He took out his wallet and unfolded a little square of paper, soft as cloth from being carried. He knelt down in front of the safe and set his coffee on the floor.
Three turns right. Two turns left. One turn right. The handle dropped.
Toby pulled the door open. He reached in, and then he stopped. He went still for a long moment, and then he looked up at me.
“Rhea,” he said. “Come look.”
I knelt down beside him on the concrete.
Inside, on the top shelf, was the deed to the shop property and the title to Dean’s old truck.
On the bottom shelf was a stack of tax returns rubber-banded together. And in the middle, all by itself, was a small payment book from the bank in town.
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It had a blue cardboard cover, the kind they used to give you for a car loan or an equipment note. On the front, Dean had written in pencil, “Lift. 2011.”
I opened it. Inside were thirty-six payment stubs, one for every month from April 2011 to March 2014. Every single one of them had the bank’s round stamp on it, paid, with the date and the teller’s initials.
Dean had walked into that bank on the first of every month and paid it in person at the window. I remembered now.
He used to say he liked to look the teller in the eye. I had written the check out of the shop account, and he had carried it in.
On the inside of the back cover, in Dean’s square handwriting, was one more line. “Paid in full, 3-14. Ours.”
I sat back on my heels on the floor. Toby did not say anything. He just put his hand on my shoulder, the way you would steady a ladder.
“I’m going to make a copy of this,” he said after a while. “If that’s all right.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Show people,” he said. “That’s all. Just show them.”
I should tell you that I did not ask him to do what he did next, and I did not stop him either.
I have thought about that a good deal since, and I have decided I can live with it.
He took the payment book to the library in town and made two copies on the machine for a dime apiece.
He brought the book back to me. Then he drove to the south side of town to Curtis’s car lot.
He taped one copy, all thirty-six stamped stubs and Dean’s line on the back, on the inside of the front window of the little office, facing out toward the road, where everyone who pulled in to look at a car would see it.
Curtis was not there. The girl who answered his phone told Toby it was fine to tape it up, because she did not know what it was.
By that afternoon, people in town knew what it was.
I did not go see it. I heard about it from everybody. The woman at the post office told me she drove by on purpose.
And I heard Curtis came back to the lot around three, saw a pickup parked in front of his window and two farmers standing there reading it, and sat in his truck a long time before he went inside.
On Friday morning I came in at seven and there was a flatbed on my gravel.
Ennis was standing beside it with his son-in-law and two other men I knew from church.