Chapter 3

The county paper came out Thursday with a photograph of her chimney standing in the ash and a headline that read Widow's Home Lost to Unsafe Wiring. It quoted the chief's report four times.

She went to the feed store Saturday, the way she had every Saturday since 1994. Hoyt Mullins was behind the register. When she laid her list on the counter, he didn't pick it up.

"Ruth Ann." He looked past her at the two women in the aisle. "I need you to hold off coming in here for a while."

She set her purse down. "Hoyt, I've bought feed and seed and my Christmas ham in this store for thirty years."

"It's not that."

"Then what is it?"

He leaned in, and his voice went low and unhappy, like a man repeating something he'd heard and hated. "You're not the first person in this county to get a report somebody else wrote." He straightened. "Don't make me say more than that. Please."

She stood there. He bagged nothing. She picked up her list and left.

At church Sunday, three women she'd known for forty years studied the floor when she came up the aisle. One of them said, "We're praying for you, Ruth Ann," in a voice that meant something else.

That night she walked down the lane to the hydrant.

It stood at the end of the field, forty yards off the county road, where the county had set it in 1974. She'd watched the tanker park on the road that night with its lights on. She had never seen a hose come off it.

She put her flashlight on the cap.

The paint on the cap was unbroken. The little ring of ice that had formed in the threads was still there, whole, cracked nowhere. Nobody had put a wrench to that hydrant. Nobody had turned it. Not that night, not since the frost came.

She stood in the dark with the beam shaking a little, because her hands were shaking.

Then headlights swung off the county road and stopped at the end of her lane. A truck sat there with the engine running. After a while the window came down.

"Ruth Ann." Bo Traywick's voice, soft, patient, the voice he used on claims. "It's late. You want to be careful out here in the dark."

The window went up. The truck pulled away slow, the way a man drives when he isn't in any hurry at all.