Chapter 9

Curtis Bane stood up slowly, the way a man stands when he's been sitting with something for a while.

"Mr. Teague," he said, "I want to ask you a second question."

Marlon turned halfway around. "Mr. Bane, this is - we're in the middle of an appeal -"

"This is the annual review." Curtis walked out from behind the clerk's table with the ledger open in his hand. "The Angel Fund has one donor of record. Eleven years. Money orders, mailed from Marlow, all signed with the initials R.D.S." He looked up. "Who is R.D.S.?"

The room was quiet.

"I don't have donor names," Marlon said. "They come in unsigned. It's a fund."

"They're not unsigned. I've got the deposit slips in front of me."

"Then it's a bookkeeping matter -"

"It's my question," Curtis said, "and I'll ask it one more time. Who is R.D.S.?"

Ora Dell's hands were still on the scanner. She could feel the whole room waiting, and she knew, the way you know a hymn before the piano starts, exactly what she was supposed to do.

She stood up.

"That's me," she said.

Heads turned.

"R.D.S. is Raymond Dale Sizemore. My husband." She held up the scanner, still glowing with her own name on it. "He's been dead eleven years. I've been mailing that fund a money order from the Marlow post office every month since the week he died, and I signed his initials because I couldn't stand to sign my own that year, and then I never stopped."

Marlon Teague's face did something Ora Dell had never seen it do. It emptied.

"Miss Ora Dell," he said, "I had no idea -"

"No," she said. "You didn't. You never once looked at the name."

Lurlene Cade stood up in the fourth row with the intake book in her arms.

"Mr. Chairman," she said, "I keep that book. That entry's in his handwriting, not mine, and I wasn't on shift that day and my time sheet's been changed." Her voice cracked and kept going. "And I watched him sell that dog out the back door Tuesday morning."

Delbert Yancey stood up behind her. "I bought him. Seventy-five dollars cash. My brother-in-law Rufus Kilgore was with me and he'll swear to it."

Chairman Cardwell looked at Curtis Bane. Curtis Bane looked at Marlon.

"Mr. Teague," he said, "the county's Angel Fund account has received zero dollars in eleven years. Zero. But the shelter's ledger shows deposits, and those money orders were cashed at a bank in Marlow into an account called the Wren County Animal Control Angel Fund that is not a county account." He closed the ledger. "I'd like the commission to freeze the shelter's accounts until the state auditor's office can look at this."

Somebody in the back said "Lord have mercy."

The vote was five to nothing. The meeting adjourned at nine-forty.

Marlon Teague was still in his chair when the gavel came down. Still the director. Still holding his clipboard. He walked out past Ora Dell without looking at her, and Deputy Pell had to lead Duke out the side door because the dog would not leave her.

Ora Dell drove home with the shoebox on the seat.

She sat down at the kitchen table in her beauty-shop chair and opened the box, and there on top, exactly where it had been for eleven years, was the stub she never mailed.

Eleven thousand dollars. The week Raymond died.

She turned it over.

There was writing on the back.