Chapter 17 of 18Nobody Buries a Courthouse

The lawsuit Owen Pritchard's attorney had filed against the 1868 deed sat on a circuit court docket, and the provenance review Sofia Navarro had won with a single board vote would not survive a second meeting. Marianne Abbott had one thing left that could end the whole argument — Thaddeus Westwood's own letters, the tin box Eliza Sparrow had written about burying where winter cannot reach. If that box was at Westwood Manor, it might as well have been in Richmond.

Daniel Murphy rolled a cart into the archives workroom, the Historical Society's published registers stacked to his chin.

"This is everything the Society ever printed about the Colonel. Which is a great deal, because he never stopped talking about himself."

"Then we spend the day with a man talking about himself." Marianne lifted the top volume free. "Fascinating."

"Dr. Whitcomb's history says Westwood built the east wing in the eighties. Maybe he built a hiding place into it."

"Maybe." She turned to the index. "Find me the floor plans. There's an insurance survey in the vertical file. Pocket doors, coal grates, all of it itemized."

They worked through the morning. Daniel read the Society's pamphlets aloud in a flat, patient drone and marked every mention of the house. Marianne laid the architectural drawings on the long table and followed the east wing wall by wall, comparing the parlor, the morning room, the stair, and the two small chambers off the landing. No cellar hatch appeared on the drawing. No closet sat sunk behind the paneling. The surveyor's ink had found nothing worth a note.

"Nothing in the attic, either," Daniel said. "That's in the insurance man's inventory. Blankets, two trunks, one broken chair."

"Who inventories a broken chair?"

"Somebody who never saw a hiding place." He spun the drawing around to face her. "Which means there wasn't one."

Sofia Navarro knocked once and came in carrying a coffee she did not drink, which usually meant news.

"The clerk called about Owen's filing. The county recorded it yesterday afternoon."

"Of course it did." Marianne kept her eyes on the drawing. "What does it ask for?"

"The deed voided, costs assessed, and a line in the record saying the library mishandled a private collection." Sofia set the cup on the corner of the table. "If a judge agrees, that deed becomes a curiosity, and we become the people who made a fuss over a curiosity."

"Then we need the letters."

"You need the letters." Sofia softened it with a tilt of her head. "How is it going?"

"Badly." Marianne said it before she could dress it up. "The Manor's own drawings don't show a hiding place. Nobody wrote one down anywhere I can find. I've spent the morning with men praising a man who does not deserve it, and I am no closer to a tin box than I was on Tuesday."

"You'll find it."

"Will I."

"Daniel is still here, so yes." Sofia picked the coffee back up. "I have to give the board something before the next meeting. That's the extension I bought you."

"Noted."

After lunch Daniel brought up the second cart: the town's bound council minutes, their leather spines cracking at the hinges. Westwood had sat on that council for years, and Marianne wanted to see what a man like him put into a public record when he thought the record was dull.

Most of it was roads. A bridge repair. A complaint about hogs loose on Water Street. Then, in a volume from the eighties, after a neighbor's barn burned, Westwood had entered a paragraph in his own hand.

"What does it say?" Daniel leaned over her shoulder. He had brought doughnut holes from the Food Lion bakery across the square, and the sugar was on his fingers.

"The fire reminds him of his duty to his family." She read the passage once, slowly, and then went back over the last sentence. "He says he has lodged all his sensitive family documents in a secure deposit box at the County Courthouse, for the safety of the papers."

Daniel waited. "Okay, so — that's a place. That's an actual place."

"It's a place for tax rolls and land titles." Marianne turned the page. "Eliza wrote that she buried the box where winter cannot reach. Buried. Under a floor, behind a hearth, in a cellar corner."

"She might have meant buried somewhere warm."

"She was a midwife, Daniel. She wrote what she meant." Marianne closed the volume harder than she intended, and dust lifted off the spine. "A tin box in a courthouse vault is a lawyer's sentence, not a hiding place. He was showing off. That man could not eat supper without leaving a record of it."

She called Jamal Washington at the end of the afternoon, because he deserved to hear it from her rather than from the town.

"Nothing?"

"Nothing." Marianne pressed the phone against her ear and looked at the council volume still open on the table. "The Manor drawings are clean. There's no room in that house that could swallow a tin box and keep quiet about it."

"Now, you have to understand something." Jamal's voice came slow, in his storyteller's cadence. "Old houses change. They take on rooms and give them up again. A panel goes in, a panel comes out, and the man who put it there dies without telling anybody."

"That's the trouble. We need a plan that matches what's standing."

"You want me to come in tomorrow and walk that house's history with you?"

"No." She heard how it landed and softened it. "No, I'd only be putting you in Owen's path for nothing. Let me sit with it tonight."

"Then I'll pray on it," Jamal said, "and you sit."

By six the workroom had gone dim and Daniel had gone home. Marianne sat with the council volumes and Eleanor Dawes's folder open side by side, and neither of them had anything to say to her.

She went back through the years page by page, hunting for any mention of the family's private rooms at the Manor — a study, a strongbox, a shelf behind a door — and found instead Thaddeus Westwood at his most tiresome: a complaint about the price of brick, a motion to name the main street after himself, and a letter read into the record about the proper pruning of the town's sycamores. The only sentence that lifted off any page was the one about the courthouse, and she had already set that one aside.

Her own index card, tucked into the front of Eleanor's folder, still said what it had said all week. Letters. Manor. Floor, cellar, chimney base. Question mark.

Sofia found her with her coat half on and her car keys already out.

"Go home, Marianne."

"I intend to."

"You don't." Sofia looked at the litter of drawings on the table. "What did you find?"

"A man who liked the sound of his own minutes." Marianne closed the council volume and laid it on the cart. "Tomorrow I'll draft a note for the board myself. The provenance review stands on the deed and the marriage register, and the letters are a legend out of an old woman's journal. That's the honest version, and it's the one that keeps the deed alive."

"You believe that?"

"I believe I've run out of house."

Daniel could photocopy the council pages in the morning; the machine took nickels and ran all day. She did not ask him to, and she did not write the page number down. She slid the leather volume back into its slot on the shelf, where its one useful sentence would wait in the dark beside a hundred pages about hogs and brick, and she went to find Sofia at the desk to tell her she would write the board note herself.