Chapter 15 of 19The Flood Spooked Him

The planning file was gone, stolen off a library shelf sometime that weekend, and all that remained of it in Laurel Ridge was red pencil on old linen. Eleanor Vance unrolled the tracing across her own kitchen table on Monday morning. The fifty acres lay exactly on the 1995 county line. Without a witness who saw the original, it proved nothing.

She had finished the drawing Friday night and had not touched it since.

Grace Miller called before the coffee went cold.

"The council minutes list an address for the applicant," Grace said. "The Ridgeview Inn, on Main Street. He used it on every filing that year."

"Harrison Whitfield."

"From Charlotte. And he never bought a house here."

"A man buying fifty acres doesn't live in a hotel for a year."

Eleanor reached for the pencil she kept by the stove and turned the tracing so the north corner faced her.

"I checked the state index too. He filed a corporation in April of 1993 called Blackwood Mountain Development, and I made you a copy of the page."

"Did it ever take title to anything?"

"Nothing in this county. I went through the deeds and the plats."

A car went by on Poplar Street, slow, and neither of them remarked on it.

"Thank you, Grace."

"Eleanor. Mariah came in Friday and asked for the council minutes. The same book."

Eleanor looked at the telephone after she hung up, then dialed the Ridgeview Inn.

"Ridgeview."

"This is Eleanor Vance, on Poplar Street, doing historical work for the county, and I wonder whether you still keep guest registers from the early nineties."

"Honey, we've changed hands twice since then. Books like that went out with the mattresses."

Eleanor shifted the receiver to her other ear and waited.

"Is anyone still around who worked here in ninety-three?"

"Mrs. Ledbetter waited tables, but she moved to Florida in 2011."

"Thank you. You've been kind."

The inn had kept nothing. Nobody there could say when Harrison Whitfield arrived or when he left, and the only paper on her table that carried his name was the photocopy Grace had made of the council minutes.

She rolled the tracing into the cardboard tube she had bought Friday at Coon's Hardware for $3.29 and walked next door, past the frost that still held on the north side of the fence.

Owen Brady opened the door in his socks and waved her toward the kitchen, where the percolator had been going since six, a Piggly Wiggly bag stood open on the counter, and a plate of Sunday's biscuits sat under a dish towel. He was sixty-four, eleven years out of a practice that had covered three counties.

When she unrolled the linen he moved his mug an inch clear of the edge and folded his arms, and he did not say anything until she had smoothed the last corner down.

"Walk me through it," he said.

"The base is the 1993 survey. Mr. Hayes drew it on linen." Eleanor touched each corner in turn. "Everything in black is what the tract looked like the year before the flood."

"The red?"

"The 1995 county line. I traced it off the assessor's map with a straightedge and laid it on top of the black."

Owen bent closer. His reading glasses swung forward on their cord.

"They match."

"Within the width of the pencil. A surveyor with a good eye would call them the same line."

"They can't match if the creek moved."

He tapped the bend in the black line and sat back.

"The creek never moved. You told me so yourself on Friday."

Owen pushed his glasses back up his nose.

"Then the water didn't change the line."

"That is what the drawing says." She left it there, because a drawing proves only what its maker can explain.

"There's more." She took a folded page from her coat pocket and smoothed it beside the linen. "The estate file Doreen pulled for me lists everything Thomas Blackwood owned when he died. There is not one acre of land on it."

"Opened when?"

"February 1995. A man who drowned in October owned no property by February."

Owen read to the bottom of the page and set his mug on the corner to keep it from curling.

"Where do fifty acres go in four months?"

"Onto his brother's side of the line. The 1995 tax map carries a note in the margin. Two words. Per S. Blackwood."

Owen looked at the red line for a while.

"What was the project called?"

"Blackwood Mountain Preserve. File 93-118. Presented to the town council in September 1993 by Silas Blackwood and a developer out of Charlotte."

"Harrison Whitfield," Owen said.

Eleanor wrote the name at the top of a clean page.

"You remember him."

"I remember him, and I have been trying to place that name since the first time you said it." He pulled a chair out and sat down. "Now I can."

"To be specific, I need what you saw. And when."

Owen rubbed the side of his jaw and answered slowly.

"He was everywhere that fall, the Legion hall and the school gym and the trout supper at the Ridgeview, and he bought coffee for the whole counter at the diner and told everybody what this county would look like in ten years."

"What did he look like?"

"Tall. Good coat. He carried a brochure with a drawing of a lodge on the cover and a gold gatehouse at the bottom of the road."

Eleanor wrote three words in her notebook: lodge, gatehouse, brochure.

"And Silas?"

"Silas never left his side. They came into my office in October with a petition for the water line extension and wanted my name under theirs."

"What did you tell them?"

"That I don't lend my name out."

Eleanor wrote that down too.

"Did Whitfield ever own any part of the Blackwood tract?"

"Not that I know of."

"The record agrees with you. There is no deed to his company anywhere in this county, and the fifty acres went onto Silas's side of the line, not to a corporation from Charlotte."

"So the developer was a salesman."

Owen looked at the hatched parcel again, and his mouth pulled to one side.

"A salesman with a plan the town had on file and lost. I found the withdrawal slip. Withdrawn by applicant, November 1993."

"That's before the flood."

"Months before it. Somebody pulled that file and kept it pulled."

Eleanor laid her pencil in the crease of the notebook.

"Then why is the library box gone now?"

"Because the plat still matters to somebody."

Owen moved his mug aside.

"One more thing. Where did Whitfield stay while he was here? Grace found an address in the minutes."

"The Ridgeview Inn. The room over the porch."

"I called them this morning. They don't keep a register going back that far."

Owen's brow furrowed.

"He vanished."

"Checked out of the inn the day after they found Thomas's body and was never seen in Laurel Ridge again. We all assumed the flood spooked him."

Eleanor boxed the date on the inventory page and closed her notebook. A man who left town the day after Thomas Blackwood's body came out of the water had not been frightened by rain.