Norah wrote that down too.
Eli watched her notebook grow thick with observations. One evening he picked it up from the kitchen table and flipped through pages of measurements, copied citations, sketches, buyer names, moisture readings, and thoughts she had written in the margins.
"You know you're supposed to be a teenager sometimes."
Norah looked up from homework. "I am."
"This looks like an accountant got trapped in a forest."
"You told me to write things down."
"Didn't expect obedience."
She smiled. "Your mistake."
School made the timber project slower, which turned out to be useful. Norah no longer had entire afternoons to spend searching archives or watching logs come out of mud. Questions had to wait until weekends. Samples had to dry. Buyers had to call back. Paperwork moved at the pace of stamps and envelopes rather than excitement.
The delay stripped drama from the discovery and left something more durable underneath.
In October, Clara Benton received a letter from the state archive responding to her request about Bellamy & Cross. Enclosed were photocopies of two surviving pages from a scaling book associated with Dawes Landing. The entries did not identify individual logs, but they confirmed that Bellamy & Cross handled large baldcypress in the late 1880s and used the same registered mark Norah had found.
One notation from 1891 recorded a discrepancy between timber sent toward the landing and timber received after the flood event. The quantities were impossible to match directly to the Bell logs because units and records were incomplete, but the entry strengthened the historical context.
Clara called the Bell house at seven-thirty in the evening.
Norah answered.
"Don't get excited," Clara said.
"Then why are you calling me?"
"Because I have something exciting."
Norah covered the receiver. "Granddad!"
Eli came from the living room.
They drove to the historical society the next afternoon.
Clara laid the photocopies beside the 1891 newspaper article and registered mark.
"This still does not prove that your three marked logs are the exact timber listed as lost," she said before Norah could speak.
"I know."
Clara blinked.
"What?"
"Six months ago you would have argued for ten minutes."
"I've matured."
Eli made a skeptical noise.
Norah ignored him.
The documentation gave Clara enough confidence to expand the exhibit into a short written bulletin on historic timber transport in the county. She asked Norah to contribute a page describing how the farm discovery began.
Norah struggled more with that one page than with any school assignment she had ever written.
Her first version made herself sound too clever.
The second made Marcus sound too dishonest.
The third became a list of evidence with no human story.
Eli read all three.
"Which one's true?" he asked.
"All of them, sort of."
"Then write the part none of them say."
"What's that?"
"You didn't know what you'd found."
Norah stared at the papers.
He continued. "That's the whole reason the story matters. Anybody can recognize value after somebody tells them the price."
She started again.
Her final account opened with the black logs after the flood and the cut mark that reminded her of Eli's workshop piece. She wrote that she had no idea whether the mark mattered. She described Sterling's strange interest as a reason to ask questions rather than proof of hidden value. She ended with the line, "The first useful thing we found was not expensive wood. It was a reason not to throw away the question."
Clara printed it without changing the sentence.
The bulletin brought a different kind of buyer to the farm.
His name was Thomas Avery, and he represented a reclaimed-wood company that supplied architects, furniture makers, and historic restorations. Unlike Marcus, Thomas arrived with no attempt to minimize the material. Unlike Leonard Shaw, he was interested in commercial volume rather than a few carefully selected boards.