Chapter 2

Ora Dell drove home the long way, out past the bypass where the shelter sat on its slab of hot asphalt, because she couldn't stand to drive past it twice.

Her house was a white frame house with a porch that ran the whole front of it and a hand-painted sign by the steps: CUTS AND SETS, SATURDAYS. In the kitchen, a ceiling fan turned slow over a table with a mirror bolted to the wall and a folding chair pulled up to it. It still smelled like Saturday - permanent solution, coffee, and Opal Shrewsbury's cigarettes.

She set her purse down. Then she went to the sink and pulled out the shoebox.

It was a shoe box from a store that closed in 2004, with a picture of a covered-dish supper taped to the lid, and it lived under the sink behind the dish soap, because nobody looks under a sink.

Inside: money order stubs, rubber-banded by year. Eleven bands. And a folded card from Barlow Animal Clinic, softened along the creases.

SIZEMORE, ORA DELL. 06/14/2011. Brown hound, male, approx. 8 months. Microchip #985141-2237. Bud.

On the back, in pencil, in Earl's slanted hand: "Ask them to scan him if he ever runs off. Cost me $45. Worth it."

Robert Dell Sizemore. Everybody in Harlow County had called him Earl since he was nine years old, after his uncle, and the only two places R.D.S. still existed were on a bank signature card and a line on a money order. She had never once said those initials out loud to another living soul.

Lurlene Cade knocked at 6:40, still in her work shirt, and didn't come in past the doorway.

"He's alive," she said.

Ora Dell had to put her hand on the counter.

"I heard him Tuesday night. Kennel nine. He bayed twice and then he quit, the way he does." Lurlene's eyes were red. "Mr. Mabry bought him Tuesday. Seventy-five cash. He was supposed to pick him up after the vet run next Tuesday. But there's no sale on the book, Ora Dell. No receipt, no entry. On paper that dog is still an unclaimed stray."

"He was never a stray."

"I know."

"Lurlene. Will you say that out loud?"

Lurlene looked at the floor for a long time. "I've got a truck payment and a boy at the community college," she said. "And Marlon took the intake book home with him Tuesday night. He brought it back Wednesday with a new page in it. The Tuesday page is in his handwriting and it's got my initials on it. I didn't write it."

Ora Dell sat down in the folding chair, in front of the mirror, the way she did when her legs needed a minute.

"There's something else," Lurlene said. "There's a notice going in the Register Thursday. It's got your name on it."