Chapter 5

Grady Sisk drove the 1996 tanker for nineteen years. Now he lived in a single-wide on the other side of the county with a dog that didn't like anybody. He let Ruth Ann in because of Arlen.

"The seal on that pump's been walking since I had it," he said. "Weeping. You lose prime, you lose water. Happens maybe once a month. You shut it down, you prime it, you go on."

"Did they ever run the pump test?"

Grady laughed without any humor in it. "I ran it. Every spring, off the hydrant by the school. That was my job." He looked at her. "Nobody's asked me to run it since twenty-two."

"So who signs the test now?"

"Bo signs everything."

Ruth Ann sat with that.

Three years of annual pump tests, signed, filed, sent up to the state. If the pump had been failing and the tests were signed anyway, the state could pull that tanker's certification. There was a grant - she'd read about it in the paper, a rural equipment grant, forty thousand dollars, awarded to the county two years back on the strength of the department's records.

That was it. That had to be it. The pump failed at her fire, and Bo rewrote the cause because if the state opened the pump file they'd find three years of signatures on tests nobody ran, and the department would lose the tanker, the grant, the insurance rating - everything.

She wrote it down. Then she wrote to the state fire marshal's office in the capital, four pages, times and facts, no adjectives.

The answer came back in eleven days, one page, on letterhead.

"Your correspondence has been referred to our Field Audit Division. An audit of the Two Rivers Volunteer Fire Department has already been scheduled for the first week of January, at the department's request."

Ruth Ann read that twice.

At the department's request.

She drove to the hall that afternoon and found Marlene alone, filing.

"Marlene. I know about the pump. I know he signed the tests and never ran them, and I know why he wrote that report." She said it fast, because she believed it. "It's about the tanker."

Marlene's hands stopped. She looked at the doorway, then at Ruth Ann, and her face had gone the color of the wall.

"Ruth Ann." Her voice was barely there. "You're reading the wrong line."

"What line?"

Marlene turned back to the cabinet and slid the drawer shut, slow, so it wouldn't bang.

"Go home," she said. "And when the mail comes, don't throw anything away."