Eli measured diameters with a tape while Norah wrote in a spiral notebook. The largest trunk measured a little over five feet across at its broadest exposed end. Two others were between three and four feet. Most of the ordinary debris was much smaller, with broken roots or fresh splintering that suggested recent flood damage.
The three that interested Marcus were different. Their bark was almost entirely gone. Long sections were smooth and dark, as though they had spent years—or decades—pressed beneath water and sediment. Their cut ends looked old rather than freshly broken, and on two of them Norah found squared surfaces where somebody had once worked the timber with tools.
Eli showed her how to distinguish an axe scar from a split. "See the little repeated bites?" he said. "That's steel. Nature doesn't hit at the same angle six times."
Norah traced the old cuts without touching them. "So people handled these."
"At some point."
"Before they got buried."
"Probably."
"And the flood exposed them."
"Maybe."
She looked up. "Do you enjoy saying maybe?"
"Keeps fools from building houses on guesses."
Near sunset they walked the debris line. Norah noticed that fresh branches were scattered across the pasture in a wide fan, but the large black trunks clustered along a narrow curve following the drainage swale. She marked the curve on a rough map.
"Could the flood have carried them that way?"
"Water follows low ground."
"But that channel is shallow."
"Now."
Norah looked at him. "What do you mean now?"
Eli stared toward the far end of the pasture where the swale disappeared beneath grass. "This country changes. River changes. Creeks change."
"Ditches get dug. Ditches fill. My father used to say half the land around here remembers water better than people do."
That night, after dinner, Norah went to the workshop.
The building stood behind the equipment shed, a narrow structure of weathered boards and corrugated tin that had once belonged to Eli's father. The air inside smelled of old oil, dust, and dry wood. Tools hung where they had hung for decades, their shadows familiar even in the weak yellow light of the bare bulb.
Eli followed her without asking why.
The wrapped timber block still sat on the high shelf.
He took it down.
Norah unfolded the burlap.
The wood looked almost black until Eli turned it toward the light. Its cut face showed tight, reddish-brown grain, and near one corner was the mark: two intersecting lines and a curved notch.
Not identical.
Close enough that Norah felt the hairs rise on her arms.
"Where did this come from?" she asked.
Eli rubbed his thumb across the end. "My father said his father kept it from riverwood they found during a dry year. I never asked enough questions when the people who knew the answers were alive."
"Was it cypress?"
"I always assumed so."
"Why keep one piece?"
"Because his father did."
"That's not an answer."
"It's the only one I've got."
Norah looked from the block to the photographs drying in envelopes on the bench. "Then we find the rest somewhere else."
Eli smiled faintly.
"Library?"
"Library."
The next morning Marcus Sterling returned.
This time he drove directly to the lower pasture without stopping at the house first.
Eli met him by the lane.
Marcus gestured toward the log jam. "Thought I'd save you some trouble and take another look before my loader gets committed elsewhere."
"We're not ready."
Marcus nodded. "Fair enough."
He walked toward the largest trunk anyway.
Norah stood near the fence holding her notebook.