Chapter 3

The foreclosure notice came four days later, tacked to her door with a roofing nail by a man who wouldn't meet her eye.

The county paper reprinted the chief's report word for word on the front page, and it put her address in the second paragraph, which meant that everyone in Two Rivers now knew exactly which widow on County Road 9 had burned her own house down with bad wiring in an unpermitted addition.

At the feed store, Dwayne Estridge came out from behind the counter and asked her, kindly, if she'd mind doing her business in Marston from now on. Two women she had fed lunch to for forty years crossed the street in front of the drugstore rather than pass her.

Ruth Ann didn't argue with any of them. She went home and laid the newspaper clipping on the kitchen table beside the notebook and read the report the way she used to read a recipe - twice, out loud, once for the words and once for the order they came in.

"Tanker supplied the hydrant at 9:41 p.m."

She had been standing in the field at 9:41. She had watched her back wall come down. She had never seen a hose on her property, not once, not for a minute.

"Cause determined on scene, 6:10 a.m."

She had been ten feet from him at 6:40, and he had been holding a typed page. Nobody types in a burned yard. Nobody types in the dark with frost coming on.

She turned the clipping over and wrote on the back: Typed. Not on scene. And under it: Two things that don't fit.

Sunday, after church, she caught Marlene Estep by the coat rack in the fellowship hall, where the coffee was and where nobody stood still long enough to hear anything.

"I'm not going to ask you to say anything against anybody," Ruth Ann said. "I'm going to ask you one thing. What time did you type that report?"

Marlene's round face went the color of her cardigan. She looked past Ruth Ann at the door, at the parking lot, at anything.

"I do the books at the funeral home on Tuesdays," she said. "All day. Nobody comes in."

She took her purse off the hook and went out into the cold.