"He cannot mean this," Martha Jenkins said, holding the memo by one corner the way a person holds a wet umbrella.
Harriet Ainsworth took the page from her and read it twice. Monday morning, twenty past eight, and the second floor of Havenwood Town Hall smelled of the furnace burning off summer dust. Through the tall window, frost sat hard on the town green, silvering the grass and the little schoolhouse where the Historical Society kept its doors.
"Read it out loud," Martha said.
"A complete and itemized inventory of all artifacts held by the Havenwood Historical Society, including provenance, condition, and estimated fair market value." Harriet turned the sheet over. The back was blank. "To be submitted within seven calendar days of receipt."
"Seven days."
"So he says."
"That's more than a thousand objects."
"One thousand two hundred and forty-one, if the accession book is current."
"It isn't."
"Then more than that."
Martha sat down and did not open her computer. "He's burying you, Hattie. You're the one who knows where everything is. Now you'll be down in the vault for a month, and the permits will pile up on my desk."
Harriet folded the memo and put it in her bag. "He asked for the paperwork. We have the records. They aren't the same thing."
She put on her coat and walked. The shortcut took her past the bandstand and past the Founder's Day bunting that nobody had remembered to take down, the red, white and blue gone limp and faded in the cold. A hard frost had finished off the geraniums in the barrel outside the schoolhouse door.
Bea Chandler was at the long table with the accession book open and her glasses hanging from a ribbon.
"You look like a woman carrying bad news," Bea said. "Sit down, dear. Put it on the table."
Harriet put it on the table. Bea read slowly, moving her lips at the long words.
"Seven days," she said at last.
"Seven."
"For the entire collection."
"The entire collection."
Bea set the page down and finished her tea. "The churn. The sap yoke. The brass bell we took out of this room the morning the school consolidated. My great-aunt Ruth's wedding quilt, which lives in the north case and will die there." She tapped the memo with one finger. "Provenance. Half of our things walked in with a note that says 'from the attic.'"
"He wants fair market value too," Harriet said.
"For the churn."
"For the churn."
Bea laughed once, high and short, and then stopped looking amused. She looked at the flat files along the wall, at the shelf of accession logs, at the card boxes stacked three deep under the window.
"Then we give him exactly what he asked for," she said.
"Meaning?"
"Meaning every card. Every log. Every gift letter and every penciled note Esther Hagerty wrote before she retired. Copies, mind you. He doesn't get one original, not after the business with the school register in the winter of '82." Bea leaned in and lowered her voice, the way she did when the story mattered. "He said complete and itemized. He never said sorted. He never said legible."
Harriet looked at the boxes. "That's six thousand cards."
"Forty years of them, dear. Give or take."
They started with the card boxes, because Bea insisted the cards were the backbone. Accessions 104 through 288 were in Bea's own round hand. Everything after that belonged to Esther Hagerty, whose pencil had gone gray as dishwater. The first hundred odd cards were in a third hand nobody living could name, tied in bundles with rubber bands gone brittle as old string.
"One butter churn," Bea read aloud, "wood, cracked lid, gift of the Whitcomb family."
"Keep going."
"I intend to. One sap yoke, iron, found in the Beaudry barn. One school bell, brass, from this building. Condition: good, considering."
The Society's copier quit after four hundred pages with a noise like a lawn mower swallowing a stick. Harriet carried the boxes the short way to Town Hall and finished on the town's machine in the basement, the one with the sign taped above it in capital letters. PLEASE DO NOT COPY PERSONAL ITEMS.
At half past noon, Doreen from O'Connell's knocked at the schoolhouse door with a paper bag.
"Bea Chandler, you have not eaten since I don't know when." She set two foil trays on the corner of the table. "Monday special. Meatloaf and mashed, eleven ninety-five, and I'm not charging you for the coffee."
"Thank you, Doreen," Harriet said.
"She's the one who forgets," Doreen said, and let the door shut behind her.
At half past one, Harriet drove to Holloway Hardware for boxes. Sam Holloway stood at the counter with a pencil behind his ear.
"How many?" he asked.
"How many do you have?"
"Nine. Eleven if you count the two with crushed lids."
"I'll take eleven."
"Yup." He wrote it on a pad. "Two seventy-nine apiece. Tape is on the house, since it's for Bea."
"Delivering, actually. To the Town Manager. He's requested a full inventory of the Society's collection."
Sam's pencil stopped moving. "In writing?"
"In writing."
"Keep the memo," he said. "Staple a copy inside the lid of the top box. Take the hand truck. Bring it back Tuesday."
"You think it's a good plan."
"I think he's not wrong that the building costs the town money. Twenty-two thousand a year, give or take."
"No. He isn't wrong about that."
"Then hand him the reason it's worth it," Sam said. "Page by page."
They finished at ten past four. Eleven boxes, taped and stacked, filled the back of Bea's station wagon. She drove around to the Town Hall curb and they made the trips up the granite steps one load at a time. Marcus Thorne's door stood open. He was at his desk with his sleeves rolled and his laptop glowing.
"Harriet." He looked at the box in her arms. "What's this?"
"Copies," she said, and set it on the near corner of his desk.
"Copies of what?"
"Of the inventory you requested."
He stood as Bea came in behind with the second box. She went back down for the third, and Harriet went with her, and by the fourth trip Marcus had stopped saying anything at all. Boxes went on the floor, on the visitor's chair, along the window ledge. The last one went onto the desk itself, level with the bottom of his monitor.
"You had until next Monday," he said.
"I know."
"This is not an inventory. This is a filing cabinet."
"Accession cards, forty years of them, in three hands," Harriet said. "Accession logs, donation letters, condition notes, insurance lists, and the loose pages from the dedication. Four thousand nine hundred and six pages."
"Mrs. Chambers." He nodded at Bea. "This is not necessary."
"Chandler," Bea said. "And yes it is."
Marcus laid both hands flat on the one clear corner of his desk. "Listen. Folks. Nobody in this town wants to hurt the Society. I've read the budget. The heat bill on a building that two hundred people visit a year is a real number, and it's growing. The building is an asset, and assets have to work. I am trying to hold the tax rate flat so a widow on Maple Street doesn't have to sell her house. That is the whole job."
"I understand the job," Harriet said.
"Then help me do it. Give me something usable."
"It's all usable. It's not sorted."
He looked at the mountain of paper. At the rubber bands, the coffee rings on the index cards, Esther Hagerty's gray pencil, the card that still read *one butter churn, cracked lid*. He looked for a long while at the top of his own desk, which he could no longer see.
"Is this some kind of a joke?"
"It is a complete and accurate response to your formal request, Mr. Thorne. As per the record."
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