Chapter 18 of 20The Eldest Then Living

The binding vote on the Havenwood town green had been set for tonight and was not going to happen. Harriet Ainsworth had bought the delay with a town bylaw and Samuel Holloway's signature, and she knew what a delay was worth. If the historical impact study came back to the selectboard with nothing in it, the land would be sold and the Historical Society building would belong to a developer from Manchester before the snow flew. Every page she turned up went across Marcus Thorne's desk before it went anywhere else.

Monday arrived anyway. In the Town Hall the radiators knocked and the granite gave up its cold slowly, so the second floor stayed chill until noon. Martha Jenkins had the mail in a neat stack and the message light on the phone blinking.

"The phone hasn't stopped," Martha said. "Everyone wants to know if we're voting tonight."

"What did you tell them?"

"That I hadn't heard otherwise." She squared the envelopes. "Which isn't the same as no."

"There's no vote tonight. The study takes precedence."

"Then I'll say that next time."

She slid an envelope across the counter. The Town Manager's return stamp sat in the corner.

"He wants a progress report. His office sent it down Friday," she said.

"He'll have the study when the study is finished."

Harriet put the envelope in the tray marked IN and stood at her window. Across Main Street, Sam Holloway had a pallet of ice melter out front, bags stacked high, and a frost had come down in the night hard enough to silver the hoods of the cars along the curb.

A quarter mile is a short walk in October. She turned her collar up, tucked the tax map copies under her arm, and walked the sidewalk to the old schoolhouse on the green that had been holding the town's paper since long before anyone called it a society.

Bea Chandler had the lights on over the long table and the deed box open on a clean towel. A bag of cider doughnuts from the farm stand sat between them, unopened.

"I took it out of the file myself," Bea said. "It hasn't been out of my sight."

"Good."

"Is it good? I keep thinking about the rectangle on the lid where the label used to be."

"So do I. But we start with the words."

Harriet pulled on the cotton gloves. The parchment had been folded in quarters so long it wanted to fold itself again, so she weighted the corners with river stones off Bea's windowsill and read the first line aloud for Bea to write down.

"Special trust and confidence," she said.

"That much we had."

"To have and to hold, in the town, for the uses and purposes herein set forth, and for no other use or purpose whatsoever."

Bea wrote. On the second page the hand changed and got smaller, and Harriet came to the clause she had read in this room before and understood no better for it.

"The estate hereby granted shall cease, determine, and revert," she read. "And the schedule or writing hereunto annexed, marked A."

She stopped.

"What," Bea said.

"The fold. There's something in it."

"The deed?"

"Inside the deed."

She lifted the parchment by the edge and let it open the rest of the way. A thinner sheet, folded small, stayed behind in the crease where it had lain pressed flat, gray along the edges where the parchment had been against it. Harriet worked the tip of a letter opener under the flap and eased it free.

"It's a letter," she said.

"From whom?"

"The lawyer who drew the deed. It's written to the founder's son, to be kept with the paper." Harriet turned it toward the window. "Being an explanation, in plain words, of the deed of trust lately made, and left here with the deed for the family's keeping."

Bea set her pen down and did not pick it up again.

Harriet read on. "The lot on the green, with the school upon it, is lent to the town and not given. Nothing is owed for it and nothing may be taken for it."

"That's the trust," Bea said.

"So long as the town keeps the lot for the common good — a school, a library, a hall for the meeting of its people — the town holds it, and no man may complain."

"Still the trust."

"Let the town sell it. Let it lease it. Let a shop or an office or a lodging house be kept upon it, and the loan is at an end."

Bea said nothing.

Harriet went on, and her own voice sounded strange to her in the empty room. "What follows is the part your father wished done quietly. The land does not go to the town, nor to the state, nor to whoever holds the paper. It comes back to your father's line, and to the eldest of that line then living, as though the town had never held it."

The letter ran on a few more lines. A vote of the town cannot give away what was never the town's to give. No buyer may keep what the town could not sell. At the bottom stood a signature in the same brown ink as the deed, and nowhere in any of it did the letter mention the schedule, or the letter A, or the page that was supposed to be annexed.

Bea put her finger under the line about the eldest.

"That's a trap," she said.

"It's a trap," Harriet said.

"He put it in the ground and told nobody but his lawyer."

"He told his family. It was folded into the deed and kept with the deed. Somebody knew."

Bea looked past her at the window. Marcus Thorne was coming up the brick walk with his coat open and his phone against his ear, talking to someone who was not there.

"Wrap it," Bea said.

Harriet slid the letter into a Mylar sleeve, laid the sleeve in the flat portfolio under the tax maps, and had the deed folded and the lid back on the box by the time the door opened.

"Morning, ladies." He looked at the ceiling, the trim, the long table. "I won't keep you. I'm walking the green with the assessor's maps."

"There's nothing in my study yet."

"There will be. This building costs the town twenty-two thousand dollars a year. Heat, insurance, a roof that leaks over the stacks." He tapped the door frame. "Counsel went through the old trust years ago, before I got here. There's nothing in it that a vote and a lawyer can't undo."

Harriet kept her hands in her lap.

"Nothing at all?" Bea said.

"Nothing the town can't decide for itself, Ms. Chandler." He stepped back out, and the door closed behind him.

"Then why is he so sure?" Bea said.

"Because a clause like that is only as strong as the person standing on it."

"And if there's nobody to stand on it?"

"Then the sale goes through, the developer builds, and the founder's trap sits in that box forever."

Bea went to the nail by the door and took down the ring of keys.

"Where do we start?" she said.

"Family files."

Bea turned the key over in her hand. "Every founding family in town has a folder in that cabinet, going back as far as anybody kept count."

"Then I want all of them. Every family file the Society keeps, and everyone who married in."

"All of them?"

"All of them."

Outside, the green lay empty under the oaks, and the schoolhouse sat dark in the middle of it. Harriet stood at the window with the portfolio under her arm. The letter said the land came back to the eldest of the founder's line then living. It did not say who that was, and it did not say whether anyone was left to say so.