Chapter 2 — FOUR IN THE MORNING

Renata Colquitt was twenty-nine.

Everybody called her Ren.

She came in at three and left at eleven and in between she ran the divider and the shaper and did the shop floor and she was, by a distance that was not close, the fastest pair of hands in that building.

She was from Wheelwright the way Gus was from Wheelwright, which is to say her mother was from Wheelwright and so was her mother's mother.

Her husband had gone to Indianapolis in 2023 to do drywall and had stopped sending anything in February.

She had a Corolla with a bad wheel bearing and an apartment above the laundromat on Fourth and two children, five and four, and a shift that started at three in the morning.

I want to be very specific about this next part because it is the part everybody got wrong afterward.

There is no childcare at three in the morning.

Not expensive childcare, not bad childcare, not a waiting list.

There is none.

The earliest licensed opening in Wheelwright County was six thirty and the woman who did overnights out of her house on Bellamy Road had stopped in 2022 when her husband got sick.

Ren's mother was in Terre Haute and did not drive at night.

So in April, when the second shift got cut and the only job left was the three a.m., Ren did the arithmetic that every person in that position does, and the arithmetic came out the same way it always comes out.

She brought them with her.

For the first two weeks they slept on flour sacks in the corner by the office and woke up every time the sheeter ran.

Then Gus, without saying anything about it, went into the walk-in on a Sunday and took out the shelving.

That is the whole of it.

That is the crime.

A sixty-one-year-old man with a bakery that was two payments from the bank took the shelving out of a dead freezer so that two small children would have a dark quiet room with a door.

He never said a word about it to Ren and Ren never said a word about it to him and for four months that arrangement held, held perfectly, the way things hold when nobody is willing to name them.

There were rules and the rules were never spoken either.

The children were gone by half past six, walked to the corner of Delacroix and Fourth by their mother, before the front opened.

Nobody from the front of house ever came past the flour bin.

And the door of the walk-in stayed propped.

Always propped.

A yellow plastic wedge, the kind you buy in a hardware store four to a pack, kicked under the bottom edge so the door could not close and latch.

I asked Ren about the wedge exactly once, in June, standing at the shaper.

She said, "There's no handle on the inside."

I said, "None?"

She said, "It's a freezer. Nobody's ever in there."

Then she said something else, and I have thought about it more times than I have thought about almost anything else in my life.

She said, "Anyway it doesn't work. It's just a room."