Chapter 16 of 18I'm Not Brave Enough

"He can't void a deed with a letter," Daniel said.

"Give him a judge and he'll try," Jamal said.

Owen Pritchard's attorney had filed with the circuit court on Tuesday afternoon, asking a judge to set the 1868 deed aside as a forgery, and Sofia had told Marianne Abbott that a ruling against them would end her job at the Harmony Creek Public Library. Daniel had printed the filing and carried it up to the archives workroom, where the radiator knocked and the cold pressed against the glass.

"Four pages," Daniel said. "Not one of them mentions the letters."

Marianne read the third paragraph and set the page down. "It says the deed came out of an attic, and that Mr. Frye surveyed that attic and found it empty."

"Donald Frye signs whatever is put in front of him." Jamal turned his hat over in his hands. "Now, you have to understand something. A man doesn't write a letter like that one to prove a thing. He writes it to make the other side spend the winter answering it."

"So Owen only has to wait."

"He has to keep us waiting." Jamal leaned on his cane. "Where does a man keep what he can't burn?"

"Indoors," Daniel said. "Under a floor, beside a chimney, anywhere the frost won't reach the paper."

Marianne crossed to the window. Wind had stripped the sycamores along Elm Street overnight, and the gutter outside the Carnegie building held a cold inch of water that would not drain until spring. "Which brings us back to the Manor."

Daniel sat down on the workroom stool. "The Historical Society kept its collection in the west wing there until Owen moved the meetings to the church hall. Everything that didn't fit in the new cases went back to the Manor, and it's behind a locked door in a house none of us can walk into."

"There's a process for requesting access," Marianne said.

"To our collection. Not to his." Daniel spread his hands. "He's the president of the society that holds the papers, so the request goes to the man who wants the deed gone. That's a dead end."

"Stalled isn't stopped," Jamal said.

"It's close."

Marianne stacked the court filing with the deed photocopies, the marriage record, and Jamal's list of founding families, all four of them on the table like a hand of cards nobody would take. It had taken months of other people's courage to put that much paper in one place, and a single judge could scatter it. "I'll take a formal request out to the Manor this evening," she said. "Sofia wants it in writing. Courts read paper."

"Then let it be paper," Jamal said. "And don't expect the door to open."

By late afternoon the light over the valley had gone thin and gray, and the Founder's Day committee was hanging banners in the fellowship hall of Harmony Creek Community Church. A slow cooker of Brunswick stew sat on a card table by the door for the volunteers, next to a Dollar General sack of tape and zip ties. Reverend Ben Wilkins stood on a folding chair with a staple gun while two women from the altar guild argued about whether the parade should turn at the statue or at the courthouse.

Laura Pritchard was at the display case with a wooden box.

"Laura." Owen Pritchard filled the doorway with his coat still on.

"Oh. Owen. I didn't hear the door."

"You emptied my father's study."

"I brought four pieces. For the case. Miss Abbott asked—"

"You will not lend out what belongs to my family." His hand came down on the stack of programs on the card table, and the top half of the stack slid across the floor. Nobody in the hall moved to pick them up.

"Owen, please."

"Go home. I'll deal with the case."

Laura's fingers found her pearls. "I'm sorry," she said, to the altar guild, to the reverend on his chair, to the room in general.

Marianne stepped forward. "Mr. Pritchard, the display was my request. Blame me."

"I do." He looked her over from her shoes to her reading glasses. "You came to this town in September, and you have been going around people ever since. That ends."

"My request goes to the board."

"Everything goes to the board." He took his wife's elbow and steered her toward the door. "Car. Now."

Laura went. At the threshold she stopped and turned her head, and the look she gave the room was not an apology about a box. It was the look of a person counting the exits.

Wilkins climbed down from his chair and began gathering programs. "That man gives money to my food pantry," he said.

"And his temper to his wife."

"He has been worse since the vote was tabled." He squared the stack against the tabletop. "I don't say that as gossip. I say it as a man who has watched him in this hall for years. He is frightened."

"He's frightened of a box he can't open," Marianne said.

Wilkins looked at the display case, then at the empty doorway. "Then God help whoever has the key."

Marianne drove out to Westwood Manor after supper with Sofia's request in a manila envelope. The house stood at the end of its own drive, lamps lit in the two front rooms, and the porch light came on when she rang the bell. Laura Pritchard opened the door in a cardigan, and her hand went straight to her pearls.

"Mrs. Pritchard. This is a formal request for access to the Historical Society's collection. I'd like you to take it and give it to your husband."

"He's at the building committee. He won't be back until late." Laura looked past her, down the drive, at the dark road under the trees.

"Then take the envelope and I'll go."

"You saw him this afternoon."

"I did."

Laura stepped back so the hall light fell on her. "He took his father's things back from the hall tonight. He went through that box piece by piece, and when he finished he asked me whether I had been through it, and I said no." Her chin came up, and then dropped again. "I lied to him in my own kitchen."

Through the parlor doorway Marianne could see the side table, and on it the wooden box with its lid raised and a fan of old paper beside it.

"Mrs. Pritchard, if there are letters in this house, Thaddeus Westwood's own letters, then the deed holds and the court case dies."

"Owen says there are no letters."

"He told the library board the box at the inn was empty, too."

Laura closed her eyes. Then she crossed the hall into the parlor, and Marianne heard the lid come down on the box. When Laura returned she had one hand in her cardigan pocket and she stood still with the porch light behind her and her weight on the balls of her feet, ready either to step out onto the stone or to step back into the hall.

"Would it change anything?" she said. "A man's own words, in his own hand, written down for nobody."

"It would settle everything. And it would hurt your husband very badly."

"I'm not brave enough."

She held out her hand for the envelope anyway, folded it into the pocket where her other hand was, and the porch light caught what was already in there and pressed against the wool: the bow of a key, old brass, the size of a coat button. Marianne looked at it for as long as it took to be certain, and Laura saw her look, and neither of them said another word about it.

"You should go. He counts the cars on the drive."

The door closed. The bolt went over.

Marianne walked back down the steps to her car with the request gone, no promise made, and one thing settled that had not been settled an hour before. Laura Pritchard was keeping a key, and somewhere in that house there had to be a lock that answered to it.