Constance Reyes appeared from behind a rolling cart of archival boxes with reading glasses perched on her head. She was retired from the county clerk's office but volunteered three afternoons a week because, as she told anyone who asked, records had a way of becoming fiction when nobody remained to remember how they were filed. She and Adele had known each other since Tobias was a baby, though in recent years they had seen one another mostly at funerals, holiday suppers, and the occasional hurried grocery-store conversation. Constance embraced her once, stepped back, and studied the dirt on her jacket. "Tell me you haven't fallen into a ditch," she said.
"Not yet," Adele answered. She laid the journal on the counter and opened it to the underlined sentence. "I'm looking for a pipe under the pond. An old one, iron, built into stonework." Constance's eyebrows rose, not because she thought the question ridiculous but because the combination of words seemed to turn a wheel in her memory. She disappeared into a filing room and returned carrying a yellowed survey folder tied with a fading cotton ribbon.
Inside was the original land survey for the property Josiah Fenwick purchased in 1888. Adele recognized the crooked outline of the northern pasture, the curve of the creek, and a faint pencil notation marking a seasonal wet area below the ridge. The property description had changed slightly through later subdivisions and boundary adjustments, but the center of the farm was unmistakable. Constance pointed to a narrow mark near the wet area that might have been an annotation or merely damage to the paper. "Somebody made a note here," she said, "and somebody later decided it wasn't worth copying."
The survey told them where the low ground had been, not what Josiah had done to it. Constance checked the old purchase ledger, the tax index, and a miscellaneous envelope of receipts that had traveled with the original title papers from office to office. In that envelope she found a brittle slip dated the autumn of 1888, a receipt for drainage tile, pipe fittings, iron fasteners, and hauled stone. The amount was considerable for a family starting out on marginal farmland. Adele did not know the price of a day's hired labor in 1888, but she knew enough to see that Josiah had spent money where the land records suggested there was nothing to be gained.