Bonnie said all the right things.Of course.I’ll hold things down.Take care of him.She’d hung up and sat at her desk for a full minute, staring at Lucas’s closed office door.She had the office to herself.Maybe for days.
The list she’d made with Gray was in her bag, the notebook sheet folded into quarters.She’d memorized it already.In reality she didn’t need lists to remember things.She made them because the act of writing things down imposed order on chaos.But she pulled out the list anyway and smoothed it flat on her desk.
She knew Lucas’s filing system better than he did.She’d built half of it herself.But Lucas also kept a separate set of files in a tall wooden filing cabinet behind his desk that he’d brought from his home when he first took office.It held ranch business, personal correspondence, and whatever else he didn’t want mingled with the town’s records.
In four years, she’d never opened it without being asked to retrieve something specific and being told where to find it.Because she was loyal.Because she respected his privacy.Because she was a good girl.
She walked into his office and closed the door.Locked it for good measure.The room smelled like him: stale cigars and the wintergreen lozenges he’d been sucking on since his doctor told him to quit smoking.She pulled open the top drawer of the wood filing cabinet.There they were, about six inches back in the drawer.File folders, neatly tabbed.Insurance—Barn.Insurance—Ranch Vehicles.Insurance—Liability.
The first folder was thin.A declarations page, a premium notice, a renewal letter.Standard stuff.She flipped it closed and pulled out the second folder.Insurance—Barn, Claims.
Inside was a three-ring binder, which she opened to find about fifty pages of insurance documents inside.She’d seen enough insurance paperwork in her life to spot an adjuster’s field report at ten paces.The top page had the word CONFIDENTIAL stamped across the front in red ink that had faded to a rusty brown.
Her hands were steady as she turned the page.Her heart was not.
She read the cover letter on page 2.She skimmed the first paragraph saying that all loss of life claims would be handled as separate liability claims to be settled at a later date.This document was identified as the final report in the matter of a claim for total loss of a structure due to fire and an additional claim for loss of all the contents therein.
Contents?Forty beautiful racehorses burned alive werecontents?
She closed the cover.She wasn’t going to read the report.Not here, not now.And definitely not alone.Honestly, she hoped Gray would be willing to read the whole thing and just summarize the important parts for her.She wasn’t sure she could handle dozens of pages of gruesome detail describing how Brent and the other men perished.
She carried it to the copier in the outer office and took the pages out of the binder.The copier hummed and clicked, fifty-two pages emerging warm in the output tray.She put the original back in its binder, banker clipped the copy together, and slid it into a manila envelope from her desk drawer.
She returned the insurance report to its place in the filing cabinet and closed the drawer.She wiped the handle with her sleeve, which she realized immediately was ridiculous.This wasn’t a TV crime show, and her fingerprints were all over this office legitimately.But the impulse to clean up after her dirty deed ran deep.
But this dirty deed was for a good cause.
She went back to her desk and called Gray.
“I found it.”
A pause.She could practically hear him sitting up straighter.“The insurance report?”
“I already made a copy of it.”
“Where’s the original?”
“Back in the filing cabinet where I found it.But Gray ...”She lowered her voice, even though the office was empty.“The folder is in his personal filing cabinet.Not the municipal files.He owns that piece of furniture.If he comes in tomorrow and decides to move it, or shred it, or take it home ...”
“Then we’d lose the original.”
“Exactly,” she confirmed.“I figure a copy of a document isn’t nearly as useful to Cooper as the original with the insurance company’s stamps and binding.”
Silence on his end.She could hear him thinking.Gray’s thinking had a quality to it, a focused stillness that she could somehow perceive even through a phone.
“We need to get the original to Cooper,” he said.
“If I take it, Lucas will notice it’s missing.He may not check that folder for weeks, but the one time I assume he won’t look is the day he’s going to.”
“What if we take the original and replace it with the copy?”
She considered that.A good copy on the same weight of paper with the same binding.The confidential stamp would be black, not that faded red, but if Lucas wasn’t looking closely, and given how bad his eyesight had gotten, he might not notice for a while.
“That could work,” she said slowly.“But there’s a problem.The notebook has the logo of the insurance company on the cover.Cooper will probably want that, too.As proof that it’s the original.”
Gray thought for a moment, then said, “There’s a print shop in Apple Pie Creek that does mugs and T-shirts and the like for corporate events.I’ll bet it can make an exact copy of the notebook.”
“Lucas is supposed to be out of the office today and tomorrow for sure.The doctor wants him to stay home the rest of the week, but to be safe, I’d need to make the swap before close of business tomorrow.”
