Chapter 23 of 24Miscellaneous and Sundries

"Ben, it's Eleanor Vance. The deed that gave Silas Blackwood his brother's land is in a book in the courthouse basement, and if we don't take it into custody today it will be gone by morning."

Ben Carter let out a breath on the other end of the call. A radio muttered behind him, and somewhere in Laurel Ridge a truck downshifted on the bypass.

"Say that again."

"Miscellaneous and Sundries. The 1994 ledger, in the basement, past the map room." She carried the phone to the kitchen window and looked out at the field behind Poplar Street, white with frost, a thread of woodsmoke rising off Owen's chimney next door. "If it isn't in your hand today, it won't be there tomorrow."

"Where did that come from?"

"Lillian Gaines called yesterday afternoon. A stranger has been out at the center asking the aides about her."

"The old clerk."

"The Clerk of Court," Eleanor said. "She filed the paper herself the day after they pulled Thomas out of the creek, and she put it in a book nobody opens."

Down the block a screen door banged, and a dog answered it.

"You're telling me a filing from thirty years ago is still sitting in a book in the courthouse basement."

"I'm telling you the deed logs were not all lost in that flood. She filed it where the water could not reach it, and where nobody had a reason to look."

Ben said nothing for a moment, and she listened to him work through it.

"Meet me at the courthouse."

"Hear the rest first, because you'll want to say no, and then you'll have to unsay it."

"Go on."

"The planning box for the Preserve walked out of the library basement in the middle of the night. Pages were cut out of a deed book with a blade, in daylight, and Doreen logged it and I signed as a witness."

"Cut out."

She heard him breathe. A cardinal came down on the feeder outside and knocked seed onto the ice.

"Clean as a trim line," she said.

"That's theft, and that's destruction of public records."

"That's housekeeping. He has been at it for thirty years, and he is hurrying now because I am slow and he is not."

"You're going to say his name."

"I'm going to say that the man who gains is the man who has stood in every doorway I have opened since I pulled that map off the shelf."

A drawer closed on his end. "I'm on my way."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me yet. Bring a coat."

The courthouse on the square was gray stone with narrow windows, and the Register of Deeds counter was a slab of dark oak. Ben was already there with his hat in his hand when Eleanor came in with her bag and the thermos of coffee she had not poured.

"Deputy."

"Doreen."

Doreen looked up from her screen. A Food Lion sack with a can of pumpkin in it sat on the floor beside her chair.

"I need the Miscellaneous and Sundries ledger for 1994."

"The what?"

"The misc book. Every year has one."

"Nobody has asked me for one of those in years."

"I'm asking now."

Doreen looked from Ben to Eleanor, then down at the form he set between them.

"Is this a case?"

"It's a records request." He uncapped a pen. "I'll sign for it and carry it out myself."

She pushed the key across the oak. "Shelves go to the back wall. Light switch is inside the door on your right. It's cold down there."

"We'll manage."

"Half the town is worked up over your map project. My sister sits on that board."

"Monday," Eleanor said.

"Monday," Doreen agreed, and went back to her screen.

The basement stairs were concrete, and the cold came up them. Ben found the switch, and the bulbs came on in a row down the long room: metal shelving, canvas-bound ledgers with the year stenciled on the spine.

"Back wall," he said.

They found it low, between 1993 and 1995. Miscellaneous and Sundries, in white paint, the canvas gone soft with dust.

"There," Eleanor said.

Ben lifted it down with both hands and set it on the table under the bulb. "You want to do the honors?"

She opened the book and turned the pages steadily, past entries typed on the county's old machine and past entries in ink that had gone brown with age. Then a crease in the middle of a block of pages, pressed down by everything filed after it.

"That," she said. "Not a page of the book. A page put in the book."

Ben came around the table and opened the fold onto the blotter. It was a deed on the county's old form, folded to fit a book it was never meant for. Behind it, folded the same way, was the survey.

"Quitclaim deed," he read, "Thomas B. Blackwood, grantor, and Silas J. Blackwood, grantee." His finger stopped at the next line. "Fifty acres, more or less, being the parcel known as the Mountain Preserve."

"Read the date."

He read it, and then he looked at her and said nothing.

"That is the day after they brought him up," she said. "Lillian filed it that morning, before there was a line at the counter, and she remembers the office floor still being wet."

"You're sure."

"She is sure. That is why she called me."

Ben spread the deed under the light. "That's his name on the grantor line."

"Look at it."

The letters sat heavy on the line, loops closed and careful, the mark of a hand copying instead of signing.

"You've seen his hand," Ben said.

"On the back of the 1993 map, in pencil, asking himself about survey marker number seven. And on his will." She laid the probate copies beside the deed. "Same slant, same hurry. He never closed the B. This one closes it and presses through the paper."

"Would a forger be that careless?"

"A forger would practice, and practice takes time. He had one morning."

Ben put his thumb under the bottom line. "Witness line. Blank."

"Nobody stood at that counter and swore they watched Thomas Blackwood sign his land away. He filed it alone, first thing, into a book nobody opens."

"Deputy?" Doreen called down the stairs. "Mr. Blackwood's office is on the phone."

Ben did not look up from the deed. "What do they want?"

"They want to know whether anyone has been in the basement today."

"Tell them you'll check."

"She's asking now, Deputy."

"Then tell her yes."

The door at the top of the stairs closed, and the cold came back into the room.

Eleanor looked from the deed to him. "You want him to know."

"I would rather he know tonight than guess tomorrow. In the morning this goes to the district attorney, and after that it is out of my hands."

"And until then?"

"Until then, keep your doors locked and your lights on."

He photographed the pages, signed the receipt, and carried the ledger up in a records box. On the courthouse steps the wind came across the square, and down the block the hardware store had its lights on for the lunch crowd.

"One more thing. The district attorney will take the deed. She will take the survey folded behind it, and Lillian's statement with it, and she will call it fraud and forgery, and she will mean it."

"But."

"But fraud is land and ink. It is not a body." He turned his hat over in his hands. "You have read more of this county's paper than anybody. So answer me. Is thirty years of paper enough to prove a man killed his brother?"

Eleanor looked at the certified copy in her hand. The date sat at the top in the county's old typewriter face, one day after the searchers found Thomas Blackwood.

"Not by itself," she said. "Tomorrow morning we take it to Mariah."