It would cost Dale Tolliver something too, Hank suspected.The man had built his whole run for mayor on the comfortable idea that nothing in Cobbler Cove had ever been wrong.That Lucas Shoemacher was a good old boy, and the widows were grieving too loudly.
State investigators with clipboards, however, were a poor fit for that story.The harder the state looked, the worse Dale’s easy answer was going to play with voters.And a cornered politician was someone Hank had learned to keep one eye on.
What he hadn’t expected was for the trouble to come looking for his home office.But a town determined to fight will cast around for the nearest weak, vulnerable thing to fight about.And in the three days since the investigators arrived, the town turned its attention to Sunny.
New in town, hired by Bonnie to tinker with the town’s books, a woman nobody had any history with and everybody suddenly had a theory about.
He caught wind of it as a patient went oddly quiet when Sunny’s name came up.Then a man at the hardware store asked Hank, a shade too casually, just what it was the doctor’s pretty new accountant got up to over at Town Hall.
He didn’t mention either incident to Sunny.He hoped it would come to nothing.
It came to something on Thursday.
Cy Bray came in that afternoon about his high blood pressure he’d been ignoring for a decade, and his wife, Marlene, along to make sure he didn’t fib about his symptoms.
Cy was sixty-some, built like a fence post and roughly as flexible.He was one of the ranchers up the valley who’d staked a Tolliver sign at the end of his drive the day Dale announced his run for mayor.Marlene did his talking on any subject he considered beneath him, which was most topics that weren’t cattle.
Hank wrapped the cuff around the old man’s arm and was watching the needle climb past numbers it shouldn’t be getting close to when he heard it start out in the foyer.He’d put a small desk out there for Sunny to work at when he was seeing patients in here.
Marlene had stayed out front to settle the bill, and her voice carried in here loudly enough that Marlene clearly meant for him to hear her, too.
“You’re the one doing the town’s books for Bonnie Watson.”
Sunny replied, pleasant and careful.“I’m doing an audit for the town, yes.”
“That’s apoliteword for your shenanigans.”Marlene warmed to it.“The way I hear it, you’re fixing the books for her.Hiding away whatever it is she doesn’t want the state to find.My cousin’s girl does the books for some folks and she says you ...”
Hank didn’t hear the rest because he’d already set down Cy’s chart and walked out of the exam room.
Sunny was standing behind the desk.He had watched her field a great many things in three weeks: a screaming toddler, stubborn insurance agents, his own catastrophe of a filing system.She’d fielded every one with brisk, unbothered competence that never once cracked.
But it had cracked, now.She stood there with her mouth slightly open and nothing coming out of it.She’d gone pale, and he realized in an instant that of all the daggers a person might have thrown at her, accusing her of financial deceit was the one that cut her.
“Mrs.Bray,” Hank said bluntly enough to cut her off, but not loudly.He’d found, over the years, that loud was for men who were not certain they were right.He came around to stand beside Sunny.Not in front of her, but beside her.
“Sunny Carter works for me.She’s a certified forensic accountant, which means finding the truth in a set of financial records is what she’s good at.It also means she holds herself to a code of ethics a good deal stricter than anything you or I answer to.
“In three weeks she’s found thousands of dollars insurers owed me, caught several billing mistakes that were mine, and put all my records in an order the IRS could read in their sleep.I’ve watched her work.I would put my own license behind her honesty.She wouldn’t falsify a figure to save her own life, let alone to do somebody a favor.Whatever you’ve heard is false.Not exaggerated.Not half true.False, from top to bottom.I’d be obliged if you didn’t bring such lies past my front door.”
Cy came out of the exam room with his sleeve still rolled up, looking at Hank as though he had expected a great many things from a doctor’s visit but not this.Marlene’s mouth had thinned to a white line.
“Well,” she said.“I’m sure I only repeated what ...”
“I know,” Hank said, gentler now because the work was done and there was no profit in grinding it.“That’s how lies spread.You can just as easy be the one who stops it.”
Standing right there, never leaving Sunny’s side, he wrote Cy a prescription for blood pressure mediation, told him to take it every day and not only on the days he remembered to be scared.Then he walked the two of them to the door with the same courtesy he would’ve shown anyone because he knew a person didn’t win over a town by humiliating its people.
He shut the door and turned around.Sunny was looking at him gratefully.
He hadn’t come out and said those words so she would look at him the way she was looking at him now as if she’d braced for a blow and instead he’d stepped between it and her.
“You’ll want a coffee,” he said.“I’ll put a pot on.”
“Hank.”Her voice was not quite level.“You didn’t have to ...”
“I know,” he said from the kitchen doorway and left it there.He’d done it because it was true, and she was being lied about under his roof.
She didn’t take the coffee right away or go straight back to her desk.She stopped in the middle of his exam room with her arms wrapped around herself as if the warm June afternoon had a January draft blowing through it.
