Chapter 2

Eleven days later the adjuster called at ten past nine in the morning.

"Mrs. Coker, this is Pauline Rhee, out of the Marston branch." Papers shuffled. "I've got the fire chief's report in front of me. Based on the stated cause, the loss falls under your maintenance exclusion. We're denying the claim."

Ruth Ann had the red spiral notebook open on the kitchen table. She wrote the date, the woman's name, the word denied, and then sat with the pen down for a while, because there was nothing else to write yet.

She drove into town that afternoon and parked in front of the block-and-tin fire hall two streets off the square. Marlene Estep was at the desk in her rose cardigan, wire-rims on a chain, typing on a form with a yellow carbon under it.

"Marlene, I need the run sheet from my fire."

Marlene's hands kept moving. "You'd have to ask Bo."

"I'm asking you what time you typed it."

The typing stopped. Marlene looked at the door, then at Ruth Ann, and said nothing at all, which was an answer.

Ruth Ann walked back into the bay. The 1996 tanker sat in the far slot, its brass dedication plate dull under the work lights. Under the pump housing, someone had set a coffee can. It was catching a drip - oil and water together, beading slow off the rim, the can a third full and the floor around it wiped clean and wiped recently.

On the shelf beside the bay sat a three-ring binder with PUMP TESTS written on the spine in marker. She opened it. Every annual test in it was signed in the same green pen, the same looping B.T. And in the column where flow readings went, every line was blank.

"Ruth Ann."

Bo stood in the bay door with his windbreaker over his polo shirt, not angry, not hurrying. He looked at the binder in her hands and then at the can on the floor.

"You shouldn't be in here," he said.

She picked the coffee can up. The drip ticked onto the concrete where it had been.

"What's it catching, Bo?"