I tucked the brass key into my coat pocket and pushed the workbench drawer closed before the heavy soles of Zane’s boots crossed the floorboards upstairs.

By ten the next morning I was standing next to Frank in the basement records room of the Oak Creek town hall.

Frank, a retired county deputy who’d lived on our road for thirty years, rubbed the scar across his left knuckles while he ran his finger down a column of numbers in a cloth-bound town ledger.

“He owed six thousand dollars to the building supply yard and four more to the lumber mill,” Frank said.

His voice was low and flat beneath the humming fluorescent tubes.