"Mrs. Vance? It's Grace. Box 93-118 is gone."
Eleanor Vance set her coffee down and reached for the notebook she kept by the toaster. Poplar Street was quiet at eight o'clock, the frost still white on the fence line. That was November in Laurel Ridge. "Say that again, and slowly."
"Planning file ninety-three dash one-eighteen. Blackwood Mountain Preserve." Grace Miller's voice had gone flat and careful, the way it did when something had frightened her. "I went down to the lower-level archive at seven-forty this morning, before we opened. That box was on the shelf Friday at four. This morning the shelf is empty."
"Signed out?"
"No card. No slip. The ledger's clean back to September."
Eleanor looked at her kitchen table, where Monday's withdrawal slip sat under the sugar bowl so the ceiling fan wouldn't take it. Withdrawn by applicant, Nov. 1993. Brown ink, small tidy hand. "Is anything else gone from that row?"
A rustle of paper. "No. Just that one."
"Don't mention it to anybody yet. Not even Mariah."
"She asked again yesterday what you'd been consulting," Grace said. "I told her the 1948 plats. Which is true."
"It is true." Eleanor wrote lower-level archive, Tues., 7:40 on the pad and underlined it twice. "Thank you, Grace. I mean that."
She stayed at the counter after she hung up, working the problem the way she worked any survey. Two explanations covered a missing box. Either someone had misfiled it, or someone had taken it. The ledger was clean and the boxes on either side had not moved, which ruled out the first, and she drew a small X beside it in the margin.
Knuckles rapped the front door. Three easy raps, then a pause. That was Owen Brady's knock exactly.
"Your mail came to me again." He handed over a shoebox. Inside was her electric bill, $96.14, a seed catalog, and a jar of apple butter tucked in among the envelopes. "The butter's from the orchard my sister married into, up in Watauga County."
"You keep feeding me and I'll stop cooking."
"An outcome I have considered." He nodded past her at the notebook. "Busy morning?"
"Someone took a file out of the library archive. One file. The one I needed."
Owen's face changed, not much. "The planning file."
"Box 93-118. The developer's plat." She told him about the withdrawal slip, the empty folder, the clean ledger. "Monday I had a slip of paper with a date on it. Now I don't have the box the paper came out of."
"That's a fact about somebody else's intentions, El. Those are harder to subpoena than deeds."
"I know it. But it narrows things. The town never voted that plan down. I checked the minutes — no hearing, no denial, nothing on the record. Nobody on the council refused it. The applicant pulled it, and pulled it quietly."
"Then somebody didn't want it read." Owen put his hands in his pockets. "What can I do?"
"Nothing yet. Tell me if anyone asks you what I've been doing."
"Nobody has," he said. "Which is itself a little strange."
He was two steps down the walk when a sheriff's cruiser came along Poplar Street and stopped at her curb. Deputy Ben Carter climbed out, no lights, no siren, and stood a moment in the cold with his jacket half zipped, letting Owen pass with a nod.
"Mrs. Vance? Ben Carter. Sorry to drop by unannounced."
"You're not the first this week." She held the screen door. "Coffee's fresh."
"I'll take some, if it's no trouble." He wiped his boots on the mat twice. Thirty-eight years old, and he still did things like that.
He sat at her table with his hat on his knee. "I'll be straight with you, because I think you'd rather have it that way. Mr. Blackwood telephoned the sheriff's office yesterday. He's concerned."
"About what, specifically?"
"He said a volunteer has been stirring up painful memories around town. He named you." Ben sighed. "That's the version he gave the sheriff. Then he asked, friendly, whether the county had any reason to be looking into the Blackwood Tract again."
"And does it?"
"Not that I know of."
"Then let me be clear about what I'm doing." She set his cup in front of him. She'd bought that coffee at the Piggly Wiggly in September, two cans for eleven dollars, and she was down to the last of the second. "I'm a retired land surveyor. I volunteered at the Historical Society to digitize the map collection. Doing it properly means cross-checking our old linen surveys against the assessor's maps and the plats that survived at the Register of Deeds. Slow, dull work, and it leaves this town better records than it has ever had."
"That's all?"
"That's the assignment, and it's what I'm doing." True, entirely true, and she disliked how easy it was to say.
Ben turned the cup a quarter turn. "Somebody at the front desk says they saw you out at Caleb Hale's farm last week."
"Caleb Hale owns a strip that borders the Blackwood Tract. I asked him about an old boundary oak. He was civil. Barely."
"And the assisted living center."
"I've been out to see Lillian Gaines. She's seventy-eight, she was Clerk of Court for twenty-six years, and she remembers that filing system better than anyone alive." Eleanor paused. "Historical societies interview people. The record also shows she told me to let sleeping dogs lie."
"She probably meant it."
"I'm sure she did."
Ben drank. "Did anything in all those maps turn up that a deputy ought to see?"
She thought about the fifty acres, the erased pencil note, the closed bridge, the empty folder. "There's an irregularity of about fifty acres between the 1993 survey and the 1995 valuation map. It carries an explanation I can't verify. That's the whole of it."
"An explanation."
"The flood."
"That's the official story," Ben said, in the voice of a man who had repeated a word too many times. "I have to write this visit up. It's a form, and the form goes in a file with your name on it."
"Then write that I was cooperative."
"I will." He finished the coffee, stood, and settled his hat. At the door he stopped with his hand on the screen and looked out at the street, at the bare maples and Owen's porch light, then back at her. His voice dropped into the register people use when they are no longer on the record.
"Just so you know, Mrs. Vance," he said quietly. "Silas Blackwood doesn't get concerned. He gets results. You be careful."
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