Chapter 15 of 20Deed Vault

The letter of intent was signed. Harriet Ainsworth knew that much and nothing more: Roy Deakin's company, the town green and the Havenwood Historical Society's land beneath it, and a binding vote on October fourteenth that would hand the parcel over. Everything she had gathered so far — a diary she could barely read, a phrase about a line broken, a parcel that had never appeared on the town's tax rolls — amounted to suspicion. Suspicion did not stop a signature.

She reached Town Hall with the frost still holding on the windshield and the maples along Main Street down to bare wood. Martha Jenkins had Monday's mail in two stacks on the counter and a Hannaford flyer open beside her coffee.

"Morning." Harriet hung her coat on the hook by the stairwell door. "Anything from the county?"

"Not unless they've started writing on grocery circulars." Martha turned the flyer around to face her. "Cider doughnuts, two for a dollar, through Wednesday. That's the news."

"I was asking about George Pillsbury."

"You were asking with your coat still on." Martha set the flyer down. "Ask, then."

"When he retired, you and I packed up his office."

"We did. Took the better part of a week, and you made me label every box twice."

"Where did they go?"

Martha squared the two stacks of mail, the flyers under the envelopes.

"Most of it went up to him at Maple Leaf. His niece drove it over in the spring. The rest came down to the basement. The board wouldn't let us throw out a manager's papers, so there's a shelf of them past the vault, and a few boxes at the far end where the light doesn't reach."

"Which vault?"

"Yours. The records vault." She raised her eyebrows. "You keep the keys, Harriet. You know that basement better than I do."

"There's a second door down there, past the shelves. Iron, painted over."

"That old thing." Martha poured the last of her coffee into the sink behind the counter. "Nobody's opened it since I came to work here."

"Since well before that." Harriet lifted the stairwell key off its hook. "The inventory page is in the vault, isn't it?"

"Page after the road layouts. Furnace room, holding cells, coal bin, and the last one on the list." Martha looked at her over the rim. "You've read it before."

"I've read it without reading it."

"That's the trouble with this building."

The basement stairs were granite and slick with furnace damp, and the corridor at the bottom ran the length of the building: the furnace room with its low iron door, the records vault with its shelf of bound ledgers and the new step stool from Holloway Hardware, and the narrow end where the town stacked whatever it could not decide to burn.

Past the boxes the corridor stopped at a door painted the same gray as the granite, its stenciled letters weathered down to a suggestion of edges.

"Harriet?" Sam Holloway came down the stairs with a canvas bag in one hand and stopped at the bottom of the flight until his eyes got used to the light.

"I'm down here."

"Furnace is knocking again." He crossed to the iron door and put his ear against it. "Martha said you were down here with a dead man's papers."

"George Pillsbury's papers. He isn't dead."

"He isn't here, either." Sam unzipped the bag and took out a pair of gloves. "What are you hoping to find?"

"Something that says the green can't be sold."

"You want a document that stops a vote."

Sam laid the gloves on the step stool, one on top of the other.

"I want a document that makes the vote pointless. Something the town already agreed to, back when it agreed to something else."

"The board doesn't read arguments. It reads documents. You've been to the same meetings I have."

"Which is why I'm kneeling on a concrete floor."

"Then find one before the fourteenth." He stood with the bag over his shoulder. "Anything so far?"

"Plaques. Photographs. A watch."

"A watch is worth something."

"Not to the town."

He started up the stairs, then stopped with his hand on the rail.

"Harriet. If you find the thing, don't sit on it."

"I never sit on anything, Sam."

"Yup." His boots went up, and the door at the top closed, and the furnace ticked in the dark.

Her phone buzzed against her hip. Beatrice Chandler's name came up on the screen.

"Harriet, dear, it's me." Behind her voice, a page turned. "Have you eaten anything today?"

"I'm in the basement of Town Hall."

"That's where you always are. Did you find anything in George's boxes?"

"Plaques. A citation from the fire department. A wristwatch in a case."

"He wore that watch to every meeting." Beatrice made a sound that was nearly a laugh. "He used to tap the crystal when the selectboard got long-winded."

Harriet sat back on her heels with the phone against her ear.

"Bea, did the Society ever take any of his records?"

"We took the Founder's Day photographs. He wanted us to have those."

"And the rest?"

"Everything else, he said, belonged to the town."

"He said that out loud?"

The turning of pages stopped.

"He said it the day he retired, and then he told me to keep my hands off the vault. I thought he was joking. George never joked."

"Which vault?"

"He didn't say, and I didn't ask. I thought he was being an old man about his own files."

"I'll come by tomorrow morning."

"Bring your own coffee. Mine's a disgrace." Beatrice sniffed. "And wear gloves down there, dear. Carbons come off on your hands."

She put the phone away and pulled the first box toward her.

It held plaques: a brass one from the volunteer fire department, a citation from the regional planning commission, a wooden gavel with a crack in the handle. A stack of photographs had been held together with a rubber band perished into a sticky ring, and she laid them along the shelf: George at a podium, George squinting into a snowbank with his collar up.

Under the photographs, in a hinged case lined with felt, lay a wristwatch. The back was engraved with the town seal and the words With Gratitude from the Selectboard, and when she wound it, it ran.

The next box was paper: carbons gone purple, road petitions, receipts for gravel. She went through them on the floor with her back against the shelf, and under a stack of inspection reports, pressed flat against the bottom, was an envelope.

It had no stamp and no address, only the name George in a hand that had pressed ridges into the paper. The flap had dried to a curl, and she worked it open with the point of her pen.

A key fell out into her palm: iron and heavy, the bow black with age, the shaft as long as her hand. A tag was tied to the bow with twine, the paper yellowed and split along the fold; two words remained on it in faded cursive.

Deed Vault.

She knew the name. It was stenciled across the door at the end of the corridor, and it appeared in the town's inventory of its rooms, on a page that listed the furnace room, the holding cells, the coal bin, and the deed vault. Nobody at Town Hall had a key.

She crossed the corridor with the key in her fist and slid it into the lock. It went in to the shoulder, and she stood with her hand on the bow and did not turn it, because a vault opened alone was a vault nobody could vouch for. Above her, the stairwell door came open.

"Harriet?" Marcus Thorne's voice carried down the corridor. "Martha said you'd come down here. Everything all right?"

She pulled the key out, and the tag came with it, and she put both in her coat pocket and closed her hand around them.

"Everything's filed," she said.

His shoes started down the stairs.