Chapter 19 of 23The Wrong Night

"Every alibi in this town is for the wrong night," Dorothy Mercier said.

Lu kept wiping the counter at Lu & Peg's. "Morning to you too."

"Saturday the twelfth. That's the night everybody's accounted for. Kurt at the club till a quarter past ten. Bonnie on the Legion microphone till midnight, reading the meat raffle numbers twice because Arlene couldn't hear them the first time." Dot set the folder down between the salt shaker and the napkin box. "Nobody has an alibi for Sunday the sixth, six nights earlier, which is the night somebody walked into Orv's kitchenette with the first-aid kit."

"Rollie called at ten to six," she said. "The cremation permit on his desk gets signed or refused by Monday. After Monday the body's gone, and any chance of proof goes with it."

Peg came around the end of the grill with the spatula still up, which was how Peg read a room. Two eggs over easy, one slice of rye cut on the diagonal, and she would not take the four seventy-five.

"So four hundred people in this township have airtight alibis for a night that doesn't matter," Lu said. "That's the most New Ghent sentence ever spoken out loud."

"Put it on a T-shirt," Peg said.

Dot ate standing. Gus Delfosse had two of the six stools and both elbows out. She laid it out the way she'd have laid it out to a claims committee.

One: the refill bottle from Boulanger's — a month's supply on the label, seven gone after a single fill. Two: the supply log page she had photographed, where the Monday morning after the swap put a new aspirin bottle in the office kit. Three: the night-drop receipt stamped 11:47 p.m., filed in the club's own binder by the woman who kept it. Four: the canopy light over that machine, out since spring, and a friend who corrected her about it without missing a beat.

"And the piece that isn't a numbered item," Dot said. "She gave me her Sunday twice. Unprompted, both times, in front of witnesses, same words. Kurt's Sunday is accounted for to the minute. Dale's is accounted for from Green Bay. Hers is the only Sunday in this file with an hour missing out of the middle of it."

Lu stopped wiping. "You know what I think."

"I do."

"Say it anyway. Out loud. So it costs you something."

Dot finished the toast. "Bonnie Tetzlaff put aspirin in his pills."

The counter went quiet the way a room goes quiet when a church bell lands on the wrong hour. Peg cracked two more eggs at the grill. Lu went after a spot that had come off ten minutes ago.

"Twelve miles to Sturgeon Bay," Lu said. "Go on. I'll tell Peg you ate."

"I ate."

"You stood."

Dot left the four seventy-five under the salt shaker, let Peg find it later, and walked out into an east wind that had pushed the fog up the harbor. The truck heater clicked on and off the whole way north.

The county annex ran its heat like it was paying by the BTU. Dot had the folding fan out of her barn coat before she sat down, and Rollie said nothing about the fan, which was one of the better things about him.

He pushed a cellophane bag across the desk — Kwik Trip glazers, a dollar and nine cents apiece — and poured her coffee. His own cup said Culver's on the side and held decaf, which he called regular, and they both let that stand.

"Sit down, Dorothy."

"I'd rather stand."

"Sit down anyway. You're making my office look nervous."

She sat, and pushed one page across the desk. Dates down the left, sources down the right, every source a document somebody had signed.

Rollie read it twice. Then he took his glasses off and set them on top of it.

"There's no autopsy," he said. "I stood in that room and let the county call it natural, and I've been chewing on it since September."

"The body's still above ground."

"The body's at the funeral home on a permit I've sat on for three weeks, and it comes due Monday." He tapped the page. "There's no confession here. No prints on that kitchenette. No camera. What I've got is a receipt and a photograph of a log page, weighed against twenty-four years of casseroles."

"Say the rest of it."

"Fine. A jury in this county will look at Bonnie Tetzlaff and see the woman who brings the bars to every wake in the parish. Then they'll look at you and see your mother's daughter holding a file she wrote herself." He picked his glasses back up. "You want the truth. That's the truth. It isn't the answer."

Rollie sat back. Something in his shoulders let go.

"What do you want from me, Dorothy?"

"What does Monday want from you?"

He opened the bottom drawer. It stuck the way it always stuck, and he worked it with his knee and came up with a blank county folder. He uncapped a pen, wrote on the tab in block letters, and turned the folder around so she could read it.

DETLOFF, O.

He wrote a date under the name and a case number under the date.

"Send me a memo, Dorothy."

"I just handed you one."

"That's a witness statement. I want a memo, with the dates and the documents, in your handwriting, in your file." He capped the pen. "And I want one more thing on it, because I have to ask Madison about it and I'd rather not sound like a fool."

"Go on."

"There's a test. Segmental hair testing." He said it slowly, the way a man says a word he doesn't own yet. "I don't know whether the state takes it off a dead man, or what it costs, or whether it would tell me a thing worth having. But it's a name I can say out loud in a room, and names make people do arithmetic."

Dot wrote it down.

The desk phone rang at twenty past ten. Rollie looked at it the way a man looks at a wasp on a screen door.

"Schuette." He listened. "Yeah. She's sitting right here."

He listened some more, and his thumb found the corner of the folder and pressed it flat.

"Monday's Monday. I know that better than the state does."

He looked at Dot while he said the next part.

"Then I'll have the signature on your desk by Monday, or I won't have it at all. Fair enough."

He hung up and put his hand flat on the folder. His own name was on the other line, in his own block letters.

"The coroner's office," he said. "Sturgeon Bay. The state wants to know why a natural death from September is still above ground."

"And what did you tell them?"

"The truth. That I've been sitting on a piece of paper because a woman with a file folder asked me to." He moved the phone an inch away from its cradle. "Close of business Monday, Dorothy. Not Tuesday. Monday."

Dot wrote it at the bottom of the page and boxed it, the way she used to box a total on a claim sheet.

After Monday there would be no body to test, and what would be left of Orv Detloff's case was a receipt with a time on it and a photograph of a woman's handwriting.