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“Now, Doris, don’t tell me you just fed me Campbell Soup. If it was, I’m gonna be crushed. Here I thought it was homemade.”
“Sorry. To every life a little disillusion comes around.” Doris sniffed. “However, it’s only half store-bought. Every week I start off with a big pot of canned soup and juice it up. In this case, I added carrots, celery, and some chopped up ham left over from last week’s Sunday family dinner. Plus, some spices. You understand I’m only telling you this ’cause we’re friends. I wouldn’t want word to get around and there to be community-wide disillusion.”
“Your secret’s safe with me. After all, if you can’t trust your sheriff’s department, who can you trust?” Greta said with a guileless expression.
Doris looked as if she had bitten into a lemon. “You, I’d trust. That prick Wallace . . . trust isn’t a word I’d come close to.”
Greta was surprised. She had never heard Doris even mention Wallace. “How do you know my esteemed boss?”
“I don’t know him personally, but you hear things, running a business like this. People relax and say what’s on their minds when they’re stuffing their mouths. Even more so than women at the beauty parlor. I’ve heard stories about Wallace for years and can’t recall anyone saying good things. My cousin Rebecca works at your office, too. She’s a records clerk.”
“Rebecca? Becky Stromeyer?”
“Yep. Been there longer than Wallace.”
Greta knew the clerk only by occasional exchanges when she accessed or filed reports. She decided she should get to know Rebecca better. It never hurt to be on friendly terms with more people she might need help from someday.
Greta eyed the cardboard box. It was cube-shaped and about two and a half feet on a side.
“This is your receipt filing system?”
“That’s it,” crowed the proprietress. “Microsoft tried to buy it from me once but wouldn’t meet my price.”
Doris opened the four flaps to reveal receipts right to the top of the box.
With some trepidation, Greta asked, “So you just throw them inside every day?”
“That’s it. Never had the need to go back and use them for anything. I started doing it when I first opened up because I was nervous about running a business. At first, I kept the receipts for seven years. I read somewhere that was what the IRS recommended. About five years ago, the number of boxes took up too much space, so now I keep only the current year’s.”
“I hope they’re generally in order. You know . . . last January’s on the bottom, newest on top.”
“Hate to dash your hopes, darlin’. Juan rooted around for some paper towels last week and spilled the whole damn box. He stuffed everything back in, so the only sort-of order is the ones from the last two weeks on top.”
Christ! Greta thought. There must be thousands of them! I didn’t realize Doris did that much business, but I guess after more than three hundred days, the number adds up.
“How many customers a day do you usually get?”
“Varies, of course, with the season and weather. Maybe twenty to fifty a day.”
Greta groaned inwardly. Fifty! Oh, shit! That’s . . . Christ! Must be over ten thousand little pieces of paper to look through!
Disheartened, she considered checking Doris’s place off her list and letting Doris keep her filing system. Yet if she didn’t take them, Doris would wonder why, and Greta would end up explaining her great investigation, followed by Doris making a few of her normally amusing snide comments. Greta wasn’t in the mood. It would also conflict with her predilection to be methodical and comple
te. Even considering her theory was unlikely to be correct, the odds of the hit being Doris’s café were vanishingly small. However, one exception might lead to another, so best not to think that way.
Trying to sound grateful, Greta put on a good face. “Thanks for the help, Doris. I’ll get these back to you as soon as I can.”
“As long as it’s by the time I start my taxes.”
“And when is that?” asked Greta, hoping the answer was April 14th.
“I do them right after New Year’s.”
Darn, Greta thought. I’ll be gone to Missouri part of that time for Christmas! I’ve got only three weeks to go through them. Or I might give up and just tell Doris I carefully examined all thousands of the little suckers.
She paid for lunch and bid Doris a good evening. Her vehicle’s clock read almost four. She put the box in the back seat and checked her list of non-urgent reports to follow up on. Two were close enough for her to avoid driving too far from home—another truancy and a failure to report for jury duty. The absent students’ parents owned a small dairy just past the 101 junction. Greta found that the children were spending two weeks with one set of grandparents and would be back in school in a couple of days. The parents had never thought about calling the school to keep a truancy report from being filed.
The second stop annoyed Greta more than she needed. The woman had failed to report for jury duty for the third time. When she opened the door, Greta’s impression of the woman—to be kind—was “disheveled.” A less kind assessment could have been slovenly in clothing, weight, and manner. She also might have been a little high on something, but that wasn’t Greta’s issue at the moment.
