Chapter 20 of 20A Time-Sensitive Offer

The notice was on the town's website before Harriet got her coat off, and it was taped inside the glass case in the vestibule of Havenwood Town Hall by the time she came back down for her coffee. The special town vote on the Historical Society parcel had been moved up to Wednesday of the following week. The one thing that could stop the sale — a living heir, named in an old lawyer's letter — was still a blank line on an index card in her purse.

Beside it in the case hung the usual squares of paper: dog licenses due at the clerk's window, a flu clinic at the grange on Saturday, the transfer station's winter hours.

Harriet Ainsworth stood in the cold coming off the glass and read the notice to the bottom. "That was quick," she said.

Martha Jenkins came out of the clerk's office with half a grinder on a napkin and a Dunkin' cup with her name misspelled along the side. "Emergency selectboard session. Last night."

"Who called it?"

"The chair's signature is on it." Martha chewed and swallowed. "Before you ask, I didn't type it. He ran it through the copier himself."

The two of them stepped aside for a woman in a quilted coat who wanted the dog license window, and Martha waited until the door had shut behind her.

"Did he say anything to you?"

"It says the offer is time-sensitive." She wiped her fingers on the napkin. "He said good morning, too. First time since he got here."

Harriet took the stairs with the notice in her hand. Marcus Thorne's door stood open, his screens lit and his coffee going cold beside the keyboard.

"Harriet. You've seen it."

"I read it."

"Then we're in the same boat." He turned a screen toward her, and the offer letter sat on it in a page of paragraphs and a signature. "Deakin's letter of intent expires on a date they picked. The board met last night and agreed we shouldn't let a paper study cost the town its leverage."

"You're calling the study paper."

"I'm calling it incomplete." He said it pleasantly. "That isn't meant as an insult. Think of it as a schedule."

She kept her eyes on the screen instead of the man.

"The bylaw is a schedule too, and Sam Holloway filed it with the Planning Board. The board accepted it."

"I've read it. The bylaw governs changes to the green. A vote changes nothing. If the town votes yes and the study holds up, we close in the spring and nobody's hurt. If the town votes no, we lose an option and the town keeps paying twenty-two thousand a year to run a building nobody visits."

"And if a judge reads the bylaw differently?"

"Then the town pays two lawyers instead of one." He picked up the cold coffee. "That's counsel's memo. You're welcome to read it."

"What about the reversionary clause?"

"Our counsel read the trust." He said it as though he were complimenting her. "They traced the founder's family out of state. They hired genealogists. The line ended."

Harriet waited while the copier down the hall finished a page and stopped.

"When?"

"Before they recommended the board hire me."

He set the cup down and squared the corner of the blotter with the edge of the desk, and the neatness of it told her more than the memo would.

"There's a clause, Harriet. There's nobody to hand it to."

"If Bea Chandler has questions about the collection, she can route them through me." He put a d in the middle of Chandler. Nobody in the room corrected him.

"I want your study file copied to town counsel by Friday. They'll take it from there. Keep the reading room. Keep the keys. Not the pen."

"The study is mine."

"It's the town's."

He folded his hands on the desk blotter.

"And I'm the town's clerk."

"You're the deputy clerk." He smiled. "Which is why everything goes through counsel from here on."

Harriet went back down the stairs and did not sit at her desk.

By four-thirty the rain had turned sideways across the green, so she zipped her coat to the chin and walked up Main Street to Holloway Hardware.

"You saw it," he said.

"I saw it."

"And?" He turned the radio down to a murmur.

"You tell me. You wrote the bylaw."

A truck went by outside with its wipers slapping.

"I read that section in April and I read it again at my kitchen table last night. It says no change to the green without the study. A vote isn't a change to the green."

"He found the crack in it."

"He found the crack in it." Sam tore a receipt off the roll and handed it to a customer who had already carried his bag of lag bolts out the door.

The receipt roll went back on its spindle.

"How much time did that buy us?"

"Some."

"How much do we have now?"

"Until Wednesday." Sam looked at the rain on the glass. "What do you need?"

The register drawer slid shut.

"A name."

"The founder's?"

"The founder's." Harriet laid the notice on the counter and smoothed it flat. "Somebody wrote that clause for somebody. There's an heir."

"Then find them somewhere he can't reach the file." He folded the notice and handed it back. "That's Bea's."

The rain kept on outside.

"Where does the letter live now?"

"In Bea's office at the Society, with the deed."

"Keep it there. If counsel asks for your study, they get copies of what you hand them and nothing else."

The Society building held the cold differently than Town Hall; the radiators knocked all evening and never caught up to the room, so the two of them worked with their coats on. Bea Chandler had the reading lamps lit and the long table cleared, and she took one look at the notice in Harriet's hand and sat down at the head of it.

"Dear. You look like the weather."

"The vote is Wednesday."

"Wednesday." Bea folded her hands on the table. "They moved it."

"Last night, at an emergency session. Deakin's offer has a deadline on it."

The radiator under the window knocked twice and gave up.

"I've never known this town to hurry a vote," Bea said, and then she stopped.

"Apparently it's hurrying now."

"All right." Bea looked at the dark windows. "Where do we start?"

"With everything." Harriet pulled the index card from her purse and laid it next to the lamp: the founder's daughter, married in the churchyard record under a name that was not her father's. "That's as far as I've got."

Bea leaned over the card and put one finger under the first line.

"I know that name. It's a valley name. There are stones with it all over the old churchyard."

"Then someone's alive to answer for it. I need the family files. All of them."

"Every founding family? That's a great many folders, dear."

The family files filled the drawers in the back room, indexed by surname in Bea's own hand: births, marriages, burials, deeds, and letters nobody had read since they were folded.

"Then we'll want the whole table."

Bea rose to fetch the first drawer, and the floorboards answered every step out and back.

"I keep them by family," she said from the far side of the room. "Daughters don't hold land here. They marry, and the record forgets them."

"Then we'll do the remembering." Harriet capped her pen. She had until Wednesday to fill that line, and she did not intend to put the name on any paper Marcus Thorne's counsel could read.