He sat back from the computer and thought about what that meant. A contractor could not be given access to a parcel that did not exist. A homeowner could not sign away rights over land described by a number that belonged to no one. And yet the agreement was written as if P-47C were his yard, as if the number and the ground were the same thing, and Lorraine had pressed him to sign it quickly, before Monday, before the county became involved. Marcus understood, for the first time that day, that the hurry was not about safety. The hurry was about preventing exactly what he was doing now: sitting down, reading the document, and checking the number. If he had signed in the yard, with Lorraine watching and Douglas waiting, he would never have noticed the mismatch. He would have signed a document that gave a contractor access to something he did not own, described by a number he did not recognize, and he would have done it because the fines sounded large and the deadline sounded real.
At 4:38, he drove downtown. He had made the decision quickly, because the archive room stayed open until seven during the annual property-review period, and he wanted to get there before it closed. The main counter closed at noon on Saturdays, and he knew that, but the archive room was different, and the property-review period kept it open later. He put the agreement in a folder, along with his tax record and a copy of the deed, and he drove to the old brick courthouse annex in the center of town. The building was older than the other county buildings around it, with brick that had darkened over decades and windows that were narrow and tall. He parked in the lot behind it and walked to the entrance. There was only one open entrance on a Saturday afternoon, a single door with a deputy standing beside it, and the deputy checked his folder before he let him through. Marcus explained that he needed the archive desk, and the deputy nodded and pointed him down a corridor toward the stairs.
The basement archive desk was at the bottom of a narrow staircase, in a room that smelled faintly of old paper and dust. The desk was staffed by a woman with reading glasses hanging from a silver chain around her neck, and she looked up when Marcus approached. Her name plate said Nadine Foster. She had the manner of a person who had worked in the same room for a long time, and she read the agreement the way Marcus had read it, slowly, with her glasses on, stopping at the places that did not fit. She stopped at P-47C. She read the number twice, and then she looked at Marcus over the top of her glasses, and she asked him where he had gotten the document. Marcus told her. He told her about Lorraine, about the inspection, about the agreement, and about the pressure to sign. Nadine listened without interrupting, and then she asked him whether he had signed it. Marcus said he had not. He said he had taken it to read, and he had not signed anything. Nadine nodded, and something in her posture changed, as if the answer had moved the document from one category to another.
She asked about the signatures on the agreement. She pointed to Lorraine's signature, and she asked whether Lorraine was the requesting authority. Marcus said she was listed as such. She pointed to Douglas Pryce's name, and she asked whether he was the safety inspector. Marcus said he was. She pointed to Gerald Vale's name, and she asked whether he was the remediation contractor. Marcus said he was. Nadine wrote down the three names on a small pad, and she did not explain why she was writing them down. She stood up and walked to a door at the back of the archive room, a heavy door with a lock, and she locked it. She told Marcus she was locking the archive room until her supervisor arrived, and she said it in a tone that made it clear this was not a routine precaution. Something about the document had made her lock a door.
Marcus waited at the desk while Nadine made a phone call from a phone at the back of the room. He could not hear all of what she said, because she spoke quietly and turned partly away from him, but he caught fragments. He heard her say Rosewood Hills. He heard her say Original development map. He heard her say Vale signature. He heard her say Unauthorized access agreement. The fragments did not form a complete sentence, but they formed a shape, and the shape was that P-47C was not an ordinary parcel, and that the name Vale was already attached to it in the county's records, and that an access agreement for it was not something the county treated lightly. Marcus sat very still and listened, and he wrote down the fragments in his notebook, because he had learned at work that a fragment written down at the time was worth more than a memory reconstructed later.