Chapter 8

The commission room in the old courthouse was wood-paneled and lit by fluorescent tubes that hummed, and it had a long formica dais with a county seal on the front and thirty-odd folding chairs, and on the first Monday in January there were forty people in those chairs, most of whom Ruth Ann had known her whole life.

Bo Traywick sat at the left end of the dais in a folding chair with his arms crossed, because the chief's report was on the agenda as a routine item.

In the third row, a man in a gray suit she had never seen before sat with a three-ring binder open on his knee.

Public comment came at the end. Ruth Ann stood up when the chairman called her name, and she walked to the podium with the newspaper clipping in her right hand and the yellow carbon in her left.

She laid them both on the podium, side by side, and flattened the carbon with her palm and kept her hand there.

"Read it out loud, Chief," she said.

The room murmured. Bo's arms came uncrossed.

"Ruth Ann, we've been through this."

"Then I'll read it." She looked down at the page under her hand. "Pump test. No flow. Nine forty-one p.m. That's your handwriting, Bo. And on the water-supply line there's one name. J. Purdy."

Bo's right hand started toward the paper and stopped in the air.

Behind her, in the back row, a folding chair scraped hard on the tile.

Marlene Estep stood up with her purse still on her lap and her glasses on their chain, and the murmur cut off mid-sentence.

"I typed the run sheet that night," Marlene said. Her voice was small and it carried, because the room had gone completely quiet. "Nine forty-one, while her house was still burning. And I typed the chief's clean report at seven-ten the next morning, on letterhead, the way he asked me to." She swallowed. "I keep a log of everything I type. I always have."

The auditor in the third row stood up.

"Chief Traywick," he said. "I'm going to need your pump-test file and your training file. Tonight."