Chapter 22 of 22Not on the Phone

The vote on Havenwood's town green was Wednesday, and Harriet Ainsworth had one thing left that might stop it — a line of descent penciled on the back of a 1968 tax map. She had followed that line from a name in the founder's diary, through the town's marriage and birth registers, to the last entry on the page, and the last entry belonged to her friend Beatrice Chandler. She had not said that name aloud to anybody.

She started Monday morning at her desk in the Town Hall before the counter opened, with the deed to Bea's family farm lying beside her, still creased from the box it had come out of. Ruth Tuller, the founder's beloved cousin, and her children after her. From Ruth the line ran down through the hill farms, and the surname changed as it passed through one marriage after another, in a valley where the same handful of families had been trading daughters back and forth since the first clearing.

The hard frost in the shaded ground had not lifted, and the vault downstairs was colder than the office, so she carried the registers up by the armload and stacked them by the radiator to take the chill off the paper. Harriet copied every marriage out in pencil: bride, groom, the official who performed it, the page number in the town's own book. Then she went after the births, and she checked each one against the death register, because a line that stops is not a line. Branches ran out of the valley and she marked them out. A daughter married a man from the flatlands and never appeared in a Havenwood record again. A son's children were buried beside their mother with no issue noted, and that was the end of them.

The rest came forward single file, generation behind generation, each one leaving the same modest paper trail of a birth, a marriage, a deed, and a death. By early afternoon she had a chain of names running down the page in her own handwriting, a cup of coffee from O'Connell's going cold at her elbow, and a stiffness across her shoulders that told her she had not stood up since noon.

The chain reached the assessment records. The owner's column for the Chandler farm read Chandler, and under it, in the current clerk's hand, someone had written Beatrice Chandler, who had lived her whole life within sight of the fields her family worked.

What Harriet had was a line. The lawyer's letter asked for the eldest of that line then living, and a pencil tree on the back of a tax map could not tell her whether a judge would take it, or whether some cousin she had never heard of would outrank the woman in the farmhouse. She wrote the name at the bottom of the tree anyway and sat back and looked at it for a long time.

Then the door at the bottom of the stairs groaned and Sam Holloway came up with his coat still buttoned.

"Counter's open," Harriet said.

"I know it is. Counsel's got your impact study. Or mine. Hard to tell whose it is now."

"I sent it Friday."

"I read it." He set his hat on the ledge and left it there. "Bea got me a copy."

"And?"

"And it names no heir. Nobody on that green is coming to claim anything. That's how it reads."

Harriet did not look up. "I wrote it that way."

"So the reading is the problem."

She turned the tax map face down under the farm deed, which took her a moment longer than it should have. "Are you asking me whether I've found one?"

"I'm asking."

"I have a line of descent. Documented. From the founder's diary through the marriage and birth registers to the deed of a farm on the valley road."

"To a living person."

"To a single living person in Havenwood."

Sam waited. When she did not go on, he picked his hat back up. "Name."

"Not today."

"Is it somebody you like?"

Harriet thought about Sunday, about the box of papers, about Bea handing her the deed across the table without asking what it was for. "Very much."

"Then tell them before a lawyer does. Thorne's counsel hands your study to the selectboard tomorrow night, and a missing name in a pile of paper gets noticed."

"I know."

She said his name, and he turned. "I can prove the line. I can't prove it counts in court. And I'm not handing the name over a counter before I've said it to the person's face."

Sam considered that. "That," he said, "is the first sensible thing anybody's said to me all day."

He went down the stairs.

Harriet locked up at the end of the afternoon and drove the valley road as far as the Chandler mailbox, and did not turn in. She sat with the engine running and the heater ticking while crows worked the cut corn across the road, and then she put the car in gear and drove back to Maple Street, because she could not yet say the name out loud without her voice doing something she would rather it didn't.

That evening she spread the map under the kitchen lamp, poured a cup of coffee she did not want, and dialed the farmhouse.

"Chandler."

"Bea, it's Harriet."

"Harriet, dear. This late?"

"Is Sam there?"

"He's out on my porch ladder with the light fixture, and the ladder is winning." Something knocked against the siding twice.

"Put him on the other phone."

"Sam! Kitchen phone!"

A creak of the ladder, the porch door, footsteps on linoleum, and then Sam on the second receiver.

"I'm here."

"Both of you, my office tomorrow, before the counter opens."

"What's happened?"

"I finished the tree."

Harriet turned the deed over on the table, crease up.

"And?" Bea said.

"And I have a name."

"Whose name, dear?"

"Not on the phone."

Harriet looked at the pencil line, at the last entry, at the farm on the valley road.

"Harriet Ainsworth, you're frightening me."

"I know. Sit down with Sam and I'll say it once, with the records in front of you."

Sam said nothing for a moment. "Does it hold up?"

"If a court says so. I don't know that yet. I know it's true."

"Huh," Sam said.

"Harriet—" Bea began.

"Tomorrow," Harriet said, and hung up before she could take it back.