Chapter 2

The Wren County Ledger came out Wednesday afternoon, and by four o'clock three people had called Ora Dell's house.

The notice was on page three, same place the county always put them. NOTICE OF IMPOUNDED ANIMAL. It described a brown hound taken up Monday on Bledsoe Ridge Road, "found without adequate food, water or shelter," and it printed her name and her address and said the owner of record had failed to reclaim the animal and was subject to citation.

Ora Dell read it twice at the kitchen table with her glasses on.

She had fed that dog twice a day for eleven years. She had a shampoo sink in that kitchen and a folding chair and a mirror taped to the cabinet, and she had cut hair in that room for church ladies and farmers' wives and one county commissioner's mother, and now her address was in the paper under the word neglect.

Sissy Toler called. "Honey, I know it's a mistake. Everybody knows it's a mistake."

"Then why'd they print it?"

Sissy didn't have an answer for that.

Her son Travis called from Nashville. "Mama, what is this? Candace saw it online."

"It's a lie."

"Okay. Okay. I'll call somebody."

"Don't call anybody. I'm handling it."

After she hung up she sat still for a minute, and then she got up and pulled the shoebox out from under the sink.

It was a shoe box from Kinney's, size nine, and it held every piece of paper Ora Dell had kept since she married Raymond in 1974. Receipts for the well pump. The deed to the car. The bus-route seniority letter. And near the top, where she'd put it the week after the funeral, the card from Barlow Animal Clinic in Marlow.

DUKE - brown hound, male. Microchip implanted 06/14/2011. Owner: R. D. Sizemore. Address: 1104 Bledsoe Ridge Rd.

Raymond had taken Duke in on a Tuesday and come home proud as a boy, saying now if that dog ever got out, nobody could say he wasn't ours.

Three months later Raymond was dead, and Duke was the last living thing in the house that had his smell on it.

Ora Dell put the card on the table and dialed Lurlene Cade's number.

Lurlene picked up on the fourth ring. "Hello."

"Lurlene. It's Ora Dell."

There was a pause with a television going in it.

"Miss Ora Dell, I can't talk on this phone."

"I only want to know one thing. Was Duke written in your book?"

Another pause. The television kept going.

"The page is in there," Lurlene said.

"Then I'll come look at it."

"You can look at it." Lurlene's voice dropped down to almost nothing. "But that ain't my hand on it."

The line clicked dead.