Chapter 10

At eight the next morning Ora Dell was in the courthouse annex with the shoebox under her arm.

Curtis Bane had a small office with one window and a lot of paper. He cleared a place on the desk and she set the box down and took the lid off, and he went through it the way a man goes through something holy, stub by stub, writing figures in a column on a yellow pad.

At the end he sat back. "Fourteen thousand two hundred and forty dollars over eleven years. That's what you sent." He tapped the pad. "That's what he took."

"Will it hold up?"

"It'll hold up. The money orders have serial numbers. The bank in Marlow keeps records. And the intake sheet, and the statement, and the girl - Kaylee Dunn - she came in on her own yesterday afternoon and gave a written statement that he typed it for her." He looked at her. "You brought one more thing."

Ora Dell took the stub out of her purse and laid it on the desk, face down.

Curtis Bane read the writing on the back twice. Then he read it out loud, slowly, in his flat auditor's voice.

"Ora Dell - this is the truck money. Barlow's says the shelter account runs short every year and nobody at the county can tell them why. I want it paid, and I want your name on it. Not R.D.S. Yours. I spent thirty-one years watching you sign my name to everything. Sign this one yourself. - Ray"

Ora Dell sat very still with her hands in her lap.

"That's why you never mailed it," Curtis said.

"That's why I never mailed it."

He set the stub down gently. "Miss Sizemore, it's evidence now. But when this is over I'll get it back to you."

The county moved fast, because in a small county everybody already knows everything and only the paperwork has to catch up. County Attorney Leta Boykin filed on Wednesday. Deputy Pell served the warrant Thursday morning at the shelter on County Road 14 - theft by conversion, falsifying public records, official misconduct, and unlawful sale of impounded animals.

They walked Marlon Teague out past the intake desk at nine-forty with a cardboard box of his things: the coffee cup, the framed certificate, the little plaque from the deacons, the khaki polos folded on top. Lurlene Cade stood in the doorway of the kennel row and watched him go by, and did not say one word, and he did not look at her.

The commission appointed Lurlene interim kennel supervisor that afternoon and took the Angel Fund away from the shelter entirely, putting it under the clerk's office with the deposits published in the Ledger every quarter. The neglect citation against Ora Dell was withdrawn and the paper ran a correction on page one, three inches, with her name spelled right.

At First Methodist the following Sunday, Marlon Teague did not stand up for joys and concerns. The deacon board had asked him to step back until things were settled.

Delbert Yancey brought Duke home Tuesday afternoon in the cab of his truck. The dog came up the walk with his tail going and his ribs still showing, and Ora Dell knelt down on the concrete and let him climb into her, all eighty pounds of him, and she held onto him and cried into his neck for a while, which she had not done in eleven years, not even at the funeral.

She paid Delbert his seventy-five dollars and he tried three times to give it back.

That evening she sat at the kitchen table and opened the box one more time. Then she got out her good pen and wrote a check on the account Raymond had left her, and the next morning she drove to Marlow, to the post office, and bought a money order for eleven thousand dollars.

At the counter she filled in the payee: Barlow Animal Clinic, Shelter Veterinary Account.

And on the line that said PURCHASER, Ora Dell Sizemore wrote her own name.

She mailed it on the way home. When she came in, Duke was asleep on the linoleum in front of the sink, twitching after something in a dream, and the shoebox was back under there behind the drainpipe where it had always lived, emptier than it had been in a long time.

Ora Dell hung her pocketbook on the chair and stood a minute looking at her own kitchen - the shampoo sink, the folding chair, the mirror taped to the cabinet door, the good light coming in over the yard.

Then she went and got her scissors out of the drawer, because Sissy Toler's girl was coming at two, and she had a head of hair to do.