Chapter 4

Tuesday, Ruth Ann drove two hours and ten minutes to the capital and parked in a lot with a meter, which she had never done in her life.

The state fire marshal's office was on the fourth floor of a building with a marble hallway and no smell of smoke in it at all. A young woman at the counter gave her a form. Ruth Ann filled it out in her careful school-cafeteria printing and attached the newspaper clipping, the denial letter, and a page from the notebook, and then she sat in a plastic chair and waited an hour and forty minutes to hand it to a man who read it twice and said, "Ma'am, that's a serious allegation."

"I know it," she said. "That's why I brought it here."

She ate a sandwich in the truck in the parking lot because she wasn't going to pay capital prices for a sandwich, and on the drive home the alternator light came on and stayed on, and she drove the last forty miles with the radio off to save the battery.

The alternator cost her one hundred and ninety dollars, which was the money she had set back for heating oil. She wrote it in the notebook under the date.

Two things happened that same week.

Junior Purdy was hired as a paid firefighter in the next county over - full-time, with a uniform and a paycheck - and the Piggly Wiggly put a new boy on the bag line. Everyone said it was a fine thing for the boy.

And a letter came from the state fire marshal's office, two pages, on the same paper the auditor used. Page one acknowledged her complaint and said it would be reviewed in the ordinary course. Page two was a notice of a routine compliance audit of the Two Rivers Volunteer Fire Department, and it gave a date.

Ruth Ann read the date twice. Then she got the county paper off the table and found the notice of the commission's monthly meeting, six weeks out, and the audit was scheduled for the week after it.

The letter said the audit date had been set at the department's request.

Bo Traywick had picked the day himself.