"You want Caleb Hale," Owen Brady said. "Take that old map with you."
Eleanor Vance set her cup on the porch rail. Wednesday had brought the first hard frost to Poplar Street, and the ridge above Laurel Ridge, North Carolina, stood bare under a gray sky. Silas Blackwood had refused her the day before, courteously, on the telephone, and a refusal like that carried no appeal in it. The granite rock and the iron pin she needed sat behind a posted gate on his pasture, leased to a hunt club he could call off with one word.
Caleb Hale was seventy-five and the last person on the western edge who had walked that fence line before the water moved it.
"He'll run you off," Owen said.
"He might."
"Wear your boots. Don't ask him about the Blackwoods. Ask him about the line."
She understood the shape of it. A question about family would earn a closed door. A question about a line might earn the truth.
Four names sat on a page in her notebook, each with a reason written beside it. Silas Blackwood, who stood to gain the timber money. A developer out of Charlotte who wanted the timber. Caleb Hale, who had lost ground to that fence. Mariah Blackwood-Cates, who had inherited whatever her father left. Four names, four reasons, and not one document under any of them.
She filled her thermos, rolled the 1948 plat into a cardboard tube, and drove west out of town. She passed the Bojangles, four trucks idling at the drive-through, and the Food Lion lot mostly empty at that hour, and kept going until the valley pinched and the pavement gave out. Gravel took her up the hollow. At a farm stand, a plywood sign offered sweet potatoes, four dollars a half-bushel. At the end of her road a mailbox leaned on a post with a card tucked under the flag. Eggs. $4 doz. Money in the can.
The farmhouse had a tin roof and a porch that wanted painting. Eleanor knocked twice. A dog started up behind the house and quit.
The door opened six inches.
"You're on the wrong porch."
"Mr. Hale? Eleanor Vance. I survey land. Retired now, but I still read plats."
"What's it to you?"
She lifted the tube. "I brought the 1948 plat for the Blackwood Tract. I want to know where the old line ran on your side of the fence before the flood."
"That's Blackwood business."
"It's your fence, too."
He looked at her boots, then at the tube. "You came all the way out here for a line."
"I did."
The door shut. Inside, a chair scraped the floor, and then the door opened wide and he stepped out in a canvas coat with a walking stick in his hand.
"Bring it around back," he said. "And bring that map."
He walked her down the fence row, past a rusted hay rake and a black walnut with its lower limbs gone. Broom sedge stood in the field, and one post leaned. Beyond the wire the ground belonged to the Blackwoods.
"Now," he said. "Which line."
"The one that ran off the spring branch to the granite rock. Before the creek moved."
He stood at the fence and looked west, the way a person reads a page that isn't there anymore.
"Old line came off the spring branch at the big rock," he said. "Climbed the ridge to the white oak they called the courthouse oak. Then straight down the hollow to the iron pin. Your pin."
Eleanor uncapped her pen and wrote it.
"The white oak," she said. "Is it standing?"
"Lightning took it. The stump's still down in the hollow, and stumps don't lie."
"And the line they run now?"
"Off from that rock. Off the wrong way." He tapped the leaning post with his stick. "I've told them so. They won't come out and stand on the ground with me. Neither brother ever did."
"What did they say when you asked?"
"One of 'em said the other had the papers." He shrugged. "That's how it always went with those two."
She wrote that, too, and he watched her do it.
"Coffee's on the stove," he said, and headed for the porch.
The kitchen had a cup already set out and a brick of livermush on the counter with the paper peeled back. A coffee can of roofing nails stood on the windowsill. The radio was tuned low to a station out of Boone.
She took the cup, though she did not need it.
"You're writing all this down," he said.
"The record shows memory fades. Mine does, anyhow."
That earned half a laugh, which might have been the whole of it. He sat down across from her and leaned his stick against the table.
"You want to know what I never told anybody," he said. "Law included."
"I would."
"A week before the flood, I was at that fence, bracing a post where the creek had cut under it. Both of them were out there in the field. Thomas and Silas. Loud enough to carry to my barn."
"Which part of the field?"
"By the rock." He tipped his head toward the window. "The rock in question."
He turned his cup a quarter turn on the table, and waited.
"What were they saying?"
"The usual at first. Timber. Buyers. Then one of them hollered 'selling out our heritage.'"
"Which one?"
"Wind was wrong. I won't guess and I won't say I know."
Eleanor wrote the words exactly as he gave them. A quarrel was not evidence of anything but a quarrel, and she had learned that from paper, where the record so often showed only the shape of a thing and none of the weight.
"Did you tell anyone?" she asked.
"Who was I going to tell?"
"The sheriff."
He made a sound in his throat. "I took it for family business, and I've got no more use for either brother than I have for a wet August. Nobody ever asked me a question I cared to answer. You're the first one came out here with a map."
She rolled the plat and slid it into the tube and stood. He walked her to the door, and on the mat he stopped with his hand on the jamb and looked past her, out through the glass, at his own field.
"There was more of it I didn't say."
She set the tube down and took out the notebook.
"'Forged papers.'" His voice was flat. "That was the other thing that carried to my barn. 'Forged papers.'"
She wrote the two words in ink, under the line about the heritage, and closed the notebook.
"You didn't mention it before."
"You didn't ask before. And a week later the flood came, and Thomas Blackwood was gone."
He looked at her then, the first time all morning.
"That's Blackwood business," he said. "What's it to you?"
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