Chapter 5

Ott Sizemore had serviced the county's trucks for thirty years before his knees quit, and he lived in a trailer out past the old creamery with a dog that barked at the wind. He let Ruth Ann in and put the kettle on and didn't make her ask twice.

"That ninety-six tanker," he said. "Pump seal went. Two winters back, near about. I told Bo to his face. Told him the pump'll run dry and burn itself up if he keeps pulling on it."

"What did he say?"

"Said he'd handle it." Ott poured. "Then the next spring I seen the test sheet signed and no flow numbers in it, and I figured he'd bought a new pump." He shrugged. "Wasn't my department."

Ruth Ann drove home with the heater on and her gloves off, because she thought she finally had it. A dry pump. A chief who didn't want the state looking at a dry pump. A report written fast, before the last truck left, to make a burned house nobody's problem but hers.

It fit. It fit everything.

Toby Gant at the county paper was twenty-four years old and ate his lunch at his desk, and he listened to her for eleven minutes and then said the thing that mattered: "The department's budget hearing's next month. Chief Traywick's gotten that budget raised every year since I started here."

That afternoon she went back to the hall to photograph the coffee can and the drip, because a picture is a thing a woman with no standing can hold in her hand.

The bay was empty.

The 1996 tanker was gone off its slot, and the floor where the can had stood had been mopped, and the can was in the trash barrel by the door with a paper towel folded on top of it. The binder was gone off the shelf.

Bo came out of the office with a cup of coffee and stood in the doorway and looked at her looking at the empty bay, and he didn't say a word about it.

"That truck's twenty-eight years old," he said. "You think a truck is worth all this?"

She looked at the clean floor where the drip had been.

"I think you moved it this morning," she said.

Bo drank his coffee. Then he smiled, and it was the first real smile she'd seen on him since the fire.

"It's in the shop," he said. "Pumps need testing."