Chapter 10 of 10The Same Ground

"Item four," Sofia says. "Friday night. Personnel and collection practices. And the item is you."

Marianne Abbott shifts the manila envelope to her other arm and keeps walking up Elm Street. The Harmony Creek Public Library board votes Friday, and the vote can take her job. The only thing standing between her and a termination letter is the paper in that envelope: an 1868 deed made out to a woman the town's official history has never once mentioned.

"Who wrote the agenda?"

"Owen did. He counted his votes before he put pen to paper."

"Does he have them?"

"He doesn't have mine. That's the part to be thinking about, not the other part."

She waits at the crosswalk while a delivery truck backs up to the Food Lion. "Sofia, Owen has wanted this position gone since the morning I unlocked the office door."

"I know he has. So use today. Trace the deed, and find out who witnessed it. On Friday you stand up in that room and read it out loud, and every member of the board has to look at the paper whether they want to or not."

"And if they won't look?"

"Then the minutes will say they didn't."

"The deed is signed by a woman nobody in Harmony Creek remembers, and somebody remembered her long enough to put a seal on it. Go find the rest of them."

Daniel Murphy coasts alongside her on his bicycle, one hand on the handlebar.

"Going to Jamal's?"

"I am."

"Then go around the square. Owen's car is parked in front of the Historical Society."

"Noted."

He pedals on toward the library, and she takes the long way.

The walk runs past the courthouse and past the square, where the bronze man on his pedestal keeps his back turned to the oldest part of town. Frost still lies in the shaded ruts of the sidewalk. By the time Marianne reaches the low ground along the creek, her ears are numb and both her hands are warm from carrying the envelope.

Jamal Washington answers the door in a gray felt hat, holding his cane in the same hand.

"Miss Abbott."

"Mr. Washington."

He studies her face, then steps back into the hall.

"You walked."

"It isn't far."

"No, it isn't." He lifts the hat off and hangs it on a peg. "I heard about Monday."

"Everyone heard about Monday."

"Not everyone listened." He takes the envelope and weighs it in his palm. "Come back to the kitchen. Coffee's been on a while."

The kitchen smells like chicory and toast, and a jar of apple butter stands open on the table.

"You found the deed."

"Saturday morning. In Grace Kim's attic, in a metal box with old receipts on top of it."

"And Owen called us both forgers in front of the reading room."

"He said the box at the inn was empty, and he said it loud enough that everyone at the reading tables heard every word of it."

Jamal taps the envelope with his knuckle and slides it back across the table.

"Now, you have to understand something about Owen Pritchard. He tells a lie that size when he is frightened. A man who is winning doesn't need to say a box was empty."

"He didn't look frightened to me."

"He never does. That's the trick of him."

"You don't look surprised."

"I've been expecting this since the day I met him."

She spreads the deed out between them. Jamal reads with one finger moving under the lines—Eliza Sparrow, herbalist, the community apothecary, the sycamore—and when he sits back he folds his hands.

"I have said that name at this table before," he says. "Never over paper."

"It says community apothecary."

"That's what it was. People came over the mountain for what she made out of bark and root, and while they were here they stayed and built."

"I need more than one deed. On Friday Sofia will ask me for provenance, and all I'll have is a page that came out of an attic."

"Then you need people, not paper."

Jamal takes a sip of his coffee.

"The reverend, then. Ben Wilkins. His church has records from before the war."

"Ben Wilkins." He stirs his coffee. "A good man and a timid one, and those two have been arguing inside him a long while."

"You talked to him."

"I sat in his study and told him the whole of it. He believed every word, and then he asked me not to say any of it in his church."

He sets his cup down.

"So he's against us."

"No. He's afraid of Owen, which is a different thing, though from where you stand it looks the same. He won't stand up and tell the truth, and he won't stand up and tell the lie."

"Then who is left?"

Jamal goes to the shelf by the window and comes back with the family bible. He opens it to the leaves where births and marriages are written in four hands. Folded between the Testaments lies a sheet gone soft as a handkerchief.

"Who wrote that?"

"My grandmother's grandmother. She wrote down the families who came to the creek with Eliza, back when the county books started dropping names."

"Why would she bother?"

"Because pulling a name out of a book doesn't pull the family off the ground."

He flattens the sheet. The ink is brown and careful, a column of names in a woman's hand, and at the bottom a line the paper has folded through until the letters have worn to nothing.

Marianne reads them aloud. "Coleman. Frye. Bledsoe."

"And more under the fold."

"Coleman." She says it a second time. "There's a Coleman who keeps bees out past the orchard, and the Fryes have sold paint and nails on the square for as long as anybody has been buying them."

"Now you see it."

"See what?"

Jamal turns the sheet toward the window.

"Every story I ever told about the settlement ends the same way. People hear it and they say, well, that was a long time ago, and those families scattered and went north, and that is the end of the question. They didn't scatter. They changed what they were called and stayed on the same ground, and the town quit asking."

"So their descendants are still here."

"They are at the Food Lion on a Tuesday morning. They are in the pews at Ben Wilkins's church."

"Then why has nobody said anything?"

"Who asks them? You want to walk up to a family and tell them their great-great-grandmother founded this town and got written out of it?"

She folds the list along its old creases. Jamal closes the bible.

"Take it. I have kept it folded in that book long enough."

"You're sure?"

"That paper has been waiting on somebody who could hold it up in front of a room."

He walks her to the door, hat back on, and holds the screen.

"If Owen asks whether you gave me names—"

"He won't ask. He'll tell me what I did, and then he'll tell the