Chapter 6 of 9A Hole in the Record

The transfer form is still in Marianne Abbott's desk drawer with no signatures on it. It needs two — hers and Sofia's — and on the afternoon both of them sign it, the Westwood Collection walks out of the Harmony Creek Public Library, her job walks out behind it, and anything Eleanor Dawes was on the verge of proving goes back into a locked room at Westwood Manor.

"Okay, so." Daniel Murphy turns his laptop toward her, and the screen is a grid. "Every proper noun out of the first ledger. Names, places, the odd word that's neither."

"You got through all of it?"

"The pages that took a clean shot. Some are foxed so badly the software hands me back soup."

"Show me the names."

He scrolls. "Tackett and Boyd. Merriweather, Pettis, and a long row of Freemans."

Marianne reads down the column, and her hand goes still on the edge of the table. Those are the names on the Founder's Day plaques in the square, the ones the Historical Society polishes every October, the ones Owen Pritchard reads aloud from the courthouse steps.

"They're all here," she says.

"Every last one." Daniel taps a key. "And in the ledger they aren't founding anything. They're asking for help. Fever, a breech birth, something for a baby's cough."

"Patients."

She writes the word at the top of a fresh page.

"Patients, or neighbors." Daniel shrugs one shoulder. "Hard to tell which."

She pulls her chair closer and opens the library's census subscription. The county is digitized back to 1870, paid for out of a grant Sofia chased when she first took the director's job, and the search field takes a surname and returns households. She starts with Tackett, then Boyd, then Merriweather, then Pettis.

Every family comes back. The same names, the same farms on both sides of the creek, children listed in the order the ledger lists them.

"Good grief," she says.

"Right?"

She types Sparrow. Nothing. She tries it with a final e, in case an enumerator in a hurry had been careless, and gets nothing. She widens the search to the whole county and the results come back short and wrong: a hired hand's surname in a household four districts over.

"That can't be right," Daniel says. "She's the whole book."

"She's the whole book," Marianne says, "and she isn't in the record."

Daniel leans over her shoulder. "Does she sign her name anywhere in it?"

"An initial. Sometimes only a mark at the foot of a page."

"That's strange."

"That's careful."

While the search runs again, Marianne takes the pencil from behind her ear and writes the names in the margin of her notes. She has been carrying them since yesterday, when Jamal Washington talked in the lobby of The Settler's Inn and she sat with her hands folded and let him finish.

Owen Pritchard. Everything Owen is stands on land his family claims it was given, and a ledger that says otherwise takes the Historical Society, the reading room his family paid to build, and the version of himself he has been reciting his whole life.

Laura Pritchard. Her days are arranged around being Mrs. Owen Pritchard, and a scandal would take every one of them, along with the pew she sits in and the garden club and the small, careful kindnesses that make the arrangement bearable.

Reverend Wilkins. The roof fund, the food pantry, the pledge that keeps the lights on, all of it signed by the same hand that pays for the Historical Society's dinners.

And Daniel Murphy, who printed a transfer form for Eleanor Dawes on the morning of the day she died, and who has never once said why.

"Okay," Daniel says, and she closes the notebook. "That's the surface. What next?"

She looks at him for a beat. "The form Eleanor asked you to print."

He stops scrolling. His hands come off the keyboard.

"Yeah."

"Did she tell you what it was for?"

"Housekeeping. That's the word she used." He spins a pen between his fingers. "She said the collection needed to be somewhere she could see all of it."

"Somewhere she could see all of it."

He doesn't answer that one right away. "That's what she said."

Marianne sets her pen down alongside his. "Did you mention it to Mr. Pritchard?"

"No." He says it fast, then slower. "But he knew. He called the desk asking who'd been pulling books out of the 973s. I didn't tell him."

"Then who did?"

"That's the part I keep turning over."

The radiators under the window knock and tick, and the sleeve of peanut butter crackers on the corner of the desk is still unopened, a dollar twenty-five from the machine down the hall. Daniel goes back to his screen.

Her phone lights up with Sofia's name.

"Sofia."

"Hey. How's it going up there?"

"The ledgers are talking."

"Good. Listen." A chair creaks on Sofia's end of the call. "Owen emailed the whole board this morning. Materials leaving the building without a proper deaccession record."

"Nothing has left the building."

Marianne switches the phone to her other ear. "I know that. He's building a paper trail, and he's building it around you."

"For what?"

"To make it look like the collection is being mismanaged while you're the one in charge of it. Come see me in the morning."

Marianne writes the word deaccession on her pad and circles it. "Early."

"Early. And bring the ledger."

She works the census until the light goes slantwise through the tall windows on the west side, and Thursday has gone quiet around them. The desk phone rings.

"Ms. Abbott? Grace Kim, at the inn."

"Grace. Is everything all right?"

"Two men came by with a letter from the Historical Society. They want to survey my building. For the record, they said."

"What did you tell them?"

"That I'd think about it. And that I'm booked solid through the fall."

Marianne turns her chair away from Daniel. "You don't have to let them in."

"I know. That's why I called."

"Grace—"

Something clinks on Grace's end, ice against a glass. "The box is still up there, by the way. I keep meaning to bring it down and I keep not doing it."

"Don't open it yet."

"Wasn't planning to."

"Okay," Daniel says, later, when the lights over the reference tables have come on by themselves. "I went at the property records."

"The inn's parcel?"

"The inn's parcel. The deed index is online, and everything before the subdivision is thin." He turns the laptop around.

The screen shows a single entry, and the year on it is 1883: the parcel under The Settler's Inn, owner Westwood, Thaddeus.

"That's not the first deed," Marianne says. "That's the first deed they kept."

"Read the note under it."

The note is four lines of type: Refers to paper deed c.1868, un-digitized due to damage.

"Every plat in this county is photographed," she says. "Every tax list. Somebody went through the courthouse page by page."

"It might be damaged."

"It might be."

Daniel sits back. "So the official record has a hole in it."

"Right where she would have been."

Marianne prints the page and folds it into her cardigan pocket. Then she opens her notebook to a clean sheet and begins a list of everyone who would have to sign off on a deed being too damaged to photograph, and the first name she writes is a name she is not looking forward to saying out loud.