He Let Them Think She Was His novel · Chapter 21 of 32
Chapter 21: Eight Days
Abby's POV
The centennial invitation had been printed on cream cardstock with a gold border, and it was pinned to the corkboard in the feed store with eight days left on it.
I stood under it with a sack of oats on my shoulder and read it twice.
One hundred years of the Renner brand.
Saturday the twenty-first, one o'clock, the main lawn.
Barbecue for the whole county, with a short program at three.
"You want it down?" the clerk said from the register.
"No."
"I can make it vanish."
"Leave it."
I paid for the oats.
She slid the receipt across and lowered her voice.
"There's talk, Abby."
"There's always talk."
"This is different. Somebody's saying Jesse got fired for taking money out of the co-op. That he paid that girl out of the cash account for two years and his father found it."
I set the oats down on the counter.
"Who's saying it?"
"I heard it from three people before nine o'clock. They all got it from the same place."
"Ward."
"I didn't say that." She looked at the invitation. "I told the last one that the man who signs the checks at the co-op is the man whose name is on the checks. She said, huh."
"Thank you."
"I'm trying to be useful," the clerk said, a little stiffly, and I nearly laughed.
I carried the oats out to the truck.
It was a good lie.
It was clean, and it explained everything.
It made Jesse a thief and Ward a patient father, and it would hold exactly until three hundred people were standing on a lawn wanting somebody to blame.
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