When Nadine returned to the desk, she told Marcus what P-47C was. She said it was not a residential parcel. She said it was a restricted subsurface reserve. She said it was possibly beneath several properties, not just one yard, and that it did not follow the lines of the houses above it. Marcus asked what that meant, and Nadine explained it as best she could without the supervisor present. A subsurface reserve was a designation for land beneath the surface, recorded separately from the homes and lots above it. It could run beneath several properties at once. It could be restricted, meaning that access to it required county authorization, not a homeowner's signature on an association form. She said it carefully, and she said it as if she were choosing each word, and Marcus understood that she was telling him something the county did not say to everyone who walked into the archive room.
She brought out a microfilm index cabinet and a scanner, and she showed Marcus a map. It was a map of the pre-development land, from before Rosewood Hills was built, and it showed the ground as it had been when the neighborhood was still fields and yards and storage sites. Marcus leaned over the scanner and looked at the image as it came into focus. He could see an abandoned plant nursery, marked in faded ink. He could see a maintenance yard. He could see a county storage site. And across the middle of the map, shaded in a darker tone than the land around it, was a rectangle marked P-47C. The rectangle did not align with any fence. It did not follow the lot lines that would later be drawn above it. It ran diagonally, and Marcus could see, even on the old map, that it would pass beneath what would become five future backyards. His own backyard was one of them. The flower bed where he had knelt that morning, where Lorraine had dumped the garbage, sat directly above one end of the shaded rectangle.
Marcus stared at the map for a long time. He thought about the metal cap his landscaping crew had found beneath a root cluster along the rear fence, the four-inch circle stamped P-47C, and he understood now what the cap had marked. It had marked the top of something buried, something recorded on a map older than his house, something that ran beneath five homes and did not belong to any of them in the ordinary sense. He thought about Lorraine covering the cap with soil and telling his workers to leave, and he understood that act differently now. She had not been protecting a drainage barrier. She had been hiding a marker. He thought about the depression in his yard, the shallow dip that had appeared three weeks earlier, and he understood that too. The ground above a buried structure settles in its own way, and a boot sinking slightly into soft soil was not a mystery. It was a symptom.
Nadine told him to keep the agreement unsigned and to keep it safe. She told him her supervisor would want to see it, and that the county would want to look at the map and the signatures. She did not tell him everything, because she could not, and because the supervisor had not yet arrived, but she told him enough. She told him that P-47C was real, that it was restricted, and that an association agreement could not grant access to it. Marcus thanked her, and he put the agreement back in his folder, and he walked back up the narrow staircase and out through the single open entrance into the late afternoon light. He drove home slowly, and he thought about the map, and about the rectangle beneath five backyards, and about the fact that a number on page two of a document he had almost signed had led him to a room in the basement of a courthouse, where a clerk with glasses on a silver chain had locked a door and shown him the ground beneath his own garden. He had come downtown to check a parcel number. He was going home with the knowledge that his yard sat above something the county had recorded, restricted, and then, for reasons he did not yet understand, allowed to be forgotten.