Chapter 2

The email came Monday at 6:14 in the morning while I was making coffee.

One record. Ray Allen Dunnett and Diane Marie Fowler, Tulare County, the ninth of June, eleven years ago.

Ray's middle name is Allen. He has not used it since he was a boy because his father was Ray Allen too and it caused problems with the yard's accounts, and there is a whole story he tells at parties about the first time a check bounced over it.

Eleven years ago in June I was in Modesto with my mother, who was dying, and it took four months, and I came home in October and he had painted the kitchen as a surprise.

I put the coffee down and sat at my own table and read a public record on a phone for about six minutes.

Then I did the thing I have done for twenty years, which is that I went to work.

Dunnett Building Supply opens at seven. I do the accounts, the payables, the county permits, the tax filings, and I have done all of it since 2005 out of a back office with a window onto the lumber racks. I am not on the paperwork anywhere. When Ray's accountant set it up he said it was cleaner that way and I said all right, because in 2005 I would have said all right to anything that let me stop working nights.

Diane came in at eight to do the schedule.

She saw me and stopped in the doorway with her coat still on.

"Claire."

"Morning."

"About Saturday — "

"Do the schedule," I said. "Toby's got the flu and there's nobody on the second delivery."

She did the schedule. She did it standing up, at the counter, not at her desk, and it took her forty minutes and it takes twenty.

At ten I drove to the library on Fifth, because a printer at a yard is a printer eleven people use, and I stood at the machine on the second floor and fed it fifteen cents.

The girl at the desk asked if I needed help finding anything.

"No," I said. "I know exactly where it is."