“Mettie,” he said, “that proves a man can cheat. It does not prove he did. You have been holding a grudge against this fellow since the day he walked in, and you know it.”
Some of them nodded, and I will not pretend they did not. For about ten seconds it could have gone either way, with me in a vest holding a bingo cage and Lanny Spangler beside a jar of nine thousand dollars looking like a deacon.
“You are right, Hiram,” I said. “It proves nothing. I cannot prove a thing.”
Lanny smiled and spread his hands. “He is right, friends. A man cannot be convicted of a thumb.” The warm voice rolled out over the room like syrup. “Shall we draw?”
And that was when Zadie Gerdes stood up.
She rose slowly, with a hand on the table, and the whole hall waited, the way a hall does when the oldest person in it moves.
“Mettie,” she said, in a thin, clear voice, “how much did you write down for me in your book?”
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“Two hundred and eighty dollars, Zadie.”
She nodded. Then she turned and looked at Lanny Spangler, who had called her “my dear” on three separate Fridays.
“Mr. Spangler,” she said. “Would you please empty the drum onto the table?”
I have thought a great deal about what happened next. He could have run.
The door was thirty feet behind him, the keys were in his overcoat, and the only person standing between him and the parking lot was a deputy with a plate of fish.
But a man who has spent fifty years reading rooms knows when the room has stopped being his.
He looked at the faces. He looked at Zadie. And he turned the crank one last time and opened the brass door.
Wanda Kruse, the Auxiliary president, tipped his drum out on a banquet table. Six hundred tickets whispered across the white paper. Twelve of them, in a neat little clump, clacked down like playing cards.
They were on thick blue stock, a different color from the rest, and the numbers ran in order from six thousand and one to six thousand and twelve.
Bernadine Hatch picked one up and pinched it. “This is not the same paper,” she said, loudly, in her fourth grade voice. “Not even close.”
Nobody said anything. Then somebody said, quietly, “Dub Parrish had a blue one.” Then a woman said the same about Basil Spikes, and then it was a murmur and then it was a low sound like thunder a long way off.
When I looked at the coat rack the canvas coat and the purple windbreaker were gone. The back door was swinging slowly on its hinge.
Finis Wohlers did not run after them. She set down her plate and wrote an Oklahoma license number on a paper napkin from memory. Mr. Parrish and Miss Spikes would be hearing from a good many counties before winter.
Elwood Rasmusson walked to the microphone. He had been holding that speech for a week, and I think he had planned to shout. He did not.
“Here is how this is going to work,” he said. “We will use the Auxiliary’s clear punch bowl, and the tickets go in where everybody can see them. The gate goes in the cash box, Wanda and two witnesses count it, and not a dime goes anywhere but this roof.”
“The jar stays on the table. Mr. Spangler put it there himself, and I expect he wants to see it go to somebody honest.” Elwood turned his head. “Do you, Mr. Spangler?”