Chapter 9

It took the auditor forty minutes to send for the files and eleven minutes to read them.

The pump-test binder came from the hall in a cardboard box. He opened it on the dais and read the years out loud, and every annual test was signed in the same green pen, and in the flow column there was nothing, year after year, nothing, and the 1996 tanker's entries ran back three years.

Then he opened the training file.

"Junior Purdy," he read. "Hydrant operations. Qualified." He turned the page. "Signed by Chief B. Traywick. Logged training hours: zero."

Nobody in the room moved.

Bo stood up. He didn't look at Ruth Ann. He looked at the forty people who had eaten lunch with him for eleven years, and he said, "He's nineteen years old."

"Chief-"

"He's my sister's boy." Bo's voice cracked down the middle. "He's a kid. He got to the hydrant and the cap wouldn't turn and he froze, and he never told a soul, and I wasn't going to let the state hang a house on a nineteen-year-old kid."

Behind the last row of chairs, near the door, Junior Purdy stood up. He was in his new county's jacket, and he had come in at some point during Marlene's sentence and nobody had noticed.

"I never opened it," he said. His voice was loud and wrong in the quiet room. "The cap was painted shut. I had the wrench. I couldn't get it to turn and I couldn't make my hands do it, and I stood there. I stood there and I never called it in."

Bo turned and looked at his nephew for the first time, and something in his face went out like a lamp.

Ruth Ann stood at the podium with her hand still flat on the carbon.

"You could have told me," she said. "I'd have kept the boy out of it. I fed him lunch for twelve years." She said it without raising her voice, which was how she said everything. "You didn't have to make it my wiring."

The commission voted that night to suspend the chief pending the audit, and the auditor took the box, and Bo Traywick walked out of the old courthouse past forty people who did not say one word to him.

Ruth Ann sat back down in her chair. Her hands were shaking now that it was over, so she put them in her lap, and the yellow carbon lay across her knees, and she turned it over just to have something to hold.

At the bottom of the page, under the printed date line, in a hand that was not Bo's and not Marlene's, someone had begun a second entry.

Same date. Two years earlier.