Chapter 8 of 9Eliza Sparrow, Herbalist

Grace Kim does not waste a greeting. "The box is out of the attic," she says. "Come open it with me."

Marianne Abbott knows what is at risk: a paper that could take Thaddeus Westwood's name off the founding of this town, and a man who once tried to buy the inn so he could knock it down.

"I'm on my way," Marianne says. She sets her mug in the sink and pulls on her coat.

The frost that was forecast came in the night, the first of the season, and the grass along Elm Street is white to the blade and crunching under her shoes. She walks past the Food Lion and into the square, where Colonel Thaddeus Westwood, Harmony Creek's founder according to the plaque bolted to his pedestal, stands with a cap of frost on his hat and one hand raised at nothing in particular.

The porch boards at The Settler's Inn are slick. Inside, the dining room smells of coffee and sausage gravy, and a couple in matching fleece jackets stands at the register reading the chalkboard, weighing Skyline Drive against a second cup.

"Tell them about the statue," Grace says from the sideboard, tipping her chin at the register.

The woman turns around. "Is it true he's the one who founded the town?"

Marianne takes a moment to answer. "That's what the plaque says."

"My husband wants a picture with it before we drive the parkway."

"Everybody does."

Grace is at the sideboard with a black metal case, japanned and rusted at the hinges, the kind a bank once kept behind its grille for the papers a family could not afford to lose. She has a rag in her other hand and she is not using it on the case.

"You haven't opened it," Marianne says.

"I told you I'd wait." Grace wipes her hands on her apron. "I've been regretting it since you showed me that map."

"Where was it?"

"Under a shutter in the attic. There's an iron hook in the ceiling up there I'd never once noticed."

Marianne looks up, as if the hook might show through the floorboards above the dining room. "You went up alone."

"I went up alone." Grace taps the lid. "It's locked."

Marianne studies the hasp, then crosses to the register. "You never tried the obvious thing."

"Enlighten me."

She takes the screwdriver out of the drawer and hands it over. Grace sets the tip under the hasp and leans on it; the rust gives with a soft crack, and the lid falls back on papers folded small and packed tight against one another.

"Receipts," Grace says, disappointed. "A tax receipt. A livery bill."

"Look at the hand."

"What about it?"

Marianne leans over the case and lays a finger beside the writing without touching it. "That's a nib, not a steel pen."

"So?"

"So keep going."

Grace works down through the stack: a handbill for a cider mill, a pencil sketch of a chimney, envelopes gone soft at the folds.

"Somebody saved all of this on purpose," she says.

"Somebody did."

"Then there's more."

Marianne does not answer that, because the bottom of the case has one more thing in it. A single sheet folded in quarters, and it does not feel like the rest. She can tell at the corner before she can see it. She lifts the sheet with both hands, sets it on the sideboard, and lets the folds open on their own.

"What is it?" Grace asks.

"Vellum."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning it was meant to last."

Marianne reads with her lips moving. The hand is a clerk's, upright and heavily inked, and the words arrive in the old order: this indenture, witnesseth, beginning at a sycamore on the bank of the creek, thence along the fence line of the adjoining field.

"Out loud," Grace says.

"'Beginning at a sycamore on the bank of the creek.'"

Grace stops moving. "There's a sycamore behind my kitchen. Widest trunk on the lot."

Marianne reads on, and the coffee urn and the couple at the register go somewhere far off.

"'To have and to hold,'" she reads, "'for the establishment of a community apothecary.'"

"Community."

"That's what it says."

"Who's it made out to?"

Marianne turns the sheet and finds the grantee line. "'Unto Eliza Sparrow, Herbalist, and her heirs and assigns.'"

Grace says nothing for a moment. Then: "Herbalist."

"That's what it says."

"And the date?"

Marianne finds it at the bottom, in the same upright hand. "Eighteen sixty-eight."

Grace looks out the window, past the porch, across the square to the statue. "The town says it started after that."

"It does."

"Does the paper name him?"

Marianne reads down the witnesses, the clerk's line, the seal that has left behind nothing but a stain shaped like itself, and finds no name she knows anywhere on it. "No. He isn't on it."

Grace folds her arms. "So. Who would want this box to stay shut?"

"Four people," Marianne says. "I've been carrying their names around all week."

"Go on, then."

"Owen Pritchard." Marianne squares the vellum with the edge of the sideboard. "His family name is on the statue, on the historical society letterhead, and on the plaque in the courthouse lobby, and this deed takes the whole story out from under him."

"He offered me money for this place," Grace says. "Told me the lot would be worth more empty."

Grace rinses the rag at the sink and wrings it out. "Laura Pritchard," Marianne says. "She sits on the library board and half the committees in this town. A thing like this would end every one of them, and she would rather have a quiet life than a true one."

"Reverend Wilkins," Grace says.

"Owen's name is on that church's building fund, and Ben Wilkins knows what happens to a pastor who crosses that family."

Grace tips the case lid shut with one knuckle. "And the fourth?"

"Daniel Murphy." Marianne folds the vellum along its old creases and slides it into a manila envelope from the office. "He printed a transfer form for Eleanor Dawes on the day she died."

"Did he."

"I took him off my list yesterday."

Grace sets the empty case on the floor beside the sideboard. "You keep a list."

"I keep a list."

Grace makes a sound that is nearly a laugh. "Four people who would like a document to stay in a box. That's not a suspect list."

"What is it, then?"

"It's a town."

Grace wipes the sideboard where the case stood and drops the rag in the sink. "Take it with you."

"It's your building."

"Which is why I get to say where my building's paper sleeps, and I say it sleeps somewhere he would have to explain himself to get into. He's already sent his surveyors through my lobby once."

"He'll say I stole it."

"He'll say worse. Take it anyway."

Marianne Abbott stands at the sideboard with the envelope in her hand and the county's own record still sitting somewhere in a database, listing a later deed that points back to an earlier one, filed as too damaged to scan. She knows who she has to call, and she knows she will not put any of this on the library's network, and she knows that by Monday she will have to say all of it out loud to people who have never once wanted to hear it.

The deed names Eliza Sparrow, Herbalist, and it does not mention Thaddeus Westwood anywhere.