Chapter 9 A ring reported stolen
By a quarter past nine on Thursday the rolling door on the near bay was standing up its usual two feet, so there was a slab of white morning lying along the concrete and a draught coming in at ankle height that nobody in twenty years had done anything about.
The compressor kicked in, ran, and shuddered out.
About ten seconds behind it the space heater in the office came on and made its own noise, and the two of them had been answering each other like that since eight.
Maeve had the front counter and a stub of grease pencil off the shift board and the back of a ruined invoice, and she was making a list.
Five days in Coldwater and everything she had touched had come off somebody else.
She was going to get to the bottom of that column and then she was going to start paying it down out of a lunch counter, in ones if it had to be, and she had worked out at about four that morning that this was a plan, and that nobody else had had a hand in it.
Danny came past the counter with a parts box on his shoulder and set it down to sign the slip, hair he cut himself and cut too short, and he had signed for parts at that counter for two years and still did it carefully, with his tongue between his teeth.
“You’re on at ten fifty,” he said.
“I’m walking down at ten to ten.”
“I know. I’m saying I’ll run you.”
“It’s three miles and I like the walk, Danny.”
“I know,” he said again, to the slip and not to her, and picked the box up and took it away.
The radio in the far bay was playing a station out of Butte that came and went with the weather, and Torch was under the lift with a chopper frame over him and his voice going along under the music about nothing at all.
In the office doorway behind her Gil Medeiros stood with a mug in one hand and the invoice tray in the other and read the tray, one line at a time, and did not look up off it once.
He had said four words to her since Saturday and three of them were it’s three hundred.
Then the gravel out front changed.
That was all it was. A car came off the dead highway and onto the lot, not coming on fast, and the sound of it going slow across that gravel was different enough that the radio got turned down in the far bay without anybody saying anything, and the compressor ran on into a shop that had gone quiet under it.
Maeve saw the white door panel and the county star through the gap under the rolling door. It parked square. No lights, no hurry. A man got out of it the way a big tired man gets out of a car after a long morning, one hand on the roof.
He did not duck under the rolling door. That was the thing she noticed, and it took her another minute to understand it.
Everybody in Coldwater ducked — she had learned it in a day and a half, you came under the door at a stoop and you did not knock, and the only person who had knocked at Iron & Ash this week was the propane man — and Sheriff Dale Brennan went around to the man-door at the end of the block wall and opened it and stopped in it, and took his hat off, and stood there with the doorway full of him and no part of him inside the building.
“Gil.”
“Sheriff.”
“Jesse.” Brennan lifted his chin at the far bay, where Torch had come out from under the lift and was standing with a wrench hanging in one hand. “Your ma still watering that whiskey.”
“Same as she was Sunday.”
“Mm.” Fifties, and big, and grey in the face the way men go who have been on early shifts for nineteen years. His hat went around a quarter turn in his hands. “I’m after Miss Purnell. Maeve Purnell. I’m told she’s here.”
Three men answered at once.
“What’s it about,” Torch said, warm, fast, already crossing the bay.
“She’s under this roof,” Vault said. Twelve words, when she counted them back afterwards, and the rest of them were and she’s not out here on her own.
“She’s at work at ten fifty,” Danny said, from somewhere behind the parts shelf, which was not an answer to anything, and which was the only one of the three that was not standing in front of her.
Maeve put the grease pencil down on the counter.
It took her longer to get around the end of it than it should have, because Torch was between her and the door and did not mean to be, and she had to say excuse me to a man who would have gone through a wall for her, and he moved and looked absolutely stricken about it.
“I’m Maeve Purnell.”
Brennan looked at her for a second. Whatever he had been told to expect, it took him a moment to fit it to five foot ten of a woman in somebody else’s shirt with her hair pushed back and her knuckles shining and split.
“Dale Brennan.” He did not put his hand out, and she understood later that this was a courtesy and not a slight.
“Ma’am, there’s a ring been reported stolen in Verlon.
Reported yesterday. A gold ring with a stone in it that belonged to Everett Bidwell’s grandmother, insured on the family’s policy at four thousand one hundred dollars, and the report has your name on it. ”
Behind her the compressor shut off, and ten seconds later so did the heater, and the shop was as quiet as it ever got.
Maeve heard her own pulse in her ears. And then, underneath that, something she had not expected at all, which was a kind of terrible relief — because she knew this one. She knew exactly where that ring was. She had known since the fourth stair on Saturday morning.
“It’s in a dish on the dresser in my old room at my mother’s house on Kerr Street,” she said.
“The dish with the chip out of the rim. Second door at the top of the stairs. I took it off at six o’clock on Saturday morning to get the hand cream on and I dropped it in the dish and I left it there, and then I went downstairs and got married.
Tried to.” She heard her voice go and got hold of it.
“It has not moved. It’s been lying in that dish for five days with my mother going past it every morning, and she has looked at it every one of them, because she cleans that room on a Tuesday and she has never in her life not seen a thing in a dish. ”
Brennan had gotten a notebook out somewhere in the middle of that. He wrote without hurrying her.
“Kerr Street.”
“Fourteen Kerr. Her name’s Rhonda Purnell.
She isn’t answering her phone.” Maeve made herself stop.
“Sheriff, I can’t prove any of that. I’ve just worked that out, standing here.
I know exactly where it is and I’ve got no way on earth to show you from the other side of a mountain, and I can hear how it sounds. ”
“It sounds like where a ring is,” Brennan said.
“It sounds rehearsed.”
“Everything true sounds rehearsed by the third time you say it.” He turned a page over and looked at what he had written.
“I’d say that’s the first useful thing anybody’s given me on this.
The report I got was made at a counter down there and faxed up here as a courtesy, because you’re in my town and they’d like it known you’re in my town.
Nobody down there has been up those stairs to look. ”
“Then somebody could just —”
“They could.” He shut the notebook halfway and held it there.
“Ma’am, I want to say this to you carefully, and then I’m going to go, because I’ve got a turnout full of somebody’s cattle out on Twelve and this is not how I wanted my morning to run.
What I write down and what gets filed are not the same thing.
This” — the notebook — “goes in a drawer in my office. If a person wants paper on you, paper doesn’t come through me.
It gets walked in the front door of the county building in Ellery and handed across a counter to a girl who takes it because taking it is her job, and after that it is the county attorney’s, and after that it is not mine and it is not this town’s and there is not one single thing I can do about the speed it travels. ”
“Why are you telling me that?”
“Because nineteen years in this job has taught me I never get anywhere first,” Brennan said, “and I would rather you were told than surprised.”
He put his hat back on.
“Keep every piece of paper anybody hands you,” he said.
“Wages, rent, all of it. And don’t you be anywhere on your own with the man who made that report, and don’t call him, and don’t let anybody call him for you.
” His eyes went past her, briefly and without emphasis, into a shop with four men standing in it. “Good morning, Gil.”
Then he was gone, and the county car went out onto the dead highway the same way it had come in, unhurried, and it was twenty to ten in the morning.
The flatbed came in off the grade about four minutes later, dragging a Buick with its front end folded, and Hitch got down out of it into the middle of it.
They told him over her head. She stood there with her back against the front counter and the grease pencil list lying on it behind her and listened to three men build the whole thing for him in about ninety seconds, and not one of them was wrong about a single fact, and not one of them was telling it to her.
“— grandmother’s goddamn ring, four grand on the policy, filed yesterday —”
“Reported,” Maeve said. “Not filed. Reported.”
“— and Brennan wouldn’t come in the shop, which tells you what he thinks of it,” Torch said, and pulled his phone out of his back pocket.
“Right. Ma first, because Ma’s got the Verlon end.
Then we want somebody at that house, because that ring wants photographing where it’s lying before some bastard gets clever and moves it —”
“Don’t.”
" — and Vault, you’ll want to hear what a thing like that does to a bank account when it’s got your name on it —"
“Torch. Don’t.”
He stopped and turned around, and his whole face came open in a way that made it worse, and she could see all the way down into how much he meant it.
“Hey,” he said. “Hey. Nobody’s going to let this get near you.”
“I know. That’s what I’m asking you not to do.” She had to push the words out through something. “It’s my mother’s house and it’s my ring and it’s my name on it, and I’d like to be the one who answers it. Just — let me answer it.”
“’Course,” Torch said, already looking at his phone.
Vault said, “Nobody’s doing anything today,” and went back into the office with the tray, and the way he said it had the word today doing a great deal of work.
Danny had not moved from the end of the parts shelf. He had heard her. She could see that he had heard her, and that he was twenty-four and had been patched about five minutes, and there was nothing whatever he could do with it.
Hitch had come the rest of the way across the bay. He stopped in front of her and put the left side of his head to her, the way she now understood he had been doing all along, and waited.
“I want to answer it myself,” Maeve said.
“All right.”
That was all. And she stood there in the cold draught off the gravel and could not for the life of her work out why all right had gone through her like a swallow of something wrong — until she was halfway to the Ember with the apron she had finally gone up to the hardware and bought herself rolled under her arm, and it came to her whole.
He had not said it wouldn’t happen. He had only said it was all right that she wanted it.
She worked the counter until two. Marla put the wrong order up twice and blamed the grill, and a man in a feed cap left her sixty cents, and through the window the pass road went up out of town in long slow switches into a hard blue sky, and somewhere down the other side of it a piece of paper was already being typed.
Nobody at Iron & Ash said another word about the ring on Thursday, or on Friday.
On Saturday the church bell at the Sanctuary rang once at seven in the evening, which Maeve had not heard before, and Ma reached past her and turned the jukebox off.