Chapter 21 of 21My Beloved Cousin

Harriet Ainsworth had one name left to find, and Wednesday's vote was coming. If she could not put a living heir on the town green before the selectboard's sale went through, the Historical Society building would go to a developer out of Manchester, and every record she had kept in order for the town would end up in boxes in somebody's warehouse.

The card table in the back room of the Havenwood Historical Society held a fan of open folders, a coffee cake, and a paper bag of cider doughnuts that Beatrice Chandler had picked up on Ridge Road that morning for three dollars. Sunday was the one day the Society was closed, which made it the one day the two of them could work without somebody at the desk asking after a grandfather's military record.

Bea closed the folder she had been reading and set her reading glasses on top of it.

"I have been through Kimball front to back," she said. "Three times, dear. There is nobody."

"Read me the end of the page anyway."

Bea opened the folder and ran a finger down the column of names. "'One son, no issue.' That is the whole of the founder's daughter. It stops at the churchyard."

"Then Thorne's genealogists stopped in the same place."

"He is not wrong about the page."

"No, he is not," Harriet said. "He is wrong about the book."

Everything the two of them had found since Tuesday lay between them on the card table: a birth record, a marriage intention, a page of the county history, and the churchyard list Bea had copied out by hand. The daughter had married into a valley family, and then the line narrowed to a single son, and the son left nothing behind but a name and a row in the burying ground.

Outside the tall windows, two leaf-peepers stood on the green photographing the meetinghouse, and the frost in the shade of the north wall had not lifted all morning. Bea cut a slice of coffee cake and left it on the plate.

"It's Sunday," she said. "You ought to be home with the paper and the woodstove going."

"I'd rather be here."

"I know you would." She pushed the bag of doughnuts across the table. "Eat something, dear."

The desk telephone rang. Harriet picked it up. "Clerk's office."

"On a Sunday," Samuel Holloway said. "That is what I admire about you."

"I'm at the Society."

"I know where you are." A drawer slid shut on his end. "I'm at the store doing the books, so I will say this in one breath. Town counsel has your impact study."

"Martha mailed it Friday."

"There is not a line in it that points at an heir."

"Not yet."

Across the table, Bea set her fork down and looked out at the green. "Wednesday does not move," Sam said. "The warning is posted on the front board."

"I know what Wednesday is."

"Yup." The receiver clicked in her ear.

Harriet put it back in its cradle. Then she crossed to the shelf where the founder's diary lived in a shallow box of its own, lifted it out, and turned past the pages about roads and mill rights and the burying ground to the crowded middle of the book, where the man stopped writing about the town and wrote about his own household instead.

"Bea. Listen to this one."

"I'm listening."

"'To my beloved cousin, Ruth Tuller, who kept my house at the crossroads and my table set while I was about the town's business, and to her children after her.'"

Bea was quiet for a moment. "Tuller."

"Tuller."

"That's my mother's people, dear." She said it as a fact, not a wonder.

"Say that again."

"My mother was a Tuller out of the hill farms. I have said so before."

"I don't remember it."

"You don't remember Tuesday."

Harriet turned the diary so the page faced the other chair.

"Is there anything of theirs here?"

"There is a box in the closet. My mother's papers. I brought them in when the attic got damp."

"Get it."

Bea did not move. "Now?"

"Now."

She went. The closet door stuck and came free with a knock, and a carton scraped along the floorboards. She carried it back, set it on the card table, and went through it with quick, certain hands — past a bundle of letters tied with kitchen string, past a photograph of a farmhouse with the barn door standing open — until she drew out a single sheet folded in quarters and opened it out.

"That's the home place," she said. "I would know that paper anywhere."

"Read me the name at the bottom."

Bea put her glasses back on and read. When she looked up, her mouth was open.

"Say it."

"'Ruth Tuller.'"

Harriet reached across and turned the diary toward her, and there on the table lay the two names, one in brown ink and one in black, written by two different hands, and the same three words.

She lifted the deed into the window light. The hand was a clerk's hand, even and unhurried, and the phrase at the end of it was the old one that finished every deed she had ever filed: to her, her heirs and assigns, forever.

"It's a cousin," Bea said.

"It's the same name."

"Cousins are not daughters." Bea sat down in the folding chair. "His lawyer's letter said the eldest of that line. That means children and their children, dear, and you know it."

"It means what a court says it means."

"The letter said line. It did not say child."

"It said line," Harriet agreed.

"You're taking this well."

"I'm taking it home."

Bea looked at the sheet in her own hands. "That is the only paper I have for the farm."

"You will get it back."

"I had better." She held it out across the coffee cake. "Does it count?"

Harriet took the deed and folded it along its creases, and the paper felt thin as a leaf. She slid it into her bag, beside the transcriptions from the vault.

"I don't know yet," she said. "But I have her name on his paper and her name on yours, and that is more than Marcus Thorne has."