Clara hauled the heavy canvas binder off the bottom shelf in Room 102 and set it flat on the wooden counter.

“Maple Street’s indexed under volume forty-two,” Clara whispered, leaning in so the junior clerk at the microfiche machine wouldn’t overhear.

“I pulled the property ledger from four years back.”

I touched the silver pendant at my collar and studied the typed entry near the bottom of the page.

According to the public ledger, John Vance had sold his two-bedroom frame house on Maple Street forty-eight months before.

The buyers were a young couple from Canton, and the sale price was forty-four thousand dollars.