The Millbrook Township office occupied the ground floor of the old grange hall on Main Street, behind a door that stuck in damp weather.
Ethan put his shoulder to the door with his permit application in one hand and his deed in the other, and came into a long office where the parcel maps lived in flat drawers and township business proceeded at the speed of long acquaintance.
"Ethan Cole." Grace Tillinghast looked up from her desk with the air of a woman for whom the past was a filing system. She was sixty-three, township clerk for twenty-six of those years, and had stamped his mother's PTA forms, his father's burn permits, and documents in the depot fire's long paper aftermath. "I heard at church you'd bought the Rasmussen house. I said, well. The Cole boy's come home to fix something."
"Something like that, Mrs. Tillinghast."
"Grace," she said, "since you're a ratepayer now. What are we doing?"
He laid it out plainly, the way he had rehearsed it in the truck: he wanted to replace the boundary fence between 9 Cedar Hollow Road and the Hale property; he wanted the permit, the map, and whatever the township had on file, because his neighbor believed the fence stood on the true line and he believed it did not, and he intended to be right or wrong on paper before he was right or wrong with a post-hole digger.
"Fences," Grace said, with the gravity of a woman pronouncing on artillery. "More trouble than septic, and twice as personal. Let's see the map."
The parcel map came out of Drawer Four with a smell of old paper and dust and was spread under brass weights on the counter: Cedar Hollow Road in pale wash, the lots like ribbon candy along it, his own lot β Lot 9 β hatched and numbered in a draftsman's careful hand. Grace found the iron pin at the road corner, ran the boundary line down the map, and went very quiet.
"Well," she said at last. "According to this, Ethan, your fence isn't on the line."
"It's on hers?"
"It's on yours." Her fingertip traveled the map again. "If this plat is right β and it's the plat of record, recorded in seventy-nine β the existing fence stands a good four feet inside your property. The lawn strip on the far side of that fence, the ferns and all? Yours. Been yours, or Rasmussen's, all along. Mrs. Hale's line is over here." She tapped a point east of the fence line, on Ethan's grass, where no marker stood.
Ethan looked at the map a long time. "She told me the township settled this. Twice. In writing."
"Did she." Grace did not make it a question. She pulled the lot file and paged through surveys, permits, a septic certificate from 1987. "There's correspondence about the fence from ninety-eight... a letter from Rasmussen, and a reply. Hmm." She turned a page, then turned it back. "The reply's not here. Or the survey he mentions isn't. Files walk, sometimes, in forty years. I'll not say more than that, because I don't know more than that."
"Can I get a copy of the plat?"
"You can, and you should, and here's your permit application β fences under six feet, like-for-like replacement, no board review." She was sliding the forms across with one hand and frowning at the map with the whole of her attention, and Ethan saw that her eyes had stopped somewhere along the dashed boundary line, where a symbol he didn't recognize repeated at intervals: a dashed line, offset, with small cross-ticks, running parallel to his lot line the full depth of the lot.
"Grace. What's that?"
"That," she said slowly, "is an easement notation. Drainage, or utility, one of the old ones. They drew them in by hand, and half the time the legend's on another sheet that's been separated since the Ford administration." She took off her glasses and cleaned them, which he would come to learn was what she did instead of speculating. "It might be the storm-drain reserve. Walter Hale designed those works; his office drew half these plats. If there's an easement along your boundary, Ethan, it's old, and it may not ever have been used. I'd have to pull the county's copy to say more, and the county is not quick."
"Is it a problem for a fence?"
"For a fence?" She put her glasses back on. "Fences go over easements every day in this county, son, and nobody writes a poem about it. But you're not asking about a fence anymore, I think. You're asking me what that line is doing on your map." She folded the copy, warm from the copier, and handed it to him with the permit forms. "Take the weekend. Walk your line. And Ethan β when you dig, dig like the ground might have something to say. Around here, it usually does."
Chapter 5: Post Holes