Chapter 17 of 19The Line Steps Inland

The fifty acres had belonged to Thomas Blackwood in 1993 and they belonged to Silas Blackwood now, and the only paper that would move them back was a deed the county said the flood had taken. Eleanor Vance unrolled her map across the kitchen table on Poplar Street, set the sugar bowl on one corner to hold it down, and reached for the telephone.

Laurel Ridge, North Carolina, kept its land records in the stone courthouse downtown, and the register's office had told her more than once that the second-half books from 1994 were ruined — soaked, unreadable, gone. Everything she had to set against that was a drawing she had made herself, in pencil, from documents nobody had ever meant to be read together.

"Sheriff's office."

"Good morning. This is Eleanor Vance. I'd like a few minutes with Deputy Carter today, if he can spare them."

"He's on the road. What's it regarding?"

"Land records. He'll know the file."

The radio crackled on the corner of the desk.

"I'll put a note on his desk."

"Thank you."

The woman had not asked her to spell her name. Eleanor hung up and stood by the counter a moment, listening to the furnace come on under the floorboards. Half the town knew who she was by now, and she suspected the other half knew why.

She called the library next.

"History room. This is Grace."

"Grace, it's Eleanor. Is the 1993 linen survey logged out to me, or to the society?"

"To the society." Her chair creaked. "Is something wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong. I'm carrying it downtown, and I want the ledger to show where it went."

"I can write that in now."

"Write it in pencil."

Paper rustled at the other end. "It's a ledger, Eleanor. Pencil doesn't last."

"It only has to last until suppertime."

"You're taking it to Deputy Carter."

Grace said it quietly, as though the shelves were listening.

"I am."

"Then I'll be vague if Mrs. Cates asks."

"Be boring instead. Boring doesn't get remembered."

At Coon's Hardware she bought a cardboard tube for four dollars and change. By the time she parked behind the courthouse, a cold mist had settled over the town, the kind November leaves on the Blue Ridge until the wind decides otherwise.

The sheriff's office occupied a short hall at the back of the courthouse, past the tax window and a corkboard of foreclosure notices, and it smelled of wet coats. Ben Carter met her at the door of the small interview room with a paper cup in each hand.

"Mrs. Vance." He held one out to her. "Break room coffee, and I apologize for it in advance."

"Thank you for seeing me, Deputy."

"You said land records. From the length of that tube, I expected the whole county."

"One sheet."

He cleared the table with the side of his forearm, and she unrolled the map and weighted the corners with a stapler and a roll of masking tape. On the counter behind him sat a white Krispy Kreme box somebody had left there, a doughnut and a smear of glaze still in it. The two boundary lines ran together for most of their length, hugging the branch and the ridge road, and parted only at the southeast corner where the ground fell away toward the creek.

She had drawn it over several evenings at the kitchen table, and the paper was already soft at the corners from being rolled and unrolled under the lamp.

"All right. Talk me through it."

"The dark line is 1993. Bartholomew Hayes drew it, and the society holds the linen original."

"Go on."

"The light line is what the assessor's maps show now, redrawn from the recorded survey. Same calls, same distances, different ink."

"And between them?"

"Fifty acres that were Thomas Blackwood's in 1993 and are Silas Blackwood's today."

Ben leaned over the table with his elbows planted and followed the light line from the spring branch, past the courthouse oak, down to the creek. Where the line jumped inland and ran wide, he stopped and put his thumb on it.

"What's that?"

"That's what I came to show you." Eleanor laid one finger beside the jog. "The new line steps inland here and wanders two acres out of its way. Nothing in the deed calls for it. Nothing in the ground asks for it. Unless you know what it's stepping around."

"Marker number seven."

"You've heard of it."

"Mr. Blackwood mentioned it in the same breath as your name."

Ben set his cup down on the corner of the map and left it there.

"Then he knows."

"He knows you've been asking questions. That isn't the same thing."

Rain ticked against the window.

"In 1948 the county set an iron pin in a granite outcrop and called it the northeast corner of the Blackwood Tract. Hayes carried that pin forward in 1993, and it was still the corner. On the survey recorded after the flood, it sits out in open pasture with nothing to mark it."

Ben straightened and studied the paper without saying anything, and she let him. The radiator knocked and quit.

"I've worked this county a long while," he said at last, "and I have never seen a boundary walk off like that. Fifty acres switch sides after a flood. A pin ends up in a field by itself. It's the strangest land transfer I've ever put my eyes on. And I've heard the rest of it around town, same as everybody — a Charlotte man, a plan that folded, a family that doesn't discuss any of it."

"Then you see it."

"I see it." He picked up the cup, drank, and set it down. "Now let me tell you what I don't see."

"Please."

"The deed," Ben said. "The one that made the change." He tapped the paper with one knuckle. "Filed in the second-half book of 1994. The register's office says that book was destroyed in the flood."

"They say so."

"They say so." He squared the map's corner with the edge of the table. "That's the record, and the record is what a judge reads. What I have on this table is a drawing."

"Made from the linen original."

"Made by you." He said it without heat. "That's how a defense lawyer would put it, and that's how a judge would hear it. A reconstruction isn't an instrument. Nobody's title changes because somebody redrew a line beautifully."

Eleanor kept her hands still on the table.

"I have the assessor's notation. Per S. Blackwood, on the change."

"Initials in the margin of a tax map prove a change was asked for. They don't prove who filed what, or when, or that anyone lied about it."

He drank the last of his coffee while she waited.

"I have the clerk who took the filing. Lillian Gaines is alive and clear-headed."

"She is. She told me the same thing she told you. Hard year, ruined books, best forgotten."

"Then ask her a different question."

"Such as?"

"Not which year. Who walked a survey into her office."

Ben took a gas receipt out of his shirt pocket and wrote on the back of it.

"That's a fair question," he said. "I'll ask it."

"And if the answer is a dead end?"

"Then the deed is a dead end, and there's no case in this county."

Neither of them said anything for a moment.

"One more thing." He turned the map toward himself. "If you find the paper — the recorded instrument, or the survey that came into the office with it — you bring it to me, and I'll walk it across the street to the district attorney myself."

"And if it doesn't exist?"

"It exists or it doesn't. That's all of it."

He stood, came around the table, rolled the map with both hands, and held it out to her.

"It's a great theory, Mrs. Vance," Ben said, handing the map back to her. "But a theory is all it is. Legally, Silas Blackwood owns that land fair and square. My hands are tied."