Chapter 5

By Friday, the county had a story, and the story was working.

It went like this: the counter scanner at the shelter had a bad battery and had been giving trouble for a month; the intake page had been corrected by hand because Lurlene Cade wrote down the wrong date; the notice in the Register was a routine legal requirement; and Ora Dell Sizemore was a grieving widow who had lost a dog and was looking for somebody to blame.

Marlon told it at the co-op, and at the deacon meeting, and to two of the commissioners at the cafe on the square. He told it kindly, which was the worst part - hand on his heart, saying he didn't hold it against her, saying she was seventy-one and alone and he'd be happy to help her pick out a nice young dog from over in the next county.

Sunday, after the service, three women Ora Dell had known for forty years asked her, gently, whether she was sure. That was the sentence. Are you sure.

She was sure. But she went home and sat in the kitchen and found she had started talking to Earl in her head, which she hadn't done in years.

Monday morning she drove to Barlow Animal Clinic, which Dr. Wendell Barlow had sold to Dr. Neesha Patel back in 2016. The girl at the front desk told her the 2011 paper files were in storage and somebody would have to call her back.

The scanner was the same model Barlow used. That was the thing she couldn't get out of her head. The same unit, on the same counter, with the same beep.

She came home and pulled the shoebox out from under the sink and set it on the table and took the rubber bands off, one year at a time.

The first three bands were in Earl's handwriting. Then his stopped, and hers started, and hers ran all the way down to this year - eleven years of money orders bought at the drugstore in Ridgely, twenty-six miles away, made out to the Harlow County Animal Shelter Angel Fund, mailed from the Ridgely post office, signed only R.D.S.

She had never told anybody. Not Lurlene, not the preacher, not the woman at the drugstore who had once asked her, kindly, who R.D.S. was. She had wanted the fund to keep working, and she had not wanted anybody's thank-you, and after a while it had become the one place she could still be married.

Her phone rang at four-forty.

"Ora Dell." Lurlene's voice was thin. "He moved him."

"Moved him where?"

"Out of kennel nine, back to the isolation run, and he put a new tag on the gate. No name. Just a number." A pause. "And he told me to quit feeding him."

"Why?"

"Because he said the hauler's truck doesn't care whether a dog's been fed."