"Mr. Pillsbury's had a hard morning," the aide said. "He thinks it's 1986 and his wife is out in the car waiting on him."
"That's all right," Harriet Ainsworth said. "I'm not here to correct him. I'm here to ask him about a piece of land."
Marcus Thorne's disposition list was due Friday at the close of business, and the Historical Society building sat on the first line of it with a circle drawn around the figure the town spent on the place every year. Twenty-two thousand dollars. Harriet had read that memo often enough to recite the part about assets that no longer serve the public interest without looking at the page. She had two days now, a photocopier, and one man still living who remembered the town's business from before she was born.
The Maple Leaf Assisted Living Facility sat on a shelf of land above the village, where the maples turned a full two weeks ahead of the ones on Main Street. A woman in a fleece vest smoked by the door and did not look up.
The aide slid a sign-in sheet across the counter. TANYA, her name tag read, and under that, ACTIVITIES.
"He'll be glad of company," Tanya said. "Nobody comes on Wednesdays."
"Then I'm glad it's Wednesday."
Harriet signed, handed over the paper bag of cider donuts, and admitted they had cost her eleven dollars at the farm stand, which she had complained about to the girl at the register and then paid anyway.
"Those are the good ones," Tanya said. "He'll eat two and hide the rest in his dresser drawer."
The sunroom held four chairs, a television playing with the sound off, and a radiator that ticked like a clock with a bad gear. George Pillsbury sat by the window in a cardigan with the buttons done up wrong, watching the maples on the ridge come apart into color.
"George. It's Harriet."
He studied her. "You're the clerk. The one who reads the fine print."
"That's the kindest thing anybody's said to me this week."
"Ruth's out in the car," he said then. "She won't honk. She never honks."
"Take your time. She told me to tell you to take your time."
"That's what she always says."
His hands rested flat on the arms of the chair and stayed there. Years ago those same hands had signed every meeting warrant in the building, and now they did not move at all.
He told her about the roof over the records vault, how it had leaked again last week, how he had put a bucket under it himself.
"I'll have Frank look at it," Harriet said.
"You tell him the flashing is shot. He'll know what I mean."
She let him keep the roof for a while. Then she said, "George, I came about the Historical Society land."
His hands went still on the arms of the chair. "That land."
"The green and the schoolhouse, George. It's the founder's ground, all of it."
"It is." He said that part to the window.
"The new manager has our building on a list. He wants to sell it, and the lot under it."
"Then don't let them fool with the deed."
"What deed?"
"The trick deed."
He said it the way a man says the name of a street he has lived on all his life, without hurry, and Harriet leaned forward in her chair.
"Tell me what that means."
"My father called it the trick deed." George watched the window instead of her. "He served on the selectboard nineteen years. He said it to my face more than once and never said another word about it after."
"Trick how?"
"A regular deed says one thing. A trick deed says two."
"Which two?"
"The town got the copy that reads easy." His jaw worked. "There were two of them, and one of them went—"
"One of them went where, George?"
"Did you bring my jacket?"
The radiator ticked. Outside, a man in a canvas jacket raked around the bird feeder and took his time about it.
"Paper doesn't lie," George said. "People write it down wrong, and then everybody believes the wrong thing."
A tray arrived. Oatmeal with maple syrup, and a plastic spoon. He ate two bites, pushed it away, and asked the aide where Ruth had got to.
"Ruth doesn't like me eating late," he said.
Tanya straightened his cardigan. "He'll eat it. He always eats it."
"George." Harriet tried again, quietly. "The founder wrote it down himself?"
"His own hand." For a second he was back. "He had them file it—"
"File it where?"
"Ruth's going to be cross with me."
She waited him out. He drifted into the spring of 1986 and stayed there, talking about a culvert on Ridge Road, a dog he had owned as a boy, a selectboard meeting that ran until dark. Harriet stayed another twenty minutes and told him about the hard frost and the eleven boxes of accession cards she and Bea had carried across the green to Marcus Thorne's office. He nodded along as though it were town business he had missed.
When she stood to go, he patted the back of her hand twice.
"Tell Ruth I'll be right out," he said.
At the front desk, Tanya was sorting papers into a folder.
"You got further with him than his own son does," she said.
"Not far enough."
"There's a box of his things in the back closet," Tanya said. "From when they cleaned out his office at Town Hall. His daughter keeps meaning to come for it."
Harriet stopped with her hand on the door. "Has anybody else asked about that box?"
"Not a soul."
Out in the parking lot, the afternoon had gone gray and cold, and the maples along the drive were dropping leaves onto the windshields. Harriet sat in the car with the engine off and called Beatrice Chandler.
"Harriet, dear. Was it him?"
"It was him for about a minute and a half."
"Well, out with it."
"He said 'trick deed.' Have you ever heard that phrase?"
A pause on the line. "No. And I've read nearly everything in this building twice."
"His father used it like it was common knowledge."
"Then it was, once," Bea said.
"Can you pull the selectboard minutes from the nineteen-thirties?"
"We have them. Back wall, with the school registers." A drawer slid open somewhere behind her voice. "I'll bring the boxes out tonight."
"Don't tell Sam yet."
"Why ever not?"
"Because he'll want to do something about it, and I don't know yet what to tell him."
"That," Bea said, "is the first sensible thing anybody has said all day."
Harriet ended the call, found the Hannaford receipt in her coat pocket, and wrote the words on the back of it with the pen from her console. Trick deed. She read them twice, then a third time, the way she read any record she intended to use.
She had a name for the thing now. The one man who could have told her what it meant was inside the building behind her, asking the aide whether Ruth had brought his jacket.
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