"Maybe."
"And if ownership gets complicated, a buyer won't touch it."
"Maybe."
Marcus exhaled sharply.
"You enjoy that word?"
Norah had to look away so he would not see her smile.
Eli said, "More every year."
Marcus folded the proposal and put it back into his pocket.
"Offer stays open until Friday. After that I move my equipment to Arkansas."
"Then move it."
He drove away fast enough to throw gravel from the lane.
Norah waited until the truck disappeared.
"He knew about the map."
"He guessed."
"He knew something."
Eli looked toward the logs.
"Which means we're taking a sample to Raymond tomorrow."
Raymond Pike's sawmill sat behind his house on six acres outside a town smaller than Sunridge, surrounded by stacks of lumber stickered beneath tin sheds. Raymond was seventy-one, broad through the shoulders despite his age, with two missing fingertips on his left hand and the patience of someone who had spent forty years listening to wood before cutting it.
He had known Eli since both were young enough to work all day without complaining about their backs.
"Flood bring you business or trouble?" Raymond asked.
"Both," Eli said.
They had brought only a damaged fragment, not one of the three important logs. The piece had broken naturally from a smaller trunk when the water exposed it, and Eli was comfortable sacrificing part of it for inspection. It was nearly three feet long and heavy enough that Norah and Eli needed Raymond's rolling cart to move it from the truck.
Raymond looked at the black exterior.
"Where'd you get this?"
"Lower pasture."
"From the flood?"
"From under the flood, maybe."
Raymond glanced at Norah. "That's a sentence with a story behind it."
"She'll tell you whether you ask or not," Eli said.
Norah ignored him and spread the photographs, old map, and article across Raymond's workbench.
Raymond did not look at them immediately.
First he examined the wood.
He scraped the surface with a drawknife until the black gave way to brown. He smelled the exposed wood. Then he used a small hand lens to study the end grain.
"Cypress," he said eventually.
Norah leaned forward. "Old?"
Raymond looked at her. "All trees are old compared to breakfast."
"You and Granddad should not be friends."
"Why?"
"Same answers."
Raymond grinned.
He traced the growth rings. "This grew slow. Real slow. Tight grain. Tree was mature when cut."
"Hard to find this size now outside protected stands or isolated old growth. But don't jump ahead. A big old tree can have been cut in 1930 just as easily as 1890."
"Could it survive buried that long?"
"Cypress can do remarkable things in low oxygen and wet sediment. Doesn't mean every buried cypress log stays sound. Some turn to sponge. Some crack. Some mineral stain. Some come out beautiful."
Eli handed him a photograph of the marked trunk.
Raymond's expression changed.
"Hmm."
"That's what he said," Norah told Eli.