Chapter 2 of 13Two Members, Filed in August

"You'll want the special."

"What is it?"

"Meatloaf. Eight forty-nine, and the beans are the ones with the bacon in them." Carol Mundt had the decaf pot in one hand and the pencil behind her ear she'd never once taken down in thirty years. "Back booth's open."

"Then why ask me."

"I didn't."

Margo took it: the last booth in the Bluebird, west side of the Corley square, with the window on the courthouse lawn and Miami Valley Savings at the southeast corner, the loan officer's blinds half drawn. The freeze had come down Tuesday night on a northwest wind, exactly as the radio promised. By Thursday noon the square was back up to fifty-one, and every furnace in town had run for the first time since March, so the block smelled of dust cooking off a heat exchanger.

Two of the shop's trucks were out on no-heat calls before seven.

She laid the phone flat, brought her glasses up off the chain, and typed with one finger: ohio secretary of state business search.

Twenty-four years of books had taught her that the loudest line in a file is the one with no paper behind it. ACG had a vendor card, a rented box at the post office, and thirteen thousand five hundred fifty dollars of the operating account. It had never carried a tax ID, a phone number, or a single invoice.

The state's page was free and open to anybody with a thumb.

ACKERMAN COMFORT GROUP LLC. Active. Domestic limited liability company, registered in August.

She tapped the filing and the scan came up crooked, the way paper looks when a clerk lays it on the glass. Articles of Organization, two pages, statutory agent at a post office box in Corley. Box four eleven — the same box that sat on ACG's vendor card in her own books.

The signature block was at the bottom of page two, and it carried two lines. Roy Ackerman, member. Ashlyn Brandt, member.

Margo turned her coffee cup a quarter turn on the saucer, the way she squared invoices before adding them.

She had hired Ashlyn Brandt herself, three years ago. Ashlyn apologized out loud to the copier when it jammed.

Carol came with the plate and set the roll beside it. "You eating or reading?"

"Both."

"Only one of them gets cold." She topped off the decaf. "Coconut cream's fresh. Three and a quarter."

"Not today."

Carol wiped an edge of table that did not need it. "Roy's been in twice this week."

Margo cut the end off the meatloaf. "He's got his rep dinners."

"He had the corner booth Monday and the counter yesterday, and both times he had that girl out of your office with him, and neither time was his ring showing." She said it the way she'd have said the walleye came in frozen. "I don't tell people things. I tell you things."

"Well."

"That's all you've got? Well?"

"What would you like me to have, Carol?"

"Nothing in my dining room." Carol hummed a half-beat behind the radio and went up front to the register.

The meatloaf was good, and Margo ate all of it, and the roll, because a woman who leaves half a plate on the square at one o'clock has told the whole town something by two. She photographed the signature block and sent it to her sister. The answer came back before her glasses were folded. THAT IS HIS GIRLFRIEND — four words, in capitals, from a woman with a patient in the chair.

She left eleven dollars on an eight-forty-nine check and took her barn coat off the hook, the Menards one Roy had twice offered to replace. In the window hung the St. Boniface food-drive flyer, canned goods or cash at the hall door, Thanksgiving week. Ninety seconds north of the courthouse steps, gold lettering on a storefront read DIANE HALLORAN, ATTORNEY AT LAW, and Margo read it going past, the way you read a sign you've passed a thousand times.

Deb was in the Fairlawn kitchen by half past five with a Speedway cup sweating a ring onto the counter.

"Say it out loud," she said.

"Ackerman Comfort Group, Limited Liability Company. Filed in August. Two members."

"Say the second one."

"Ashlyn Brandt."

Deb set the cup down hard enough to slosh it.

"You hired her."

"I did. She had her references in a folder."

"Marg. That is not a bookkeeping problem."

Margo pulled a chair out and did not sit in it.

"It is precisely a bookkeeping problem. Thirteen five fifty left an account I reconcile every month and landed in a company my husband owns with somebody else. That part is on paper. That part I can hand to a person."

"Then hand it to him. Tonight. Call him, put it on speaker, and I'll sit right here and not say one word, which will take ten years off my life."

"No."

"Give me a why."

"Because you don't tip the audit before you've pulled the records."

She held her glasses up to the light, found a thumbprint on the left lens, cleaned it on her sleeve.

"The day he knows I'm looking, everything I haven't found yet goes somewhere I can't reach it."

Deb picked the cup up, looked into it, and set it down without drinking. "So you'll sit out there closing September like nothing happened."

"Somebody has to close September."

"Margaret Ackerman." Deb leaned on the counter with both hands. "You've been out there since Nick was in a car seat, and not one hour of it on a payroll. Ask me what that girl's car payment runs."

"I know what her car is."

"Do you know who's making the payment?"

"Not yet." Margo set the glasses back on her nose and then straightened a placemat that was already straight, corner to corner. "I'm on that loan, Deb. My name is typed across half the paper in that building, and I'm the one who typed it."

"So what does that get you?"

"I don't know yet. That's the next thing I pull."

Deb went quiet, which in Deb was a weather event.

From the hall closet came an accordion file with an elastic cord, bought for Nick's graduation papers and never used. Margo wrote across the flap in the square capitals she used on the storage boxes at the shop. Not his name — both of theirs, ACKERMAN, SEPTEMBER FORWARD, because whatever this turned out to be had her name on it too. In went the printout and the photographs.

She stood a while with the closet open, looking past the coats at the box on the shelf. The business credit card statements. Twelve months of them, opened, coded, and filed the first Saturday of every month for twenty-four years, a thousand charges written up in her own hand. Tools, client dinners, fuel.

She had never once read one.

At nine that night the front office out on Miller Pike still had its light on. Roy stood at the copier with his coat buttoned, feeding a stack through a page at a time, face-down, laying each sheet on the pile the same way. He squared the copies twice, slid them into a manila envelope, and set the originals back on his desk under his reading glasses. The envelope went under the driver's seat of his truck. He stood a minute at the tailgate, hands in his pockets, looking at the sign at the road.