Chapter 12 of 21In Law, Not Stone

Harriet Ainsworth had to post the warning for the vote that would sell the land under the Historical Society. Her initials would go in the corner of the notice, and the notice would hang behind glass at the Town Hall door and again at the post office on Main Street, where half of Havenwood would stop to read it on the way to the mailbox. The vote was set for Monday, October fourteenth, and every folder she had pulled out of the vault held a question with no signature on it.

Martha Jenkins came in with the proof from the printer and set it on the corner of the desk.

"That's off the machine," she said. "He wants it posted Wednesday."

"Wednesday is his preference," Harriet said. "The charter says the warning goes up in time for voters to read it and think it through. That is the whole of the requirement."

Martha lowered herself into the chair by the radiator. "He said it like it came down from the mountain."

"He does that."

Harriet read the notice from the top line to the certification line, the same as she read every legal notice the town produced, and found nothing wrong with it, which was the trouble.

"You're posting it yourself?" Martha asked.

"I'm the deputy clerk. Whoever holds this office posts what the board votes to warn."

"Well." Martha folded her hands in her lap. "Then I'm sorry."

"So am I."

Martha's next item came out while she was working her arms into her coat.

"Lydia Croft came down to the vault Thursday, asking after the 1968 tax map."

Harriet set her pen down. "Did you give it to her?"

"I told her it was out of circulation, and then I went and checked where you'd left it."

"And?"

"Still there, behind the WPA binders. I didn't take my eyes off her after that."

"Thank you, Martha."

"Don't thank me. Coffee is up to nine dollars a pound at Hannaford and nobody blinks, and I have to get across town before the lot fills up."

When the noon whistle went, Harriet walked up Main and across the green to the Historical Society, a quarter mile from Town Hall, in the schoolhouse the town had stopped sending children to long before she came to work for it.

Bea Chandler had the back room in the shape of a job half finished: boxes stacked on the card tables, a dehumidifier humming in the corner, and accession cards fanned across the only chair.

"You look like you've come to shut us down," Bea said.

"I have a notice to post and a vote to lose."

"Not yet, you don't. Look at this shelf."

Harriet looked. Newspaper, a bundle of letters tied with butcher's string, a tin of mismatched buttons, a Sunday-school felt board with the lamb still attached.

"A whole shelf of boxes," Bea said. "Dropped off a long while back by a granddaughter who never came back for a receipt. The card says 'founding family' and nothing else."

"Which founding family?"

"That is the question, dear."

Harriet turned one of the accession cards over. Blank on both sides.

"You asked about your selectboard minutes," Bea said.

"I wasn't going to ask."

"Still gone. I checked the shelf twice, and then I checked your box on the lower shelf in case we had filed it there ourselves."

"Don't let Marcus Thorne's office have a list of what's in those boxes."

"Dear, he asked for an inventory in September, and I gave it to him so thoroughly that he stopped asking."

Harriet laughed once, with not much air behind it. "I have to get back."

"Go on. I'll be here. This is where I keep my coat."

On the way home she stopped at Holloway Hardware and set a folding step stool on the counter.

"That's a stool," Sam Holloway said.

"The tread on the one in the vault is split."

"You told me that in the spring."

"It's still split."

He rang it up. "Twelve dollars and forty cents."

She paid, and he bagged the stool and set it on the counter between them.

"Warning goes up Wednesday," he said.

"Wednesday."

"You posting it?"

"Unless you want the job."

"Nope."

Sam rested his forearms on the register. "Frank pulled his crew off the green this morning. Stakes and flags, all of it."

"Did he say why?"

"He said the drill hit rock." He looked toward the window. "He didn't say what kind."

Sam tore the register tape off and dropped it in the drawer.

"Any sign of the minute books?"

"No."

"Somebody wanted them gone."

"Somebody did."

Harriet carried the stool out to the car and drove home with the heat on, past gutters already full of maple leaves. The kitchen still held the smell of the morning's toast. The phone rang while she was drying a plate.

"Harriet." Bea's voice had a thin tremble in it that Harriet had not heard before. "I opened that first box. Sit down, dear, or don't, but you will want to."

"What is it?"

"A diary. Small. Leather. The clasp is broken."

"Whose?"

Harriet put the dish towel over the back of the chair.

"The first page I can read as plain as day, and it made my hands shake."

"Read it."

"'The book of the founder of Havenwood, begun at the green.' Then a date, and then a name, and I know that name from the deed you pulled out of the vault."

Harriet sat down at the kitchen table without deciding to.

"That's his hand," she said.

"That is his hand. And I cannot read a word past the first page."

"Say more than that."

"The ink has gone brown and the paper has gone brown with it. The man wrote in a hand of loops and ligatures, with a nib like a needle, and never lifted it once. Iron gall, and the iron has done what iron does."

Harriet could hear the magnifier scraping across the desk, close and small, as if Bea had leaned into the receiver.

"How much can you make out?"

"A word here and there. More, if I use the magnifier from the stamp drawer, and my eyes pay for it after."

"Which words?"

"I got 'safeguard.' That one came up clear as a bell."

"What else?"

"Something about law. Something about stone. I put them in an order that made sense, and then I took the order apart again."

"Say the order."

"'Bound in law, not in stone.' I think. I would not swear to the 'not.'"

"Don't take it out of the building. Don't photograph it, and don't show it to anyone from Town Hall."

"Am I a fool, dear?"

"No. You are the only person in this town who can read that hand."

"That is precisely what worries me."

Harriet looked at the proof sheet on the table, at her own name typed under the certification line, and thought about a man writing at the edge of the green with a nib like a needle.

"A phrase," she said.

"A phrase I would half swear to."

"Wednesday. I'll post the notice in the morning and come straight to you."

"Bring your reading glasses. It's a lock, dear, and I don't have the key."

"Then we find one. Don't turn a page without me."