Chapter 20 of 22The Only Interesting Thing

Monday's Historical Society board meeting would end Eleanor Vance's map project unless she found a document before it started, and the probate file was the last record she could reach. Grace Miller had found its index card before the library opened, and she was waiting in the genealogy room of the Laurel Ridge Public Library with two coffees from the Ingles on Main Street and a legal pad ruled into four columns.

Deeds were closed to them. The books for the second half of 1994 were still "lost to the flood," a phrase the clerk's office had worn smooth by saying it to anyone who asked.

Eleanor sat down across the table and turned the pad around to read it.

"Every column is a different door," Grace said. "Tax maps, planning files, plat books. We've opened all of them."

"We keep asking where the land went." Eleanor uncapped her pen and squared the pad in front of her. "We've never asked what Thomas Blackwood wanted done with it."

Grace's hand stopped above her coffee. "He died without a will. I'm nearly certain of that."

"Nearly."

She drew the card drawer toward her, walked a finger down the Bs, and checked the typed line against the label before she said anything else.

"I believe the index said the estate was administered," she said. "There's a difference between a man who dies intestate and a man whose will nobody filed."

"Say that one more time."

Grace slid an index card across the table. "There's a probate file either way. Thomas Blackwood. Estate. It sits in the Clerk of Superior Court's vault at the courthouse, not in the Register of Deeds."

Eleanor read the card and set it down. "Different office, different clerk, different shelf."

"And nobody looked, because probate sounds like money. We've been chasing dirt."

"No one looked," Eleanor said, "because Silas told this town which records burned, and for weeks now we have only asked about the ones he named."

Grace reached for her coat, then stopped with one arm in the sleeve. "What will you do tonight if the board closes your project?"

"Read to them."

She waited.

"Read them what?"

"I don't know yet. That's the trouble with tonight."

They split the sandwiches Grace had brought from home, pimento cheese on white bread, and Eleanor ate hers standing at the window while Grace locked the genealogy room behind them.

The courthouse was limestone and shadow, three stories of it, and the hallway kept November the way a cellar does. Behind the counter on the ground floor, Doreen was shaking her head before Eleanor finished the question.

"Thomas Blackwood's estate?" She took the card and held it out at arm's length. "That's an old file."

"February of ninety-five," Grace said.

"That's the one. Why do you want it?"

Eleanor slid the card across the counter and left it face up between them. "A copy of the probate file. I'd like to read it at your table."

"We don't hand out originals."

"I don't want the original."

Doreen let the silence run while she decided. "It's a quarter a page if you copy anything."

"That's fine."

"And nothing walks out of here but the copies."

"Understood."

She went into the vault and stayed long enough for the radiator to tick twice. The folder she brought back was gray along its folds, tied with string that had gone flat with age, and she set it on the reading table and squared it to the edge.

"Sign the slip," she said. "You'll want the will. It's the only interesting thing in there."

Eleanor looked up from the slip. "You've read it?"

"I shelved it when I was new here. Everybody reads the interesting one."

The estate's paper came out in the order the clerk's office had put it in, and Grace laid each sheet left to right along the table, squaring the pile as she went.

"Petition, bond, oath, inventory," she said, naming each sheet as it landed, and then she stopped at the fourth page. "No real property."

"We knew that."

"The inventory says he owned no land. The will gives land away." She lifted the last sheet, which was heavier than the rest and folded in thirds. "It's a copy. Certified, but a copy."

"Then there's an original somewhere."

Grace turned the page toward her. "There's a paragraph after the bequest. You should read this one."

Grace read the opening aloud, and Eleanor followed the lines with her finger.

"'I give, devise, and bequeath to my daughter Mariah all of my real property and all of my personal property, of every kind and wherever situated.'"

"Real property," Eleanor said.

"Which he did not own in February, according to his own estate."

Eleanor read the rest to herself, and then read one paragraph aloud, because the sentence did not sit properly in her head until she had heard it in the room.

"'...and it is my express wish and legal directive that the fifty-acre parcel known as the Mountain Preserve, as delineated in the attached survey, be placed under a permanent conservation easement, to be held in trust by the state, ensuring it is never developed.'"

Doreen's pen stopped at her desk.

"Mountain Preserve," Grace said.

"That was the name on Whitfield's plan."

Grace found the printed line on the inventory and held her finger beside it.

"The same two words, in two different files. The land was named before anyone drew a plat for it."

Eleanor pushed her chair back an inch from the table. "We've had it backward from the beginning. We thought Silas moved that line for timber money."

"And he needed it moved for something else."

"He needed the parcel out of the estate before anybody read this. A directive about land the man doesn't own is a dead sentence."

Grace looked from the inventory to the will and back again.

"If this had been probated as written, that ground would have gone to the state and stayed wild."

"Forever."

"By February he owned no land at all."

Grace turned the page and stopped.

"Attachment A."

The sheet after it was the proof of publication, a printed notice with the Herald's name across the top and a date stamped in the corner. Then came the oath, and then the inside of the back cover.

"As delineated in the attached survey," Grace said. "The clause describes it in plain words."

"There's no survey."

"No."

Eleanor went through the file again from the beginning, sheet by sheet, holding each one up to the window light to see whether a page had stuck to the one behind it. Nothing was stuck. Nothing was folded in behind the oath. There was no plat, no linen copy, no sheet with Thomas Blackwood's careful hand in the corner.

Doreen raised her head. "Do you want copies or not? The machine takes quarters."

"The will," Eleanor said. "Every page of it."

She paid out of her coat pocket, and the copier's light slid under the folder's edge, and the certified seal came out gray instead of gold.

On the courthouse steps the cold came off the stone and found her hands.

"Tonight, then," Grace said.

"Tonight." Eleanor slid the folded copy in beside the tax maps, where the seal faced the zipper, and stood with her hand on the strap. Somewhere in the county there was a survey that Thomas Blackwood had ordered and signed and attached to his will, and no one in that vault had ever thought to ask where it went.

"Your board will want a reason," Grace said. "They'll ask you for the survey."

"Let them ask." Eleanor buttoned her coat to the chin. "Somebody in that room has to explain how the county probated a will with a page gone out of it."