Chapter 8

The courthouse lobby had been rearranged. Folding chairs in four rows. A coffee urn and a sheet cake on a side table. A memorial board of photographs on an easel, and beside it a long display table covered in dark cloth.

Curtis wore the brown suit he had worn to Ruth’s funeral. It hung a size wrong in the shoulders. He carried the glass frame in both hands and set it on the display table himself, next to the photographs, and stood back.

Dress uniforms. Ribbons. Spouses. Two reporters from the county paper with notebooks. A woman near the coffee urn in a gray coat, holding a folder, watching everything.

Sheriff Ashby spoke first. He talked about the year: citations up, enforcement up, record numbers, a department the county could be proud of. Then he talked about the memorial board, and read the three names, and said Deputy Aaron Mabry had been the best of them.

Curtis kept his eyes on the display table.

Then Ashby said, “Officer of the Year,” and Deputy Travis Corley stood up out of the second row, and the room applauded, and Corley walked to the front with the plaque in both hands, smiling a white rehearsed smile at his wife and two children in the third row.

Applause filled the lobby. Curtis picked up the citation off the table where he’d been resting his hand on it.

He walked the six steps to the display table and laid the paper flat beside his son’s badge.

He said it loud enough to carry over the clapping, and no louder.

“Badge 1147. That’s my son’s.”

The applause thinned. Somebody in the back row kept clapping for two beats and stopped.

Corley turned. His smile stayed up for a moment, then it came down like a shade.

“That number’s a clerical error, Mr. Mabry.”

Curtis slid the folded retirement letter across the cloth and set it next to the frame. He unfolded it so the line showed.

Corley set the plaque down on the display table and turned it face-down - and for two seconds the engraved side was up for the whole room: 47 TRAFFIC STOPS - OFFICER OF THE YEAR.

Behind the front table, Verna Talley stood up with a printout in her hand.

“Sheriff,” she said. “I need to read something into the record.”