Chapter 4
The door clicked shut, leaving Martha alone in the hallway with the small cardboard box in her hands. She carried it into the kitchen, setting it down on the laminate countertop without opening it. Arthur’s words hung in the air like smoke, heavy and suffocating. People bury all sorts of things over the years. It wasn't a casual observation; it was a deliberate provocation, a chess piece moved across a board she hadn't realized she was playing on. He knew something, or at least he suspected enough to test her reactions. She needed to know what information he had accessed, and the only place to find out was in the small office David used to keep before his memory began its slow, steady retreat.
She walked down the narrow hallway to the back of the house, pushing open the door to the study. The room smelled of old paper, dust, and lemon polish. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with heavy volumes on local history, civil engineering, and old property deeds. David sat in his worn leather armchair by the window, staring blankly at a crossword puzzle he hadn't touched in hours.
"David?" she asked softly, stepping into the room.
He blinked, slowly turning his head to look at her. "Yes, Martha? Is dinner ready?"
"Not yet, David. I need to find the old property survey from when we bought the house back in ninety-eight. Do you remember where you put the blue binder?"
David frowned, his forehead wrinkling as he searched the dusty filing cabinets of his mind. "The blue binder? That was in the bottom drawer of the mahogany desk. Right behind the tax forms from the year the drainage ditch was cleared."
Martha hurried to the heavy wooden desk, dropping to her knees and pulling open the lowest drawer. It jammed halfway, protesting the rust on its metal tracks, before giving way with a dry screech. Inside sat a stack of faded manila folders and a thick, dust-covered blue binder labeled Property Assessments & Survey Maps - 1998. She pulled it out, sitting right there on the braided rug, and flipped open the heavy plastic cover.
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Old blueprints, topographical maps, and county permits spilled out onto the floor. She sorted through them with trembling fingers until she found the master plot plan of the lot. Her eyes scanned the technical drawings, tracing the lines of the foundation, the old oak tree, and the exact placement of the utility lines. There, marked in faded red ink by a county surveyor decades ago, was an easement running right along the side of the house—the very spot where the old drainage pipe had collapsed during the massive flood of nineteen ninety-five, and the very spot where she and David had spent three days digging a trench in the dead of night to repair it before the county inspectors could slap them with a massive fine for unpermitted structural work.
Except, as she stared closer at the faded ink, she realized the drainage pipe wasn't the only thing marked on that map. A faint, pencil-written annotation, added in David’s neat handwriting years later, noted a secondary depth measurement near the gas meter. Her breath caught in her throat. Arthur hadn't been talking about drainage pipes. He had been looking at something else entirely.
