Chapter 15 of 15A Building That Mattered

The tin box of Thaddeus Westwood's letters is the only thing that can hold the 1868 deed in place, and Marianne Abbott does not have it.

She says so out loud in the archives workroom at the Harmony Creek Public Library on Tuesday morning, with the valley cold pressing at the glass, and Daniel Murphy stops unwrapping his pimento cheese sandwich to look at her.

"If the provenance review goes against us, those letters are what save us." She sets Eliza's journal on the worktable and opens it to a page she has marked with a strip of catalog card. "A man writing down what he took, in his own hand. Nobody on that board can call it a family story."

"We have the phrase," Daniel says.

"We have a phrase and a cipher. Last week we had nothing. An improvement is not a box."

"Read it to me again."

He reads it with his mouth half full. "'I have put his bitter words in the tin box and buried them where the winter cannot reach.' Then the cordial recipe underneath, which we already decided is directions."

"Which we decided."

"You decided."

"Fascinating," she murmurs, which is what she says when she agrees and would rather not.

The stairwell door bangs at the far end of the room. Jamal Washington comes in with his cane and his hat and a paper cup of coffee he picked up along the way, and he sets the cup on the corner of the table before he sits.

"Now, you have to understand," he says, "my grandmother kept the family Bible in a flour tin under the pantry floor."

Marianne looks up from the pad. "Under the floor. That's the ground."

"Under a pantry floor. Indoors." He turns his hat over in his hands. "Where nothing freezes and nothing gets damp, and where a person sweeping the kitchen never thinks to look down."

"So the winter can't reach it because there's a roof over it," Daniel says.

"The story goes like this." Jamal leans on the cane. "People put paper where the cold cannot split the boards and the wet cannot eat the ink. A cellar. A spring house. The back of a chimney. Anywhere inside a building that stays dry the year round."

"A building," Marianne says. She reaches for the pad.

"A building that mattered to her."

Marianne writes two words by her elbow. Not buried. Stored.

"Then our first thought has to be the inn," Daniel says, and wads up the sandwich paper from the deli counter at Food Lion. "Eliza's apothecary stood on that ground. If she hid anything indoors, she hid it indoors there."

Marianne already has her phone against her ear.

"Grace, it's Marianne. I need to ask you about the building."

"Ask fast. I've got a table of eight and one of them wants his eggs a way I don't have a word for." A chair scrapes somewhere behind her, and a voice calls an order across the room.

"Is there a second old box at the inn? Or a place something could be stored and forgotten — a cellar, a chimney, a cupboard nobody opens?"

"You want to come dig up my basement."

"I want to know what's in it."

"There's a chest freezer full of venison, a shelf of paint cans, and a trunk of Christmas ornaments my mother left behind. That's the basement."

"And the attic?"

"One box. The one we opened." Marianne can hear her moving, the phone tucked against her shoulder. "I went through the rest of it on Sunday looking for anything worth selling. Receipts from a hotel in Roanoke, a lamp with no shade, a yearbook that isn't mine."

"Nothing tin."

"Nothing tin, and nothing buried either, unless you count the sycamore roots coming through the north wall, which I do, because I paid a man to cut them back."

Marianne thanks her and ends the call.

"So the inn is out," Daniel says.

"The inn is out." She draws a line through the words on her pad.

Jamal sets his hat back on his head. "Then ask the other question. Not where she would have put it. Where it went after she was gone."

Marianne turns the journal so the three of them can see the open page, and she follows the thought the way she follows a call number through a stack, one shelf to the next, no leaps.

"After the marriage, Westwood controlled the land, the debts, the house, and everyone living in it, and everything that had belonged to Eliza's people came to him one way or another."

Jamal is quiet for a moment, his thumb working along the handle of his cane. "Sarah's things."

"Sarah's things. And Sarah's mother's things."

Daniel picks at the corner of his sandwich without eating it. "Then he'd have had the journals too."

"He did have the journals." Marianne taps the leather cover. "That's how they came to us, through the Westwood family papers the Historical Society handed to the library. A man keeps a set of farm ledgers on a shelf because a farm ledger looks like nothing at all. Then he forgets them."

Jamal nods slowly. "The letters are different."

"The letters are the only pages he ever wrote that could ruin him," Marianne says, and the clock over the door ticks through the pause that follows.

"Then he'd have burned them," Daniel says.

"No," Marianne says. Jamal shakes his head at the same moment. "No."

Daniel looks between the two of them. "You're both very sure."

"A man who takes everything keeps everything." Jamal rests both hands on the head of his cane. "Burning a letter is letting go of it. He kept those pages because they were his, and because a man like that reads his own words back to himself when he wants to remember the size of what he did."

Outside, the wind works along Elm Street and takes the last leaves off the sycamore.

Marianne says the name, because it is a fact and not a guess. "Westwood Manor."

Daniel stops chewing. "The letters are in Owen Pritchard's house."

"The letters are somewhere in Thaddeus Westwood's house, which is now Owen Pritchard's house, which means that everything we need to prove our case has been sitting on his family's land this whole time while we searched attics on the other side of the square."

Jamal laughs once, with no humor in it. "He'd hate that."

"He'd hate it more if we got in."

Daniel folds the sandwich wrapper into a small square and presses it against the table. "The Historical Society used to hold its spring meeting in the ballroom there. My first year, they let library staff park in the side lot."

"Not anymore," Marianne says.

"No. Not since Owen took the chair. He moved the meeting over to the church hall."

She sets the pad down and reads her own two words. The manor sits on the north edge of town behind a stone wall, a gate, and a posted sign that makes a trespasser of anyone who walks up the drive, and Owen will not answer her calls, let alone wave her through the front door to look at a display case. She has driven past those stone pillars a hundred times without turning in, because the drive curves up through the oaks and there has never once been a reason for a librarian to be at the top of it.

"So we need a warrant, an invitation, or a crime," Daniel says.

"We need something better than all three." She closes the journal. She has a target, an address, and a phrase that points at a room. She has no way to reach any of it.

"Then that's today's work." Marianne tucks the journal under her arm. "Who do we know who has been inside that house?"