Chapter 21 of 25Effective Upon Adjournment

The email arrived at 8:41, while Maeve Higgins was still on the road coming down out of the Blue Ridge toward Oakhaven, and its first line said the board would meet at six that evening to vote on her immediate dismissal for cause.

She took the next exit and pulled into the Sheetz outside Strasburg, engine off, windows down. Gas was $3.41 a gallon. A man in a ball cap was filling two red cans in the bed of his truck, and the smell crossed the lot to her open window.

David Chen had sent the agenda at 8:38 and the note at 8:41, which told her he'd had the whole thing written and attached before he typed a single word addressed to her. One item: Consideration and possible action regarding the immediate termination of the Director for cause. The cause ran to three paragraphs — the failure of her heritage site claim, the invoice for the survey that had refuted it, and a resulting loss of confidence among the board and the donors.

Twelve days earlier she had stood in the carriage house and asked them for time. This was the answer.

Until 8:41 her plan had been the regular June meeting and nothing more dramatic than that. The agenda there allowed for new business, she would have had weeks to build the room, and nobody could have called it a stunt. That plan ended somewhere east of Strasburg.

She drove the rest of the way with the radio off. The Forester rattled behind the dash, a noise she had stopped hearing years ago and heard the whole way home.

Oakhaven at twenty to ten: maples heavy and full, the air already damp ahead of the storms the forecast kept promising. She parked behind the carriage house and came up through the propagation beds, where Leo Ramirez stood at the end of a row with a hose coiled over one elbow and the ground around the water valve still dark from Monday's break.

"You're back," he said.

"Ten minutes ago."

"Sheryl Potts called my cell at seven this morning. Before I'd had coffee." He let the hose drop. "She wanted to know if I thought you'd resign."

Maeve set her bag on the end of a bench. "What did you tell her?"

"That you don't quit." He wiped his hands down his jeans. "Was I lying?"

"No."

"Six o'clock tonight. That's what she said."

"That's what the email says."

Leo looked at the puddle, then at her. "In the spring you told me you had something you couldn't talk about. Before the survey. Before any of this. I've been standing in this mud a week trying to guess what it is."

"You'll know soon enough."

"So at six I'll hear it. Or they'll fire you before you get the first sentence out, and it won't matter what you had." He said the next part fast, the way he said things when he was right and knew it. "Here's the thing, though. They can fire you at that meeting. They can't unfire you after. Whatever it is, get it into the room before the vote comes up. Not during. Before."

She stood there a beat longer than she needed to, then went inside.

Her office smelled of the old radiator and the lemon oil Tessa used on the furniture. She left the door open, set her bag on the desk, and called Clara on speaker while she drank Friday's coffee cold out of a mug she'd forgotten to take home.

"Maeve. I've been sitting by the telephone." Clara's voice had the crisp edge it carried when she had found something. "I was at the courthouse in Winchester when they unlocked the doors. The Frederick County marriage index, 1923. Henry Vance married the ninth of June, to a woman named Dorothy Pell."

"Was anyone else on the record?"

"That's the part. The witness line reads Eleanor Vance, sister of the groom." A drawer slid shut on Clara's end of the line. "In a clerk's hand, but it's her. She stood up at her own brother's wedding fourteen months before she took a dead woman's name, and she signed for it."

Maeve set the mug down without drinking from it.

"Do you want me at the meeting?" Clara asked.

"I don't know that the board will let you past the door."

"Then I'll sit in the hall with my pocketbook on my knees and be a witness to whatever they do to you." A pause. "Do you have the photograph with you?"

"It's in the safe."

"Then put it in your purse, dear. Not in a desk drawer. In your purse."

Maeve said she would, and meant it, and the two of them hung up.

For the next hour she did the work on her desk: the survey invoice, the donor letters, the messages from the newspaper she had never returned. The clock over the door went to eleven and then past it.

At noon she walked up to the square for folders, because she could not sit still, and because the walk was ten minutes each way and that was ten minutes she would not spend reading David's email again.

Cole's Hardware smelled like sawdust and bagged fertilizer. Sam Cole stood behind the register with a pencil over his ear and didn't look up until she set the box on the counter.

"Nine manila folders," he said. "And a roll of tape."

"And a roll of tape."

He rang it up and gave her the total. "Nine folders is a lot of paper for a Tuesday."

"It's a lot of Tuesday."

Sam pushed the change across and kept his hand on the counter a moment longer than the transaction required. "Half the square knew about that meeting by nine-thirty this morning. Hank's nephew works the counter at the drugstore."

"It isn't a secret. David saw to that."

"No." He studied her. "You want company in the parking lot? I close at five."

"You don't have to do that."

"I know."

She carried the folders back down Main Street with the wind picking up behind her, and something in the west going gray.

In her office she spun the dial on the safe — 18, then 97, then 24 — and the door came open on the 1912 botany manual, the eleven letters still tied in their blue ribbon, the copies of Abigail Miller's journal pages in a plastic sleeve, and the photograph of the woman with the straight nose and the steady eyes, which had ridden home from Fredericksburg in the zippered pocket of Maeve's bag.

She had not read the whole email. There was a second page she'd skipped at the Sheetz, and she read it now.

Beneath the agenda sat the resolution David intended the board to pass. It fired the director for cause, revoked her signature authority on every account, and ended with a sentence in the same flat type as everything above it: that all books, records, archives, and materials held in the Director's office be transferred to the custody of the Board Chair, effective upon adjournment.

David had a key to her office. He did not have the combination to her safe.

Maeve Higgins laid the letters out across the desk, all eleven of them in their order, and set the photograph on top the way you set down the last card. Then she went down the hall to the copier and ran nine sets of everything, and stapled each set into a folder, and wrote a name on the front of each one.

The meeting was at six. She would be in that room at a quarter to six, and she would not wait to be recognized.