"Well, look who came back."
Lillian Gaines said it from the wingback chair by the window, both hands wrapped around a can of Cheerwine. Eleanor Vance set her tote bag on the carpet and took the chair across from her.
"I said I might."
"People say a lot of things."
Wednesday had come in cold, and the sign-in sheet at the front desk still carried her name in October's ink. Somebody had taken file box 93-118 out of the library's lower archive between Friday afternoon and Tuesday morning. The town's own copy of the Blackwood Mountain Preserve file had already been pared down to one withdrawal slip. Whatever that plan once contained now lived in a single place: a chair by a window at the Laurel Ridge Assisted Living Center.
"I brought you something." Eleanor opened the tote. "Lemon cookies. The kind with the icing, from the Food Lion."
Lillian set the Cheerwine on the windowsill. "You didn't drive out here for cookies."
"No. I came to ask about the old days."
"Which old days?"
"The busy ones. Before the flood, when developers were coming up the mountain every other week with a plat rolled under one arm."
Lillian's chin came up an inch. "Well, nobody ever asked me about that."
"I'm asking."
"Thirty years, and not one soul." She smoothed the blanket over her knees. "You want the whole list?"
"I'd settle for the ones you remember."
A woman in a cardigan appeared in the doorway with both hands on a walker. "Who's this, then?"
"Bernice Kessler, you're letting the cold in," Lillian said.
"Eleanor Vance. I'm a friend of Lillian's."
"Mm." Bernice looked her over. "Lillian, you didn't eat your lunch."
"I ate the pudding."
"You ate the pudding." Bernice rolled the walker around and squeaked off down the hall.
Lillian waited until the wheels stopped. "Where was I?"
"You were about to make me a list."
Eleanor had three questions on the legal pad in her lap and a rule about asking them in order, the widest one first. Nobody hands over a boundary line before they have told you about the weather.
"Whitfield," Lillian said. "Harrison Whitfield, out of Charlotte. White Stetson hat. Drove a Cadillac the color of a new nickel and ran up a month's bill at the Mountain View Motor Court out on Route 70."
"Was he the only one?"
"Goodness, no. There was a Greensboro man with a golf course in his head and a pair of brothers from Asheville selling lots off the ridge road. Four proposals in two years. This town had never seen the like."
"And the Blackwood Mountain Preserve."
Lillian's hands went still on the blanket. "You've been reading the minutes."
"I have. I'd rather hear it from somebody who was in the room."
"I was in the room for all of it. Front row, third seat from the aisle." She reached for the can again. "The machine in the lobby sells these for eighty-five cents. Brenda keeps two in the activities-room refrigerator so I don't have to walk that far."
Brenda came in then with a tray — coffee for two and the lemon cookies arranged on a saucer. "You're not supposed to have both, Miss Lillian."
"Both what?"
"Coffee and that soda. It's on the diet sheet."
"Then leave the coffee and take the soda."
"You'll drink both and blame me."
"I will," Lillian said. "That's what I keep you for."
Brenda set the tray between them and pulled the door half shut behind her.
"September of ninety-three," Lillian said, picking up the coffee. "I remember the month because the courtroom was still hot. Silas Blackwood stood at that podium with a drawing rolled up under his arm and talked for twenty minutes about tax base and new school buses."
"Was he alone?"
"Whitfield stood beside him. It was Silas who did the talking."
"And Thomas?"
"Against it." Lillian said it flatly. "Don't let anyone in this town tell you otherwise."
"How against it?"
Eleanor watched her set the cup down and fold her hands.
"He took that same podium two weeks later and said the ridge wasn't going anywhere while he had breath in him. Those were his words. I wrote them in my own notebook that night."
"Did people agree with him?"
"Half of them. The other half wanted the tax base, and you know how that goes." Lillian smiled without much warmth. "They argued about it at the Piggly Wiggly. They argued about it at the Baptist church supper. The two brothers fell out over it, and that was the show for a while."
"Fell out where?"
"Everywhere. The feed store. The parking lot after church. My own office, once." Her mouth closed on it the way a door closes, and Eleanor watched the change come over her face — the small shift she had learned to read on old maps, where one line tells you which side of the fence you are standing on.
She steered, deliberately, the way she had planned it in the car.
"Was there ever a vote?"
"Never got that far."
"So the council turned it down."
"No." Lillian picked the Cheerwine back up. "It was withdrawn. November. I stamped the slip myself."
Lillian turned the can a quarter turn on the tray.
"The town's copy still has the slip. It doesn't have anything else."
"Then the town's copy is what the town kept."
"And that was before the flood."
"Months before." Lillian put the cup down hard enough to click. "People in this town will tell you the flood killed that project. The flood didn't kill it. It was dead and buried by Christmas of ninety-three."
"That sounds like Thomas's doing."
"It sounds like it."
Down the hall a television audience laughed at something, and a cart rolled past with somebody's lunch.
"I read that slip a dozen times," Eleanor said. "Withdrawn by applicant. An applicant can withdraw for any reason, or for none at all."
"Thomas didn't hate a building." Lillian set the saucer straight. "He let the timber crew take the south slope in ninety-two and never said a word about it. And Silas wanted that ridge developed so badly he could taste it. He'd been talking about it since their daddy died. It was this plan Thomas wouldn't have, and he said so to anybody who'd listen."
"Did he say why?"
"He kept a roll of drawings in his truck." Lillian leaned forward in the wingback and let her voice drop into the register she kept for the good parts. "It was withdrawn because Thomas found something." She lowered her voice conspiratorially. "An error in the developer's survey that invalidated the whole thing. He was going to present his findings at the next council meeting."
Eleanor wrote it down word for word, and in the margin beside it she printed two words she had no file for: survey error.
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