Chapter 19 of 19Better Left Buried

They had one witness. Lillian Gaines was the only person alive who had watched Silas Blackwood walk into the clerk's office with a deed in his own name, and she had told Eleanor on Thursday that she would say so to Deputy Carter if anyone asked her to, which meant everything Eleanor Vance had assembled since October now rested on a woman in a room at the Laurel Ridge Assisted Living Center and on getting her words written down and signed before anyone learned she meant to give them.

Friday morning the notebook lay open on the kitchen table of the bungalow on Poplar Street, the coffee gone cold beside it, and Eleanor worked down the page in order: the day the courthouse office reopened, the survey already drawn, the deed in Silas Blackwood's own name handed to a clerk too shaken to ask him why. Nothing on the page had changed overnight. That was the trouble with a statement nobody had signed.

Outside it was cold for November, with the hard sky that follows a heavy frost. Down at the Ingles on the bypass the Christmas trees were already stacked in the far corner of the lot, and turkeys had dropped to sixty-nine cents a pound. Eleanor had a pound of sausage in the icebox and no plan for Monday beyond the one she did not want.

The phone rang while she was still at the table.

"Have you seen the agenda?" Grace Miller said.

"For what?"

Eleanor pushed the cold coffee an inch to the side and squared the notebook in front of her, though Grace could not see the page through the line.

"Monday. The society board. There's a new item under business. 'Archives and Facilities.'"

"Read it to me."

"'The director will bring a recommendation regarding the pre-flood mapping project and the society's holdings.'" Grace let that sit. "That's the whole of it. No language attached."

Eleanor wrote the wording in the margin of the notebook before she answered.

"Somebody put it there on purpose."

"Somebody with a phone and a checkbook. Do you still have the tracing?"

"Rolled up in the back room, behind the coats."

It had stood back there since Tuesday, past the water heater, under an old blanket, and she looked at the doorway of the back room while she waited for Grace to say what she made of that.

"Then leave it there," Grace said. "I'll ask around about who made the request. Carefully."

"Don't ask anyone who owes him anything."

"Nobody in that building doesn't," Grace said, and hung up.

Eleanor carried her cup to the sink and called the Historical Society, and Mariah Blackwood-Cates picked up.

"Mariah, it's Eleanor."

"Eleanor." Paper moved on the other end. "I was going to call you today."

"Then you've seen the agenda."

Eleanor turned her back to the window and leaned against the counter with the receiver warm against her ear, waiting to hear which version of the week Mariah had decided to give her.

"It came through the board chair. I'm not free to discuss a donor conversation before it reaches the board."

"Is it a donor conversation?"

"You'll have to let me handle it as I handle everything else." She said it as though the room were listening. "It isn't personal."

"Mariah, if this is about my project, I would rather hear it from you than from your uncle."

"There's nothing to hear yet," Mariah said. "I'll call you Monday."

She had just set the receiver down when someone knocked, unhurried, at the front door. Through the glass she saw a gray overcoat and a dark car idling at the curb with a driver waiting.

Silas Blackwood stood on her porch with his hat in his hand, and he apologized for the hour before she had said a word back to him.

"Mrs. Vance. I owe you an apology for coming up your walk unannounced."

"Mr. Blackwood."

"I was in town, and I found I was curious about this house. I had heard it had a good porch."

"It does."

"You have kept it beautifully. The trim, the paint on the sills. A person can tell when a house has been looked after." He glanced past her, into the room. "May I?"

She stepped back and let him in.

He went as far as the kitchen and stood reading her shelves — the county atlases, the surveyor's manuals with their cracked spines, the row of field books she had picked up at estate sales over the years. His hat stayed in his hand. He sat only when she pulled out a chair, and he chose the one with its back to the window, which put the light in her eyes.

"Your work at the society," he said. "The session books from the church register. My mother's people are in those pages."

"It was mostly the scanner's work."

"Then the scanner had good help." He set the hat on his knee. "I have decided to fund the archival system Mariah has been asking for. The scanner, the shelving, a room that holds a steady temperature. Five figures, the whole of it, and no plaque on the wall unless she wants one."

"That is generous."

Eleanor let the silence stand.

"There is a condition," he said. "I will say it plainly, because you would only ask me to repeat it. On Monday, I would like your project concluded. A short written conclusion, accepted and filed. The volunteers moved on to something else."

"You want the society to publish a finding that the old surveys were wrong."

"I want it concluded. In my experience, a conclusion looks like a finding."

He had not raised his voice.

"The county's deed books for that year are gone," she said. "The clerk's office told me the flood took them. If that is true, a map from 1993 is a curiosity."

"A curiosity in a drawer and a fact in a collection are two different things." He said it easily. "I have spent a long life around paper, Eleanor. I know what it is worth."

"The water came up the courthouse stairs," she said. "That is what I was told."

"It did. Everything in that basement went under with it." He settled the hat on his knee. "You may take that as settled."

She had one date in the notebook that would not go with it: the week the office reopened and the water was down, Lillian Gaines stamping a deed into one of those books and asking whether it would be entered by Friday. Two things could not both be true. A curiosity in a drawer. A finding in a collection. The pasture had never been what he was protecting, and neither was the pin in the granite.

What he was afraid of, after all these years, was a page.

"You have been out to see Lillian Gaines," Silas said.

"I have."

"She is a treasure. I hope she is comfortable out there." He turned the hat over in his hands. "You have good neighbors on this street. Doctor Brady. The young deputy, who has been more than fair to you. I would hate to see your winters spent down in that little room with the microfilm machine, chasing a thing that is not there."

"You will excuse me if I keep looking."

"That is your right." He stood, and he did not offer his hand. "It is for the best, Eleanor." His smile did not reach his eyes. "Some histories are better left buried. For everyone's sake."

He took a card from his breast pocket and laid it on the table beside her notebook.

"Let Mariah know what you decide."