Chapter 16 of 20Special Trust and Confidence

The key to the deed vault was still in Harriet Ainsworth's coat pocket on Tuesday morning. Monday, October fourteenth, would bring the binding vote to sell the town green and the land beneath the Historical Society, and everything she had gathered so far came down to a phrase in an old ledger and a sentence in a founder's diary. What she needed was a document with a seal on it.

She let herself into the Havenwood Town Hall through the back door, left the second floor dark behind her, and went down. The basement smelled of wet stone and iron, the smell October always brought down there, and the cold off the granite found her sleeves before she had gone far along the corridor.

The key turned with a scrape she felt in her teeth. Inside was a room the size of a coat closet, a shelf on each wall, and on the middle shelf a gray steel box whose lid had been repainted so many times over the years that the hinge complained when she lifted it. Dust lay across the top, unbroken except for a clean rectangle where a paper label had once been pasted and later scraped away by somebody in a hurry.

Nobody was down there to tell her what she was allowed to touch. She lifted the lid.

The paper inside was folded in thirds, heavy and cream-colored, tied with a ribbon gone the flat gray of a hornet's nest. On the outward face of the fold, in ink that had browned, a confident hand had written: Deed of Trust, Town Green and Schoolhouse Lot, 1824.

Harriet carried it up to her desk, locked the vault behind her, put George Pillsbury's key in the bottom drawer, and sat with the receiver against her ear.

"Bea. It's Harriet." "I'm at the Society, dear. I've been here since the frost came off the roof. What's happened?" "I opened the vault."

She heard a chair leg drag across the floorboards.

"Harriet Ainsworth." "There's a metal box in there, and paper in it. The endorsement reads Deed of Trust, Town Green and Schoolhouse Lot, 1824."

Bea did not answer, which meant she had taken her glasses off to think.

"Don't you unfold that on a desk with a coffee cup on it," she said. "And don't leave it in the building overnight." "Can you come now?" "I have the assessment notices to mail." "The notices can wait an hour, dear." "They can wait until this is in the safe."

Harriet turned her chair so her back was to the door.

"Bea—Marcus found me down there yesterday. I told him the basement floods in the spring and I was checking the sump." "And he believed that?"

The kettle clicked off at the other end of the call.

"He smiled and went back upstairs." "That's worse than not believing it," Bea said. "Come now."

The highway past the green was stacked with leaf-peepers' cars, and by the time Harriet parked behind the old schoolhouse the sun had come off the front steps. Inside, Beatrice Chandler had the lamp angled down, a Hannaford bag of cider doughnuts opened on the corner of the desk, and cotton gloves laid out beside the kettle.

"Sit," she said. "Gloves first, and then the ribbon, and then we talk about what we've got." "I didn't untie it." "I didn't want to be the one who opened a fold that had held since the year it was written."

Bea worked the ribbon off with the tips of her gloves and laid the sheet open under the lamp.

"Read me the first line." "This Indenture, made and concluded in the year of our Lord 1824, between—" "Skip to the granting clause. That's where the power changes hands." "'Have granted, bargained, sold, aliened, enfeoffed, released, and confirmed.'" "That is a list a lawyer builds when he is paid by the word."

Bea tapped the page with the back of her glove.

"'Unto the inhabitants of the Town of Havenwood, and to their successors, in special trust and confidence nevertheless, and to the uses and behoofs hereinafter limited and declared.'" "Read the middle of that again." "In special trust and confidence."

Bea sat back and folded the gloves in her lap.

"Then it isn't a deed at all, dear. A deed hands something over. A trust says it was never handed over in the first place, and that difference is the whole fight." "There's a condition." Harriet ran her finger under the line. "'Provided always, and these presents are upon this express condition.'" "'As is more particularly set forth in a certain schedule or writing hereunto annexed, marked A, and made part hereof.'" "Annexed," Bea said. "Which means a separate sheet." "Which means it could be down the street or it could be in a barn."

Harriet turned the sheet over. The hand changed halfway down, from a slant to something rounder and more hurried.

"The writing changes here." "And here's the word we've been hunting. 'Then and in such case the estate hereby granted shall cease, determine, and revert.'" "'Revert,'" Bea said. "That's a good word." "It doesn't say to whom." "No. It wouldn't. That's what the schedule was for."

Harriet tried the long passage aloud. By the middle of it she had lost the subject, and when she went back to the beginning of the sentence she got tangled in the same place again.

"It names the party of the second part and its successors and assigns, and then it says something about the estate upon a breach, and then it doubles back on itself, and I cannot tell you who the second part is." "Then we'll copy it out by hand in plain letters," Bea said. "That's how the library taught me a hard passage." "We have the evening. What we don't have is a lawyer." "The diary said the safeguard was rooted in the law itself." Harriet put her hands on the table. "This is the law. I'm holding the law and it won't speak to me." "It's speaking English, dear. It's the English of men who were paid to be unclear."

They worked until the lamp threw its yellow circle on the table and the room went dark around them.

"Sam asked me at the store whether I'd found anything. I told him I'd wait until I had something a judge could read." "Martha tells me Lydia Croft was downstairs again, asking after the 1968 map." "Then assume Marcus hears about the box before the week is out." "Marcus knows there's a box down there. He doesn't know it's in my safe, and I'd like to keep it that way until Monday."

Harriet got home to Maple Street after dark, filled the wood stove, and put the kettle on. She was still in her coat when the phone rang.

"Harriet. It's Bea. I've had my transcription in front of me since you left." "I keep coming back to a word." "Annexed."

Harriet set the transcription down and turned the burner off under the kettle.

"Whoever wrote that trust meant the schedule to travel with it." "It didn't travel." "Or it traveled and got filed where a filing system would never look." "Then it's still in the Town Hall. Folded into a ledger, or behind a map drawer, or in a box nobody has opened since the man who closed it died."

Harriet heard a drawer slide shut at the other end of the call.

"There's a sheet of paper in this town marked A." "Then we're hunting a page in a county full of paper." "Where do you start?" "With the book that says where it went. Nobody files a paper without writing it down."