Six Empty Houses Had Paid For My Husband's Second Home

"A scratch isn't proof by itself," Mae said.

"Then we'll get something that is."

I slept four hours on her couch. At six, Wren came down the hall carrying her folded blanket.

"Where do I put this before I go?"

"You can leave it on your bed."

"Even if we leave later?"

"Even then."

She looked at the blanket for a moment, then took it back down the hall.

I made eggs. She ate two without asking what they cost.

At work, I told my supervisor, Gail, what had happened. My voice shook most when I got to the money.

"I need my route records," I said. "The ones I'm allowed to have."

She pulled out a chair.

"Start with the dates."

All six approvals were dated October 14. Each said I had checked a finished furnace between ten and noon.

That morning, I had been with Gail at a failed pump twenty-four miles away. Our truck log, work order, and her own report showed it.

"I'll give a statement," she said. "But let the investigator request the records through our office. That way nobody can claim you changed them."

For the first time since the hall, I could take a full breath.

Mae called the company that owned the six houses. By lunch, its property manager had agreed to meet a board member and a licensed heating inspector there.

The houses had no new furnaces. Two had no furnaces at all. The manager gave them access and the old equipment list.

The serial number in all six photographs belonged to one unit in Owen's workshop.

An inspector had serviced it the previous spring. He still had the picture in his file, silver scratch and all.

Mae brought the records to the police with the fund's bank statements.

I went back to work. There were still meters to read. I needed my wages, and people still needed their water bills to be right.

At three, my phone rang.

"You went to my landlord?" Owen asked.

"No."

"Celia says somebody is asking about the deposit."

I stopped beside a fence.

"What deposit?"

He hung up.

I called Mae. She said the board had asked Voss Property Services to explain its bill. That request had gone to Celia's business address.

"Don't call him back," she said. "Write down what he said."

At five, I met Dan Ortiz, a lawyer whose name Lila had given me. His fee for the upcoming placement hearing would be seven hundred fifty dollars.

I had nineteen hundred in an account I had kept since before my marriage.

"I can pay that," I said.

Saying it made me feel less trapped.

He read the fund papers and Owen's messages.

"Save everything. Don't argue through your phone. And don't return home alone to collect things."

"I need my work boots and the baby's clothes."

"We'll arrange a time with someone present."

He helped me start the divorce papers, too. I wrote my name slowly, watching the ink stay where I put it.

At Mae's, Wren was making a paper calendar. She had drawn a tiny bowl on each square.

"Breakfast," she explained. "So I can see when it's coming."

I sat beside her.

"Tomorrow, after breakfast, Lila is coming. You can ask her things. You can ask without making anybody upset."

"Can I ask to stay?"

"Yes."

"Can you ask, too?"

"I already did."

That evening, a process server came to Mae's door. Owen had asked for a quick hearing about Wren. His papers proposed sending her to a cousin outside town.

He had also filed a statement calling me unstable and dishonest.

I read it twice, then put it in Dan's folder.

The doorbell rang again just after eight.

Celia stood on the porch with a large envelope pressed against her coat.

"I didn't know he left her there," she said.

"What did you know?"

She looked toward the street.

"Can we talk without him hearing?"

Mae kept the door open and stood beside me.

Celia took a sheet from the envelope. It was a lease for a small house. The deposit and prepaid rent totaled eight thousand two hundred dollars.

Under Approved Occupants were two names: Celia Voss and Owen Hale.

"He told me you'd been separated since May," she said.

Below the names was a color photo of the front door.

It was green.