The green binder landed on the desk first, then the coffee, then Bonnie — the order of her arrivals for twenty-four years.
"Rice pie," she said, setting the plate on the corner where it couldn't reach the ledger. "I made it Tuesday, so it's still honest."
Dot slid the plate two inches clear. The Wagon Wheel's whole year of cash sat in that binder, and the estate's insurer was paying her by the hour to make the number inside it match the register tapes. Friday takes, all of them, carried twelve miles north to the after-hours deposit machine at the bank in Sturgeon Bay, because there was no bank left in New Ghent to carry them to. $418,412 in night drops, receipts taped in a straight column down every page, all of it filed by the woman standing at her elbow in a pumpkin-colored sweater.
"Bonnie, you've got the tapes sorted by month and the receipts sorted by date."
"Different questions, different order." Bonnie drank her coffee standing up, the way she did everything that could be done sitting. "Flip through it. You find a nickel off in there, I'll eat my reading glasses."
The office furnace ran like it was still August. Dot hung her barn coat on the chair back and wrote her name at the top of the appraisal worksheet — Prepared by: Dorothy Mercier — because the insurer liked a name on the paper.
"Fourteen at six-thirty tonight," Bonnie said. "The Bakers and their whole tribe, back room, and Arlene wants the perch and nothing else. Two in the bar now, four by eight. It's October. Everybody's home."
"Perch is sixteen ninety-five?"
"Sixteen ninety-five. Don't start."
"I'm appraising."
"You're appraising the wallpaper." Bonnie topped off Dot's coffee without asking. "I know where everything in this building lives. Every tape, every receipt, every fork."
"I know you do."
Bonnie went up for the fish delivery and the door clicked shut behind her.
Dot turned pages. Slow work, the kind she liked: register tape on the left, deposit receipt taped on the right, the two columns marching down a page together like a couple that quit arguing years ago. Without meaning to, she picked up the September rhythm. Nine thirty-eight. Nine forty-one. Nine forty-four. The Sunday runs had a pulse.
Then she came to the Sunday that opened the last week of Orv's life.
The receipt was there where it should be, taped straight, machine-printed. No teller, no initials. A date, a machine number, and a time.
11:47 p.m.
She read it twice. Her face did not move. She turned back a page, then another, and checked the Sundays on either side — all of them in the nine-thirty range, every one in the same tidy hand.
Bonnie came back in with a wax box of perch on her hip, glasses swinging on the bead chain.
"Nine pounds," she said. "They eat nine pounds tonight, I'll eat my other pair."
"How's the back room set?"
"Round and the long one pushed together. Arlene asked for the window."
"Put Arlene at the window, she'll complain about the wind."
"Put Arlene anywhere, she'll complain about the wind." Bonnie wiped her hands down her apron. "I'm going up to set. The crew comes at four."
She was gone up the stairs, humming something with a polka in it, before Dot let her eyes come back to the page.
She had not been here that Sunday night. She had been at the farmhouse on County K with the furnace ticking, and she had heard nothing and seen nothing, which was worth writing down too — the part she did not have.
The phone came out of her pocket. Whole page first, then the machine print close, the time filling the frame. Then the binder went back on the shelf where it lived, spine out, and she sat down and drank the coffee Bonnie had poured her. Still hot.
Her phone rang at 12:20, out in the lot, where the north wind was doing what the office furnace had been doing all morning.
"Dot. Saturday."
"What about Saturday?"
"Meat raffle at the Legion, six o'clock, and I need a number."
"A number for what?"
"Tickets, Dorothy Mercier. How many am I buying."
"Ask Peg."
"I asked Peg. Peg says we buy twenty and give half of them away, which isn't a philosophy, it's a hobby. Last April she won a ham. It's in the freezer with the date on it in marker. She says it's for a special occasion."
"Has there been one?"
"There have been two birthdays, Dot. That ham is not saving itself for the Second Coming."
Dot laughed, out loud, alone in the lot with the wind coming off the bay.
"So," Lu said. "Saturday."
"I'll be there."
"Are you going to tell me what you've been doing in that office all week, or do I have to hear it from Bonnie?"
"What did Peg put in the meatballs Wednesday?"
"...Fine."
At four-thirty Bonnie came down with a white box stapled shut and set it on the host stand next to the reservation book.
"Perch. Full plate."
"Bonnie."
"End of a pan. There's tartar in a cup. Put it in the oven — don't you dare put it in the microwave, it comes out like a sock."
"What do I owe you?"
"Nothing."
"Then I'll write you a check."
"You will not." Bonnie rolled the reservation book and swatted her on the arm with it, the way you'd swat a horse you liked. "Sixteen ninety-five is the menu. This is supper."
The box was warm through the cardboard. On the lid Bonnie had drawn a small valve in pen — so the perch wouldn't steam on the drive — the way she labeled everything that came through her hands. Dot stood in the doorway a beat longer than she needed to.
It was going to be easy, she thought, to be wrong about Bonnie Tetzlaff.
She ate the perch at the kitchen table at nine with a brandy old-fashioned, sweet, made badly, and the box fan running on the counter because the octopus furnace in the cellar had one setting and it wasn't hers.
Then the card.
Night drop receipt — Sunday. Machine reads 11:47 p.m.
She flipped it and did the arithmetic on the back, in pencil, once. Ten o'clock to 11:47 is one hundred seven minutes.
Bonnie had said it at Orv's fish fry in September, and she had said it again at the Legion burger night, word for word, which was the thing about Bonnie. Home for the ten o'clock news, same as ever. It's how I track the week.
The machine in Sturgeon Bay said 11:47.
Those are different nights.
It was not motive, and it was not proof. A woman can sit in a bank lot at midnight for a hundred reasons that are nobody's business. But twenty-five years at Voyageur Mutual had taught Dot one true thing about herself: she had walked away from a debt, a marriage, and a desk in Green Bay without much ceremony, and she had never once been able to leave a discrepancy alone.
She set the card down with the others. Then she turned it face up again.
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