Chapter 22 of 22The Book Nobody Opens

The blade marks proved what Eleanor Vance had feared since Tuesday: somebody had cut the conservation easement out of the deed book, and the county's only clean copy of the truth had gone with it. What she had left was a good drawing and a theory, and no judge in North Carolina would take either one. Without a recorded instrument, Silas Blackwood kept his acreage and his name, and whoever carried a blade into the Register of Deeds kept a county paycheck.

A knock at her back door on Poplar Street came a little before eight, Owen with a grocery sack hooked over one arm and his collar turned up against the cold. He set the sack on the counter and unloaded it: a jar of Duke's, a loaf of bread, and a pie from the Food Lion bakery under a sheet of foil.

"I saw your kitchen light on before daylight," he said.

"I've been up a while."

"That isn't what I asked."

She poured his coffee and told him the rest of it — the clean cut of the blade, Doreen's damage report, Grace's name signed under hers, Silas Blackwood standing in the doorway of the Register of Deeds as though the room were his to walk into whenever he liked.

Owen set the cup down without drinking from it. "Grace was with you," he said.

"She was."

"Then you had a witness, and it's in the county's own file."

"On file with a clerk who reads the call slips."

"From a medical standpoint, the paperwork is not what worries me."

"I know what worries you."

"I don't think you do."

The pie came out of the foil, and she slid a slice in front of him. Peach, out of season, but the bakery in town made it anyway and he had never once turned it down.

"Friday, he sat in my front room and made me a generous offer with a warning folded inside it," she said. "This week, somebody took a blade to a deed book. First he asked me to stop. Now he isn't asking."

"Which is why I would rather you quit walking into that courthouse alone."

"I'm not quitting."

"Then take somebody with you," he said.

"Ben won't act without the instrument itself. I've asked."

"Then find the copy. Everything in that building was copied at least once, and most of it was copied again."

He wiped his hands on the napkin and folded it beside his plate.

"I doctored this town a long time and never once heard of a page going missing out of a county book. That tells you what he's afraid of."

The overlay lay on the table between them, the two-acre jog that swung the line inland for no reason except to swallow a survey marker whole. "I've been hunting a copy for a week."

"Then look where nobody looks," Owen said.

He finished his coffee, wrapped the rest of the pie back in foil for her, and walked home across the wet grass between their two houses.

The call came in the middle of the afternoon, while Eleanor sat at the table with a red pencil, going over the same line again.

"Mrs. Vance? It's Lillian Gaines."

"Miss Gaines. Are you all right?"

"I want to say this while I still can."

"Take all the time you need."

"No, I won't, because I have taken it for years already, and look where it got me."

Eleanor put the pencil down. Behind Lillian's voice she could hear the television in the common room, an audience laughing at something, and under that the rattle of a cart going down the hall.

"Thursday, you asked me about the day that paper was filed," Lillian said.

"I did."

"And I told you the truth, as far as it went, which is how a coward tells it."

"Tell me the rest."

"I didn't file it with the deeds."

Eleanor reached for her notebook and pulled the cap off the pen.

"It's the survey I'm talking about, not the deed," Lillian said. "Deeds go in the deed books. A survey is lines on paper, and by rights it belongs in the plat book with the other plats. But this one came in rolled inside a cardboard tube, no seal I recognized, no attorney's cover on the back of it, and Mr. Blackwood stood at my counter the entire time I looked it over."

"So where did you put it?"

"In the Miscellaneous and Sundries ledger. Nineteen ninety-four."

Eleanor wrote the ledger's name at the top of a clean page, and her hand was not steady the first time, so she wrote it again.

"Balances, stray filings, plats that came in without deeds, anything that didn't fit a book of its own," Lillian said. "It's the catch-all. It's the book nobody opens. Nobody has ever asked me for it, and I'd be surprised if a soul has turned a page of it since."

"You're certain."

"I wrote the entry in my own hand, and it was the last thing I wrote in that building."

"Why are you telling me now?"

"A man came to the front desk this morning and asked Brenda which of us old ones had worked over at the courthouse."

Down the hall the cart rattled past again, and the television audience laughed at something neither of them could see.

"Did he give a name?"

"He didn't give one, and Brenda didn't ask, because that's how it goes at a place like this."

"Miss Gaines—"

"Listen to me."

"I'm listening."

The word careful went into the margin of her notebook, and she underlined it.

"You be careful, Mrs. Vance. He is a dangerous man to cross. I have watched that man be kind to a whole room of people and mean none of it."

"I understand."

"No, you don't, and I hope you never have to. The minute you walk in there and ask for that book, somebody will carry the word to him. Ask for it by the year, not by the name, because the girl at that counter won't know what a sundries book is."

"Thank you for calling me."

"I'm not calling for thanks."

Then the dial tone, and the kitchen, and the overlay sheet lying on the table with its two crooked lines.

She picked up the phone and called the sheriff's office. A dispatcher answered.

"Is Deputy Carter in?"

"He's out on a call over on the Green Creek Road. Can I take a message?"

"Tell him Eleanor Vance called. I know where it is."

"Where what is, ma'am?"

"He'll know."

She hung up and stood at the window a while. The ledger was somewhere in the record room or the vault of the courthouse she knew as well as her own kitchen, shelved with books nobody had a use for, and the only way to see it was to ask for it, in writing, on a slip that went into a tray behind the counter.

Tomorrow morning she would walk in and ask for it. By the time she got home, if Lillian was right about how word traveled in that building, Silas Blackwood would know exactly which shelf she had been reaching for.