"One week," he said. "Then we make a decision based on what we know, not what we hope."
Norah nodded.
One week felt short.
It was enough to begin.
The Bell pickup smelled of damp canvas, old tobacco that nobody had smoked in years, and the faint sweetness of feed grain trapped beneath the seat. Norah held the folder of photographs on her lap during the drive into town, protecting it every time Eli took a corner too fast. The county seat was twenty-eight minutes away on dry roads and nearly forty that week because two bridges were still being inspected after the flood. As they drove, Norah watched standing water shine in soybean fields and saw entire rows of cotton ground flattened into dark lines.
"Think everybody's looking for buried logs?" she asked.
Eli kept both hands on the wheel. "Everybody's looking for what the water took from them."
"That's not what I asked."
"No. It's the answer you're getting."
The county library occupied the lower floor of a brick municipal building built before air-conditioning and renovated afterward without fully accepting it. The front doors opened into a reading room that smelled of paper, floor wax, and the faint electrical heat of microfilm machines. Ceiling fans turned above tables even though two window units hummed at opposite ends of the room.
Mrs. Clara Benton was working behind the reference desk when they entered. She was in her early sixties, silver-haired, narrow-framed, and possessed the unnerving ability to remember not only what people had checked out but what they had asked about five years earlier. When Norah was eleven and researching a school paper on tornadoes, Clara had found her reading county death records and gently redirected her toward meteorology before lunch.
"Flood history?" Clara asked after Norah explained the logs. "Or timber history?"
"Both," Norah said.
Clara looked at Eli. "That usually means we'll be here until closing."
"She's got one week."
"Then we'd better hurry."
They began with newspapers because newspapers were easiest to search by remembered disasters. Clara pulled a handwritten index compiled decades earlier by volunteers and showed Norah how entries were arranged under flood, river commerce, timber, drowning, bridge loss, and transportation. The index was incomplete, and some of the dates referred only to bound volumes stored upstairs, but it gave them places to begin.
The microfilm reader cast a pale blue light across Norah's face. She rotated the reel slowly, watching old columns blur past until dates sharpened into focus. Most stories had nothing to do with timber. A church roof blown away in 1912. A ferry cable snapped in 1907.
A warehouse fire. A steamboat collision. Floods in 1882, 1897, 1913, 1927, 1937, and years no one remembered because every generation seemed to think its worst water had been unique.
Eli sat at the machine beside her with his glasses low on his nose. He read more slowly but knew words Norah would have skipped. Boom. Raft. Drive.
Landing. Tie camp. Log mark. He called her over twice for articles that turned out to concern timber losses many miles away.
Near noon, Norah found the first item that made both of them stop.
It appeared in an 1891 paper under a narrow local column, squeezed between an announcement about a church picnic and a report on a mule theft. The headline was only four words long: HIGH WATER TAKES TIMBER.
Norah read aloud.
"'A section of the Bellamy and Cross cypress drive broke from the lower boom Wednesday night after the river rose suddenly above the east bank. Men recovered a portion near Dawes Landing, but a considerable number of sticks entered the old west chute and could not be secured before dark. Company men expect to resume recovery when the water permits.'"
She stopped.
Eli leaned closer.
"Read the last line again."
She did.
"Old west chute," he said.
"What's that?"
"Could be a back channel. Could be a named cut."
Clara, standing behind them with a stack of directories, heard him. "Bellamy and Cross?"
Norah nodded.
Clara's expression changed in recognition. "They had a yard somewhere south of here. Didn't last into the twentieth century. Let me check the business registers."
She disappeared between shelves.
Norah reread the clipping.
"Considerable number," she said.
"That's newspaper language. Could mean ten. Could mean two hundred."
"Cypress."
"Yes."
"Old west chute."
"Yes."
"And our pasture has an old channel."
Eli looked at her. "You are now at three maybes, not one fact."
"You count maybes differently when they stack."
"That's exactly when they're most dangerous."
But he copied the article citation into his notebook.