Long Chain

Every parcel in this county has been sold at least nine times, and one signature keeps turning up.

Ines Baptiste came north to close a title company, not to run one. The abstractor who owned it died without a successor and left four filing rooms of original instruments — the only place the complete chain of title for Sisu Bay has ever been assembled in one draw, because the county's own index runs by grantor and grantee, not by parcel, and nobody before her had reason to rebuild it any other way.

She is forty-seven, she has spent her career cleaning up other people's paper, and she plans to be gone by spring.

Then she starts reading.

The name appears first in 1866, on a mining lease. It appears in 1904, witnessing a widow's quitclaim. It is there in 1937 and 1961 and 1998, and it is there last March, and every instance is regular on its face — properly executed, properly acknowledged, properly recorded. There is nothing wrong with a single one of them. There is only the fact that they exist, in that order, for that long.

Ines has one advantage nobody in this county has ever had: the whole chain, assembled, in one room.

Jago Pascoe came in to ask her not to publish it, and made the mistake of telling her the truth about why.

He has been trying to break this chain for ninety years — from inside it, one instrument at a time, in a county where the only weapon anybody has is a purchase and the only defence is a better description. He is very good at it. He has never once been able to explain it to anyone, and he has certainly never had help.

The woman assembling this county has never had to worry about the record before.

She does now.