Chapter 7 of 9Not Yet, Daniel

"Owen Pritchard keeps a private fund for the library," Sofia Navarro said. "Nobody votes against the man who pays for the new roof. Not on anything. Not even on whether your job exists."

Marianne Abbott left her cup where it sat on the coaster. "Then I'm working on borrowed time."

"You're working on a board vote, which is worse." The Harmony Creek Public Library was quiet on a Friday morning, and Sofia got up to shut her office door before she went on. "Okay, so. Tell me what you left out of the email."

So Marianne told her. She told her about Jamal Washington and the oral history he had carried for most of a lifetime, about Eliza Sparrow, a free Black midwife who cleared the land, planted it, delivered the town's babies and buried its dead, and about the stranger named Thaddeus Westwood who married Eliza's daughter and then took her mother's name off every paper in the county.

She told her about the map in the back of the ledger, the small square marked E.S. APOTHECARY on the ground where The Settler's Inn stands today, and about the county's first online deed for that property pointing backward at a paper document the website described as too damaged to scan.

Sofia listened with her hands wrapped around her mug. When Marianne finished, she said nothing, and out in the alley the Food Lion truck grumbled at the loading door.

"You know what that gap in the record is," Sofia said.

"I know what it looks like."

"It looks like a drawer somebody closed." She set the mug down hard enough to slosh. "Eleanor asked for the same things every year I worked with her, humidity control for the map cases and money to digitize the deed books, and the board tabled it every spring. When I asked why she had quit asking, she said, 'It's easier to work when he isn't watching me.'"

"Was he watching her?"

"Owen sits on the board, Marianne. He never stopped."

The mail slot in the outer door clapped shut. Sofia waited until the footsteps in the hall had gone by.

"Who votes with him?"

"Laura Pritchard, and she'll tell you she doesn't. Reverend Wilkins, and he'll tell you he's praying about it." Sofia unwound her scarf and wound it again. "The Pritchard money paid for the fellowship hall where the Historical Society meets, and Reverend Wilkins has a congregation that cannot afford to lose a pledge that size. He's a decent man. He's a decent man with a building fund."

"And Laura?"

"Laura has sat on that board longer than I have been director, and I have never once heard her finish a sentence Owen disagreed with." Sofia's mouth did something that was not a smile. "She's the one I would worry about. Frightened people don't vote their conscience. They vote to keep the peace."

Marianne wrote nothing down. Every chair at that table had a reason now, and reasons were cheaper than proof.

"Somebody told him about the books coming out of the 973s."

"Somebody always tells him."

"It wasn't Daniel."

"Okay, so. Convince me."

"He printed a transfer form for Eleanor the day she died, and then he came and told me he had printed it. That isn't how you hide a thing."

Sofia turned that over. "All right. Not Daniel."

"Here's what I can't do," Sofia said, and the teasing went out of her. "I can't stand up at a board meeting and say any of this. Not on a map and a gap in a website. If I accuse Owen Pritchard and I'm wrong, this library gets a new director, you get a cardboard box, and Eleanor gets forgotten twice."

"I understand."

"Good. Now here's what I can do." She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and brought out a small brass key on a paper tag, the tag lettered in a hand Marianne now knew as well as her own. HIST. OFFICE — LOWER DRAWER. "Eleanor locked that cabinet in your office and never opened it in front of anyone. When facilities cleared her desk, her keys came to me in an envelope, and I put this one in a drawer and told myself I was waiting for the right reason."

Marianne closed her hand around it. "If he asks where it went?"

"He can ask."

"One more thing." Sofia followed her to the door and stood with a hand on the frame. "Whatever you find in there, don't put it on a library machine. Everything in this building talks to the county server, and the county server talks to the board."

"Nothing goes digital."

"Nothing goes digital."

Gray light had come over the Valley by the time she reached her own office, and the forecast was promising the first frost of the season. Her desk phone rang while she was still taking off her coat.

"Miz Abbott? This is Jamal Washington."

"Mr. Washington. You saved me a call."

"Now, you have to understand how it worked in my family." A chair creaked under him. "Papers didn't leave the house. A deed stayed with the house it described, because the house was the proof of it. My grandmother would put her hand on the Bible about that."

"So a deed for Sparrow land would be—"

"Wherever the house is."

Marianne turned the key over in her palm and the tag swung. "Thank you."

"You call me when you have something to show me."

Daniel Murphy knocked and came in carrying a dented tin, masking tape across the lid: APPLE CAKE — $4 A SLICE, from the Friends of the Library sale down in the lobby.

"Sofia said you'd need hands," he said.

"I have hands."

"Not ones that open that cabinet. Those low drawers swell up when the heat comes on." He crouched and worked the drawer side to side until it gave with a pop.

"You knew it was locked."

"Everybody knew. She kept the ledgers on top and her own things underneath." He sat back on his heels. "Whenever I asked her about it, she said, 'Not yet, Daniel.'"

Marianne knelt beside him and looked into the narrow dark of the drawer. "Not yet what?"

"She never said."

"Do you want to stay?"

Daniel shook his head. "Not for this part." He stood, lifted his earbuds off his collar, and started for the door. "The cake's on the desk if you change your mind."

The drawer held less than she had braced for. One manila folder, its tab worn soft, TIMELINE penciled along the top in Eleanor's slanted hand, and nothing else.

She carried it to the window. Across the street the maples had gone rust, and the ridge beyond the water tower wore the flat gray that rides in ahead of a frost.

Inside, on a sheet of graph paper ruled into columns, Eleanor had built her timeline: a line from a journal on the left, a town event in the middle, a source on the right — land records, census pages, church rolls, the county minute books — and running down the last column beside entry after entry, the same penciled word. MISSING.

More sheets lay under it, the columns the same, the handwriting smaller as she went. The last one was folded once, and the writing on it was larger and looser than the rest, as if it had been set down standing up. The date at the top of the page was the day before Eleanor died.

Under it, one line.

Call Grace Kim re: attic box. Is the original Sparrow deed still there?

Marianne stood in the middle of her office with the folder open in both hands, the key still in her pocket, the old radiators knocking somewhere below her feet. Then she set the folder on the desk, took up the telephone, and dialed the inn.