He wiped his knife blade on his trousers and pointed toward row three.

“Nineteen ninety-eight to the present is on the bottom shelf,” he said.

“Volume forty-two.”

I pulled the heavy volume onto the oak reading table and turned the cold paper pages until I found the boundaries of the Miller farm.

My eyes ran over the parcel numbers on their own, looking for errors the way I checked hospital billing codes every afternoon.

Parcel 14-B was the two point three acres around the old farmhouse.