Chapter 6

The Christmas card came on the fifteenth of December, in a red envelope with a strip of tape over the flap. It was the same card box Marlene Estep had been reusing for eleven years - Ruth Ann recognized the angel on the front from the auxiliary's fund-raiser.

Inside, under Merry Christmas from the Esteps, folded in thirds, was a yellow sheet of paper.

Ruth Ann knew what it was before she opened it. A carbon copy. The kind that came in a bound book at the fire hall, two sheets thick, the second sheet yellow, so the department kept a copy of everything it wrote down.

She put it on the kitchen table under the lamp and read it.

The top: RUN SHEET - TWO RIVERS VFD. Date. Box 9, County Road 9, structure fire. Times down the left margin in Bo Traywick's handwriting, the big slanted hand he used on everything.

Arrival 9:12. Tanker 2 on scene 9:20. Water supply line - and there it was, in the same hand:

Hydrant 4, County Road 9 - J. Purdy.

One name. Every other line on that sheet had two names on it. Two men on the attack line. Two men on ventilation. One name on the water supply, and it was a nineteen-year-old's.

Then, lower, in the margin beside the pump column:

pump test - no flow, 9:41 p.m.

She sat back.

She went and got the typed report out of the notebook folder and laid it beside the carbon. The typed report said: Water supply - Hydrant 4, County Road 9. Adequate.

Adequate.

The pump failed. That part was real. But the pump was not the reason he rewrote the cause. If all he'd been hiding was a bad seal, he'd have blamed the tanker and taken his licks. He blamed her wiring instead - because the water-supply line on that carbon had one name on it, and the name was his sister's boy, and if anybody ever asked why a rookie was sent alone to a hydrant, the next question was what that rookie had been trained to do.

She wrote to the state fire marshal's office that same week, asking for the department's training file for Junior Purdy.

The auditor's assistant mailed her a copy, one page, certified.

Hydrant operations qualification - approved. Signed: B. Traywick, Chief.

Hours logged: none.

Ruth Ann sat at the table with the two papers in front of her and the lamp humming.

Headlights came up the drive and stopped. A truck door opened and shut. Boots on the porch steps, slow and deliberate, and then a knock on a door at nine o'clock at night in December.

She knew that knock. Everybody in the county knew that knock.