I'd seen the man exactly twice. Once at the fair, once at a league banquet he wasn't invited to.

I got there Tuesday at ten in the morning. I'd borrowed Charlene's car, and I'd told her where I was going, and she'd said, Honey, I don't like that, and I'd said, Neither do I, and I went anyway.

Dale Skaggs is sixty-two, six-three, and built like a refrigerator that has learned to be polite. He was sitting behind a desk with a green desk pad and a coffee cup he never drank from. He didn't seem surprised.

"Mrs. Mabry." He stood up. "You want to sit down?"

"I'll stand."

"Pregnant, standing in my office. All right." He sat. "What can I do."

"How much does my sister-in-law owe you."

He did something with his mouth that wasn't a smile.

"That's family business."

"It's my building she's selling to cover it. That makes it my business."

He looked at me for a while. Then he opened a drawer and took out a green ledger and a stack of deposit slips held with a bulldog clip and set them on the desk, face-up, like a man showing you his receipts.

"Fifty-eight thousand," he said. "Four thousand one hundred and fifty of that is the last month. Your sister-in-law is a very consistent person."

The slips had Mabry Lanes on them. I recognized the numbers because I'm the one who makes the deposit every morning, and I knew which nights had come up short, because I keep a spiral notebook with every count in it, and I'd been blaming myself for months for arithmetic that wasn't mine.

"She's been paying you out of the alley's cash."

"She's been paying me out of the alley's cash," he agreed. "Which is a bad idea for everybody, because cash going out the door every night looks like somebody stealing. Which it is."

"Why does she owe you fifty-eight thousand dollars."

"Wheeling." He shrugged. "The riverboat, fourteen months. She was good at it in the beginning. Then she was looking for the beginning."

I put my hand flat on the desk because the room had tilted slightly.

"Why are you telling me this."

"Because she can't close." Skaggs pushed the ledger toward me. "She's been promising me a building since August. Then it was going to be October, then November. She can't get all three signatures, and I've been patient, and patience is a cost. And now I hear she's out at your place stirring up police reports over some video." He let that sit. "I don't do police reports, Mrs. Mabry. I do cars."

"Saturday night," I said. "She called you at nine thirty-one."

"How would you know that."

"Somebody would." I said it like I knew, and he took it like I did.

"Nine thirty-one, nine thirty-two, something like that. She told me the papers were signed and it'd be Tuesday."

I walked out of there with the deposit slips in my pocket. He hadn't told me not to take them, and I hadn't asked.

At the door he said, "Your sister-in-law's a liar. You, I might do business with."

I drove home with both hands on the wheel and when I got to the office that night I sat in front of the payroll computer and jumped the file to 9:29 and let it run.

At 9:31, a woman's voice near the serving counter says, low and fast: "It's me. It's done, it's Tuesday, I just need him to sign the last one." Then: "Dale. Dale, I swear on my mother." Then she hangs up.

Fourteen minutes later she was bent over me on the floor.

The next morning I drove to the alley and Trent was already in the lot with his truck running and the heater on, and I got in the passenger side without asking.