He summoned Denise and asked for the history of the cooked fat shipments that had gone to Plains and to other recovery vendors. Denise brought him a series of folders and opened a spreadsheet showing dates, destinations, and pounds. One line repeated every week: TATE FARM, LULING. Rick remembered the woman who had asked for pit logs and the old steam kettle he had been glad to remove from storage. He frowned at the row but did not yet understand what it represented.
"Do we know what she's doing with it?" he asked. Denise reminded him that Marlene had said she was rendering it and had requested the paperwork to track her batches. Rick nodded and said the farm probably did not have capacity to matter. The sentence sounded reasonable when he said it aloud. It also relieved him of the need to think about how much source-specific fat had been diverted away from the original disposal routes.
Marlene knew nothing of the growing trouble inside Ironwood's office. The same week, a damaged seal on a storage unit required emergency service, and a laboratory invoice arrived larger than expected. Eli told her his father's truck had broken down, which meant the young man needed every scheduled hour if he was to help his family cover the repair. Marlene gave him the hours she could afford and took the late cleaning shift herself.
Near midnight she sat in the kitchen with the December bank statement open. The balance had fallen below $3,000 after the latest raw-material purchases, transport charges, and regular expenses. The stacks of finished tallow looked impressive, but the checking account revealed how near she was to having a full inventory and an empty business. She had spent months making sure every pound was real; now she needed a buyer willing to turn enough of it into money before the calendar ran out.
She stood and took the March 15 card off the wall. For a moment she thought of making an appointment with Daniel Price and asking whether the bank could extend the deadline. Then she pictured his careful face and the note he had already persuaded his institution to grant. She pinned the card back where it belonged, took out her order book, and began calling the commercial customers who had expressed interest in buying more.
In the first week of December, one of those calls brought a restaurant supply distributor to her door. He was interested in a large block of finished tallow and had the cash to pay for it before the year ended. The amount he proposed sounded enormous compared with the checks from a farmers market table. It also presented Marlene with a choice more difficult than any equipment breakdown: accept a guaranteed sum now, or keep holding the inventory for a larger opportunity that might never arrive.