Chapter 6 of 10That's Blackwood Land Now

"Plat Book Three won't do you any good," the clerk said, sliding the request slip back across the counter.

"It will do me a great deal of good." Eleanor Vance laid her pen on the slip so it couldn't slide again. "The original plat of the Blackwood Tract, recorded in 1948."

The clerk wore her reading glasses on a beaded chain and the flat patience of a woman who had told a great many people no. "Nobody's pulled that book in nineteen years."

"Then it's due for some air."

"It lives in the vault. I'll be a few minutes."

"I have all morning."

Behind the woman's shoulder, a tall window looked out on Main Street, where fog still sat in the bottom of the valley. The ridges above Laurel Ridge had gone the color of a struck match. Six days earlier Eleanor had spread the 1993 survey beside the 2022 one on a table at the Historical Society. October had turned over while she was reading, and she never noticed it happen.

The Register of Deeds occupied the ground floor of the courthouse on the square. The clerk wrote her name in a sign-in book and pointed her to the reading table under the window, then went through the steel door at the back. A drawer rolled open on old tracks. She returned carrying a gray archival box with both hands, the way you carry a cake.

"Gloves," she said, and laid a pair of white cotton ones on the table. "Copies are fifty cents a page. The machine only takes quarters."

"I brought quarters."

"Plat Book Three, page forty-one." The clerk lifted the lid. "Blackwood Tract. Surveyed April of 1948."

The paper had gone the yellow of old varnish, and the ink had thinned to a gentle brown. Along the tract's outline, twelve small circles had been drawn and numbered. Beside the seventh, in a hand so careful it looked printed: *Iron pin, set in granite.*

Eleanor put on the gloves.

"If you don't mind my asking, what are you hunting for?"

"A corner. Number seven."

"That's up over the creek."

"It is."

"That whole ridge belongs to Mr. Silas now, and he keeps it posted."

Eleanor said nothing. She took Friday's photocopy of the county tax map from her folder and laid it square beside the plat.

Two drawings of the same country, made by different men sixty years apart, and one anchor to hold them together: the stone at Mill Creek, still carried as a parcel corner on the county's map. From that stone she followed the 1948 plat's own calls north along the ridge, the line the old surveyor had walked with a compass and a chain. Her pencil stopped in the middle of a green-shaded field. The county map drew no boundary line through it. The field was part of one parcel, and the name on that parcel was Blackwood, Silas R.

She measured with the plat's scale, then measured again, then a third time.

Marker seven sat inside the strip, nearer the middle of the pasture than any fence. The pin was the one corner of the 1993 line a person could still stand beside, and the 1994 survey had walked around it.

She paid for her copies, two dollars in quarters for four pages, and folded them into the folder.

The genealogy room at the library smelled of toner and old paste. Grace Miller had two sausage biscuits in a paper sack from Biscuitville and slid one across the table before Eleanor could sit down.

"You look like you skipped breakfast."

"I skipped breakfast."

"Then eat that one. If I may."

Eleanor ate it standing, then spread the four pages out.

Grace read the plat with her chin in her hand, read the tax map, and put her finger on the green field.

"So the pin is on Mr. Silas's side."

"Inside it. Nowhere near the line."

"Was it inside in 1993?"

"No. In 1993 it was a corner of Thomas Blackwood's parcel."

Grace took her finger back.

"Grace, who was angry with Thomas Blackwood?"

"Angry how?"

"Specifically. Money, boundary, family."

Grace counted on her fingers, a librarian's habit that might also have been a way of buying time.

"Mr. Silas, to start. The timber money. Everybody in town knew the brothers had quarreled about it."

"Who else?"

"Harrison Whitfield. The developer from Charlotte. He was in and out of town that year, and whatever he wanted needed two signatures, not one."

"And Caleb Hale."

"Mr. Hale's been fighting that west line since before I was born."

Eleanor wrote all three names in her notebook. "That's three."

Grace's hand was still up, two fingers uncurled. "That's three."

"There's a fourth."

"If I may — say it, and I'll say nothing."

"Mariah was twenty-two when her father drowned. The deed and probate records list her as his only heir."

"She was his daughter, Mrs. Vance."

"I know exactly who she was. I still have to write the name down — all four of them, including the ones I don't believe."

Grace studied the table for a while. "He keeps the whole ridge posted. Signs on the service gate, and a hunt club leases the deer rights every fall."

"So nobody walks it."

"Not since I was in high school."

At half past six Eleanor carried two mugs of coffee next door and set one on Owen Brady's porch rail. She showed him the plat copy and the county map and let him look as long as he wanted, then put her finger where the pin was.

Owen set his mug down. "Have you considered what it would take to check that?"

"I'd have to ask Silas Blackwood's permission."

"He'll say no."

"He'll say yes. He can't afford to look unhelpful." She wrapped both hands around her cup, because the evening had gone cold the way October evenings do in the mountains, all at once and from the ground up. "Then he'd have to watch me walk out there."

"So what do you have?"

"Paper. All of it, except one thing." She turned the plat so the seventh circle faced him. "An iron pin, set in granite, in the middle of a pasture with Silas Blackwood's name on the deed."