The envelope had held four hundred and twelve dollars for the coat drive, and on Sunday morning it was nearly empty.
Marlene Hollister stood in the second-floor Sunday school room at Grace Methodist and looked into the old Maxwell House can on the top shelf of the supply cabinet. The envelope was there. It was torn open along one edge, and inside it were two five-dollar bills and a single, crumpled one.
She counted it twice. It didn't get any bigger.
On the shelf beside the can lay a scattering of tiny paper scraps, like confetti. Marlene brushed them into her hand without thinking. She figured they'd come off the torn envelope.
"Oh, no," she said quietly. "Oh, no, no, no."
The coat drive was Marlene's idea, eleven years ago.
Every January, when the real cold settled into the hollows of Calder County, the children in her Sunday school class collected money for winter coats. They brought in quarters and dollar bills and the change from their piggy banks.
Marlene matched every dollar out of her egg money. In February, she drove to the farm store in Marietta and bought as many good warm coats as the money would buy, and the school nurse handed them out quietly to the kids who needed them.
This year, the class had raised more than ever. Four hundred and twelve dollars, counted out on the classroom table last Sunday by eleven children and written on the chalkboard in big numbers.
Marlene had put the envelope in the coffee can herself. She'd put the can on the top shelf, closed the cabinet, and locked the classroom door.
She'd been teaching Sunday school at Grace Methodist for thirty-one years. Clay said she could spot a fib in a second grader from across the parking lot. She'd never once had money go missing.
Pastor Sam came up the stairs with his reading glasses on his forehead.
"Who has a key to this room?" he asked.
"You. Me. The custodian." Marlene shook her head. "Wilbur's been here since Moses, Sam. He's been up here every night since Thanksgiving setting traps for the church mice, and he's never taken so much as a cookie. It wasn't Wilbur."
"Was the door locked when you came in?"
"Yes."
Sam looked at the cabinet. The lock on it was the cheap kind that came with the furniture, and the key had been lost for a decade. Anybody in the room could have opened it.
"Who was in the room this week?"
Marlene knew what he was asking. She didn't like the answer.
"The class, last Sunday," she said. "And on Wednesday night, the children's choir practiced up here while I helped in the kitchen."
Downstairs, the doors opened, and they heard the first families coming in out of the cold for Sunday school.
The children came up the stairs in a rush of snow boots and mittens.
Marlene didn't tell them right away. She let them hang up their coats and find their chairs, and she watched them.
She'd learned a long time ago that children tell you most things with their hands and their feet, long before they tell you with their mouths. A child who's done something wrong will usually stand somewhere different from where they always stand.
They'll look at the thing they took. Or they'll look very hard at anything else.
Ten of the eleven children went straight to their chairs.
The eleventh went to the supply cabinet.
His name was Jayden Cole. He was nine.
He'd come to Pine Hollow in October as a foster placement with Jess and Luke Miller, who rented the old Kepler farm and had forty cows and no children of their own yet. Jayden was small for nine, with a cowlick and a gray coat two sizes too big, and in three months he'd said perhaps forty words in Marlene's classroom.
He stood in front of the cabinet with his hands in his pockets. He looked at the bottom of it, down by the baseboard, the way you'd look at a dog you didn't trust.
Then he saw Marlene watching him, and went to his chair, and sat down very fast.
Marlene told the class at the end of the lesson. She said it gently, and she said it plain.
"The coat drive money is gone," she said. "Almost all of it. I'm not angry. But I need to know if anybody knows anything about it. You can tell me later, in private, if you'd rather."
The room went still.
Ten children looked shocked. One little girl started to cry.
Jayden Cole looked at the floor.
Then a boy named Caden Fenn, who was eight and whose grandfather was the head of the church trustees, turned around in his chair and stared at Jayden. Two other children turned and stared too.
"He was up here Wednesday," Caden said. "At choir. He went to the bathroom for a long time. And last month he took crackers from snack and put them in his pockets. My grandpa says foster kids steal stuff because they're used to it."
"Caden," Marlene said sharply. "That's enough."
But it was already said, and Jayden had heard it. His face went white, and then red, and then he got up and walked out of the room and down the hall.
Marlene let him go for a minute. Then she followed.
She found him in the coat closet at the end of the hall, standing in the dark among the hanging coats with his back to the wall. When she switched on the light, he flinched.
His gray coat was hanging beside him. The right pocket was bulging.
Marlene didn't say anything. She just looked at the pocket.
Slowly, without a word, Jayden reached into it and pulled out a tight roll of bills, wrapped with a rubber band. He held it out to her, and he looked at her, and his chin shook.
But he didn't say one word.