Chapter 6

The Christmas card came the second week of December, in a red envelope with a nativity stamp and no return address, and inside it, folded in thirds, was a yellow sheet of carbon paper.

Ruth Ann knew what it was before she had it flat on the kitchen table.

She'd seen a hundred of them. Every run the department ever made was typed on a form with a carbon under it, and the carbon went in the file and the top copy went wherever top copies went. This one was creased soft at the folds and smelled like a filing cabinet.

The typed lines ran down the left side: time of call, address, apparatus, personnel. And on the water-supply line, in green ink, in handwriting she had seen on every pump test in that binder, Bo Traywick had written:

pump test - no flow, 9:41 p.m.

Under it, on the line where a name went, one name.

J. Purdy.

She got the newspaper clipping off the windowsill and laid it beside the carbon. His report said the tanker supplied the hydrant at 9:41 p.m. The department's own carbon said pump test, no flow, at 9:41 p.m. Same minute. Two different nights.

There was one more thing in the envelope - a page torn out of a lined book, in Marlene Estep's round hand: Typed for Chief Traywick, clean copy, letterhead, 7:10 a.m. Nothing else. No note. Marlene wasn't a woman who explained herself on paper.

Ruth Ann sat with it a long time.

If Bo had written that report fast to hide a dead pump, he'd have written it about the truck. He didn't. He wrote it about a person. There was one name on the water-supply line of a fire that took a house, and that name was a nineteen-year-old boy who was the chief's sister's son, and the report that came out of it said the wiring did it.

She said it out loud in her own kitchen, quietly, to nobody.

"Junior."

Then she picked up the phone and called Marlene Estep.

"I got your card," Ruth Ann said.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Thank you."

There was a long silence on the line. Then Marlene said, "I've typed every report in that hall for nineteen years. I hate being told what I typed." A breath. "Ruth Ann, don't say my name in that room."

That night, the phone rang again, late, and it was Bo, and he was pleasant.

"Marlene tells me you've been by the hall."

"Marlene didn't tell you anything," Ruth Ann said.

Bo was quiet a second. Then he said, "Somebody's been in my file cabinet."