Chapter 16 of 19Nobody Asks About Two Acres

The fifty acres had been taken from a dead man's estate with one signature, and Eleanor Vance meant to draw that theft so plainly that nobody in Laurel Ridge could wave it off as a flood's doing. She had the 1993 linen plat stretched across the left end of the long table, the 1995 survey across the right, and a sheet of clear acetate laid over both.

The map room of the Laurel Ridge Historical Society had been a parlor once, and the plaster medallion where the chandelier hung was still up in the ceiling. Two blocks east, the courthouse clock read twenty past nine. Rain came at the tall windows in slow, fat drops.

She squared the plat, taped the corners down with low-tack tape from Coon's Hardware — three forty-nine a roll — and marked the two points both documents agreed on: the stump of the courthouse oak, and the granite outcrop above the spring branch. Between those two points the county had drawn one boundary in 1993 and a different one in 1995, and everything Eleanor needed to know lived in the space between them.

She had just laid her scale ruler across the acetate when Mariah Blackwood-Cates came in with a mug in each hand.

"You've been at this since seven."

"Six-forty."

Mariah set the mug at the far corner of the table, well clear of the tape. "That's the 1993 plat under your tape."

"It is."

Mariah looked at the table a moment longer than she needed to. "My uncle paid for that closet. He paid for the furnace last winter, too."

"I heard that."

"He called me Sunday. He said you'd been out to Caleb Hale's place."

"I had."

Eleanor kept her pencil moving along the acetate. What she was tracing did not care about Sunday.

"He stood on Main Street in 1996 and told half the town my father stole his fence line."

"He was civil with me."

"He's never civil." Mariah went to the door. "I'm not asking you to stop."

"I know you're not."

"I'm asking you to be careful with the loaned material."

The door clicked shut. Eleanor reached for a fresh sheet of acetate and started again from the oak stump.

She worked in pencil first, because pencil can be lifted. On the lower sheet she traced the 1993 line in blue: from the courthouse oak, along the old fence, past the outcrop, out to the ridge above Old Mill Creek. Then she laid the upper sheet over the 1995 survey and drew the new line in red.

For the first mile the two drawings disagreed in one place only, and that place was the fifty acres — straight, parallel, north pasture and mixed hardwoods. Then blue and red came together at the spring branch and ran along the old stone wall, line over line, clear to the far corner of the pasture.

And then the red line left.

It bore off south-southeast, away from the wall, away from the creek, away from the ridgeline, away from every feature a boundary has any business following. It held that course, turned east-northeast, held that, then came back north and rejoined the blue line on the far side of the outcrop, as though it had walked around something it would rather not touch.

Eleanor set the scale down. She laid the dot grid over the pocket and worked the figures a second time.

A hair under two acres. Two acres of broom sedge and broken granite on a hillside where good timber stood a stone's throw away, drawn into Silas Blackwood's deed by three surveyed courses that gained him nothing a farmer could name, and that put the old iron pin in the middle of his pasture with no boundary line within reach of it.

She thought of the faint pencil on the back of the 1993 map. T.B. to check survey marker #7 — discrepancy? Thomas had written it. Someone had tried to rub it out.

She picked up the phone.

"History room."

"Grace, it's Eleanor. I need the 1948 Blackwood plat."

"Give me a minute. It's in the oversize drawer."

Eleanor listened to a drawer roll out, then paper unfold.

"All right. What am I looking for?"

"The north line. Read it to me the way it's written."

"'Thence with the north line of the said tract to an iron pin, set in granite, at the outcrop of the same.'"

Eleanor wrote the words down even though she already had them.

"At the outcrop."

"Is that wrong?"

"It's exactly right, and that's the trouble. Marker seven is a corner."

"And the 1995 survey puts it inside the pasture."

A chair creaked at the other end of the call.

"Somebody drew around it."

"Somebody drew around it."

"Why would a surveyor do that?"

"Because a corner you can find is a corner somebody will use."

A car went past with its wipers still going.

"You're going to say this out loud to somebody."

"Tomorrow."

Eleanor heard the drawer slide shut again.

"Not to Mariah."

"No."

"Be careful. That's her building you're drawing in."

"I know whose building it is."

The rain quit around five, and Eleanor worked until the windows went black. She rolled the two acetates and the base drawing into a cardboard tube that had held a county plat for twenty years, and at seven she carried the tube next door.

Owen Brady had his porch light on and two bottles of Cheerwine on the rail. Between the chairs sat a plate of pimento cheese sandwiches on white bread, cut on the diagonal.

"You're carrying that tube like a subpoena."

"It's finished."

"Sit. Eat half a sandwich and show me."

She spread the drawing on the porch table and weighted the corners with the sugar bowl and a bottle.

"Blue is 1993. Red is 1995."

"Your line bulges out here, by the rock."

"It does."

Owen came to stand over the table.

"What's in the bulge?"

"A granite outcrop and an iron pin."

"Marker seven."

"Marker seven."

Owen said nothing, and a truck went by at the bottom of the hill.

"But the fifty acres are at the north end. That's what your tax maps showed me."

"That's what I thought too, until this morning. The fifty acres came off Thomas for money. What I proved today is different."

"Different how?"

"The line went around something."

Owen took his glasses off and polished them on his sleeve.

"Around what?"

"Around the one monument on that hillside that could contradict him. If nobody can find the pin, nobody can re-run the old line, and the old line was the only witness Thomas had."

"So why take fifty acres to hide two?"

"Nobody argues about two acres. Fifty acres gets argued about at the council and in the paper for thirty years. Nobody argues about two acres, because nobody sees two acres. He wrapped a rock in a theft the whole town was already shouting about."

Owen set his glasses back on and leaned over the drawing again.

"Thomas's note said to check marker number seven."

"He wasn't guessing. He had found something, and Silas knew he had found it."

"You're certain?"

"I'm certain about the line. I'm not certain about the pin. It's on posted land behind a gate, and I can't go look."

The porch light ticked, and a moth worked at it.

"Then what can you do?"

"Put it in front of somebody who can't unsee it. I'm taking it to Ben Carter in the morning. Before Mariah."

"She'll take it badly."

"She'll be right to."