The records office occupied the annex behind the courthouse, where high shelves held deed books bound in cracking leather. A clerk named Amos Wade listened patiently while Eli described the old channel and recovered timber. He was a thin man with wire-rim glasses and a habit of tapping his pencil against his lower lip when thinking.
"You want property history or abandoned property law?" he asked.
"I want to know what not to accidentally sell," Eli said.
Amos nodded as if that were a familiar category.
He pulled the Bell deed chain first.
The land had changed hands repeatedly before Eli's father bought it, but the southern acreage remained part of the same section since the early twentieth century. Earlier descriptions used natural boundaries that no longer existed: cottonwood corner, old slough, west chute bank.
Norah saw the words again.
West chute.
Amos found an 1898 conveyance describing land "east of the abandoned west chute bed," which suggested the channel had already begun silting in by then. A drainage survey from 1921 labeled the same feature an "old river scar." By 1946, aerial photographs showed it only as a darker curve across agricultural ground.
"So the pasture isn't beside an old river channel," Norah said.
Amos adjusted his glasses. "Part of your pasture is the old river channel."
"How deep?"
"Maps don't tell you."
"Could logs stay buried there that long?"
"That's a question for somebody who understands wood and sediment better than me."
Eli asked about ownership.
Amos became cautious.
"I'm not an attorney."
"Didn't ask you to be."
"Good, because lawyers charge more than county clerks for saying maybe."
Norah liked him immediately.
He explained that timber intentionally stored, accidentally lost, abandoned, buried, or deposited by a changed channel could create different legal questions depending on evidence and state law. After nearly a century, with a dissolved company and timber physically embedded in land held through multiple deeds, the practical answer might favor the landowner, but Eli should not rely on a clerk's guess if serious money became involved.
"Document where it came from," Amos said. "Don't move more than necessary. Don't let somebody else move it before you've got records. And if the value gets high enough that people start changing their stories, call a lawyer."
Norah thought of Marcus.
"What counts as high enough?"
Amos smiled. "You'll know when people stop calling it junk."
Before leaving, they ordered certified copies of the old survey references and paid for photocopies of the 1887 map and 1898 deed description. The copies were grainy, but the line was visible.
On the drive home Norah held them in her lap beside the newspaper article.
"You believe me now."
Eli glanced at her.
"Believe what?"
"That those logs were buried there before this flood."
"I believe it's likely."
"That Sterling knew something."
"I believe Marcus knows timber."
"You always answer one step behind the question."
"Keeps me from falling off it."
Norah looked out the window.
Fields slid past.
Farmhouses stood on slightly raised pads above ditches still full of water.
"Why didn't your father ever tell you about the channel?"
Eli thought for a while.
"He probably did."
"You forgot?"
"People tell you things when you're young and you don't know which ones you'll need fifty years later."
"That's depressing."
"That's why you write things down."
He tapped her notebook.