Chapter 11 of 21Drawn and Left Unnumbered

Seventeen days before Havenwood voted on selling the Historical Society building, Harriet Ainsworth found a blank in the town's tax records where the deed to the ground beneath it should have been. Every other parcel the town owned carried a line in the grand list: a number, a name, and a value that showed what the town held. Under the Society there was nothing, and there never had been.

Friday afternoon, and the Town Hall had emptied down to the tick of the radiators and the smell of somebody's reheated soup. At ten to five, Martha Jenkins stopped in Harriet's doorway with her keys in her hand.

"I'm off. You're not staying again."

"An hour."

"That's what you said Wednesday." Martha wound her scarf twice around her neck. "Heat shuts off at seven, and there's a killing frost coming Saturday night. Don't sit down in that vault and freeze."

"I'll be upstairs."

"Mm." Martha did not believe her. "There's half a coffee cake in the break room. Somebody brought it for the assessor's birthday and then he took his vacation."

"Give me five minutes and I'll eat a slice on the way out."

"You'll eat it standing over a map."

"Probably."

Martha left. The front door banged, and her sedan went off down Main Street past the Family Dollar and out of sight. Harriet took the 1824 ledger down to the vault.

The tax maps lived in a flat-file cabinet behind the vault door: twenty-eight sheets, drawn in 1968. She spread sheet nine on the map table.

Sheet nine covered the green, and the Society stood a quarter mile from where Harriet was standing: a former schoolhouse, its lot bounded by the green on the north and the burying ground lane on the east. Inside the rectangle there was no lot number, no acreage, no owner's name. Every parcel around it had all three.

She went back up for the grand list books.

They were heavy, and she carried them down to the vault in three trips, the oldest from 1900 and the newest already soft at the D's. Some clerk in every volume had written the town's own name into the town's own book: the fire station on Depot Street at a dollar, exempt. The water works off Ridge Road, a dollar. Both cemeteries.

Not one line for the schoolhouse lot, not in 1900, not in 1951, not in the book she had closed an hour ago.

And the deed. She had copied the 1954 quitclaim and handed it to Marcus Thorne herself, and it was clean. A quitclaim moves a thing from a seller's column into a buyer's. Nobody had ever opened a column.

She called Bea from the desk phone in the vault corridor. Water ran in Bea's sink on the other end.

"Bea. It's Harriet."

"Eleven minutes and then the pot boils over, dear. The Macintoshes are coming apart on me."

"Then I'll be quick. Has the town ever sent the Society a tax bill?"

"A tax bill."

"For the land. Just the land under it."

The water in Bea's sink shut off.

"Harriet, we don't own the land. The Society owns the building and what's inside it. The town owns the ground under it."

"The town pays to heat it and insure it."

"Twenty-two thousand a year, near enough. Since I was a girl." A spoon knocked against the rim of the pot. "That's why I keep telling you the building was never the trouble."

"Then which clerk ever put a value on the ground?"

The pot lid rattled against the burner behind her.

"I couldn't tell you."

"Somebody should have done."

"Should have, yes. Nobody would ever have thought to, I suppose."

Harriet switched the receiver to her other ear.

"The fire station is town ground, and somebody wrote a dollar beside it in 1911. Every clerk since has copied that dollar forward."

"That's bookkeeping, dear. Bookkeeping isn't a right."

"It's a record of one."

"Is it?"

Harriet had no answer for that, and Bea went on.

"You sound like somebody who has found something."

"I found a blank."

"A blank is not a deed."

"No," Harriet said. "A deed is supposed to go in the blank."

Bea laughed once, short. "You'll be at it all night."

"Until I know what the blank means."

She laid the ledger open beside the map. She had read the 1824 grant so often that the phrase surfaced before she found it — in perpetuity, for the public good, lest the line be broken — but she had never put a straightedge to the parcel description underneath: a schoolhouse lot, bounded on the north by the meetinghouse green and on the east by the burying ground lane. The ruler came out true to the scale at the bottom of the sheet.

At half past six the front door opened, which meant Sam Holloway had found it unlocked.

"Martha called you," Harriet said.

"Martha called me from the car." He came down the stairs with two coffees. "She said you'd freeze down here and I'd feel bad about it."

"That was kind of her."

"Martha doesn't do kind. She does necessary." He leaned over the map table and read sheet nine in about four seconds. "Somebody forgot it."

"For a hundred and twenty-four years?"

He pulled the grand list book toward him and turned pages.

"Then somebody didn't forget it. You've been through all of them."

"Every book the vault holds, back to 1900."

"And?"

"The garage is on the rolls, the fire station, both cemeteries, the water works, the town forest, and the old library before it burned. Every one of them written in at a dollar so the page would balance, with a date and a clerk's initials in the margin beside it."

Sam drank some of his coffee and set the cup on the corner of the map table.

"And the green?"

"Nothing. Not a dollar, a line, or a date."

In his store, when a delivery came up short, he circled the missing item on the invoice in red and called the yard that same afternoon.

"Bookkeeping doesn't leave things out on purpose," he said. "People do."

"No."

"The town put a schoolhouse on that lot in 1831. It has shingled it, insured it, and heated it for longer than either of us has been alive. And in every book the vault holds, not one clerk would write its name down."

"Two clerks," Harriet said. "At least two. One to decide the lot was public ground, and one to decide it could not be written in the book."

Across the table, the radiator knocked once and went quiet.

"Which one came first?"

"I don't know yet."

Sam looked at the map sheet a while longer. "Sunday, then. Bea's kitchen."

"Sunday."

"I'll bring the coffee."

He put his cup back in the tray and went up the stairs.

Harriet copied sheet nine at the machine in the clerk's office, folded it in thirds, and put it into the inside pocket of her bag, where her hand would find it on the drive home. Seventeen days out, Marcus Thorne's crew was still making holes in the green on $18,400 of highway money, and she had a folded copy of a 1968 sheet and a question she could not set down. An exemption is a decision written down and signed, with a date and a clerk's initials in the corner. Somebody had treated this lot as public ground for two hundred years, and somebody else had kept it out of the ledger entirely, and no clerk in that time had joined the two.

Why would a piece of land be public ground on the map and nowhere in the book?