Chapter 7

She opened the door with the chain on.

"Ruth Ann." Bo Traywick stood on the porch with his hands in his jacket pockets, breath smoking. "It's cold. Can I come in?"

"No."

He nodded like that was reasonable. "I'll say it out here, then."

She waited.

"I know you've got a paper," he said. "I know where it came from. I know Marlene has eleven years in that office and a pension she can't afford to lose, and I know a boy who just got hired on paid in the next county and will lose it over something he did when he was seventeen."

The foreclosure notice was on the table behind her, opened that morning. The bank had given her six weeks.

"I'll pay the claim," Bo said. "Out of my own pocket. Not the carrier - me. Sixty-eight thousand, whatever the adjuster wrote. You keep the land, you fix the house, and we're done. All I need is the paper."

Ruth Ann looked at him. He had his silver pen in his jacket pocket. He always had it.

"Arlen cleared that five acres with a mule and a chainsaw," she said. "You were eight years old. You probably don't remember."

"Ruth Ann-"

"I'll see you at the meeting, Bo."

She shut the door and stood with her hand flat on it until she heard his boots go down the steps.

Then she called Marlene.

"I'm not going to ask you to stand up," Ruth Ann said. "I just need to know you won't say I made it up."

The line was quiet a long time. "I'll be there," Marlene said.

The first commission meeting of January, in the old courthouse room - wood paneling, folding tables, the flag in the corner. Ruth Ann signed the public comment sheet fourth.

She put the carbon on the podium with her palm flat on it, and she laid the typed report beside it, and she said, "Pump test. No flow. Nine forty-one."

The room didn't move.

"Water supply line, my fire," she said. "One name. Junior Purdy. Alone."

Bo was already standing, folder in hand, the patient face on. "Mrs. Coker-"

"Chief." Marlene Estep's chair scraped hard on the floor as she stood up in the back row. Twenty heads turned. "I typed that report at seven ten the next morning, at the hall. He brought me the carbon at ten after seven. He did not write it in her yard."

Nobody breathed.

A man in the third row in a plain coat with a notebook stood up and said his name was Ray Kesterson, Field Audit Division, state fire marshal's office, and asked the commission's permission to put a question.

He asked for the pump-test file for the 1996 tanker.

Bo said the seal had failed, that it was an equipment issue, that he'd already ordered the part, that the department was volunteer and ran three hundred calls a year on old trucks.

"I'll take that as a yes," Kesterson said. "And the training file for Junior Purdy."

Ruth Ann put the certified page on the podium.

"Chief," she said. "Your report wasn't about the pump. If it was about the pump, you'd have blamed the tanker." She kept her voice even. "It was about the water-supply line, and whose name was on it, and the fact that you signed a boy hydrant-qualified who never logged a single hour. You rewrote the cause to cover your nephew. You've been doing it since he was seventeen."

Bo Traywick stood behind that podium with his helmet on his head and did not say one word.

When Ruth Ann sat down, her hands were steady. She picked up the carbon to fold it, and that was when she saw it.

Under Bo's handwriting, at the bottom of the yellow page, small, in pencil, in a hand that was not his:

Old Mill Rd. 2 yrs back. Same thing. Nobody asked. J.P.