Rejected By The Alpha For An Omega novel · Chapter 26 of 32

Chapter 26: Smoke

I didn't touch it.

I took a clean evidence bag out of my car kit and put it over the can, rag and all, and sealed it.

"The sheriff?" the enforcer asked.

"The sheriff hunts elk with him."

"So?"

"So it goes in the grandmother's trunk," I said. "And it comes out on the meadow."

He nodded once.

Then he looked at the black shell of the building and rubbed his face with both hands.

"My boy was born again in there," he said.

At seven that morning, the first truck came over the bridge.

It was the laundress's brother, with a chainsaw and a box of contractor bags.

At seven twenty, two more.

By nine there were twenty-six trucks parked along the river road, and the omega row's seatless school bus.

They didn't ask me.

They just started.

The omegas hauled out the burned drywall in wheelbarrows.

The loggers tore off what was left of the roof.

June's husband ran the crew like a mill floor, shouting and pointing.

June's boys carried everything that could be carried.

The old vet sat on his porch in a lawn chair and supervised, and nobody minded.

On Saturday afternoon a flatbed from the Reyner mill pulled into the lot.

Nobody was driving it but a kid I didn't know.

It was stacked with new lumber, drywall, roofing and sheet steel.

"Who sent this?" I asked him.

"I'm not supposed to say."

"Then don't."

He looked at me, and then away.

"He said you'd know anyway," he said.

I knew.

On Sunday they framed the back wall.

On Monday the roof went on.

The jam lady brought lunch for sixty.

Her daughter sat in a folding chair with her hands on her belly and told everybody where to put the nails.

Tansy came on Monday afternoon, with her mother and the enforcer, wrapped in a borrowed coat with the hood up.

She stood in the doorway of the new cat ward and looked at the clean, raw walls.

"Can I paint it?" she asked.

"What color?"

"Lavender," she said.

On Tuesday afternoon June's oldest boy climbed a ladder and hung a new sign.

He'd painted it in June's garage, with his brothers arguing over every letter.

NIGHT CLINIC.

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