Chapter 3
Nothing more happened that week. Hollis kept to the hedges, as promised, trimming the boxwood along the north wall with the old hand shears he'd found in the shed. The garden club went about its business under the wisteria, and Claudia swept past him twice without acknowledging his existence. Sunday night he walked the grounds by himself in the long golden light, from the terrace down the gravel path through the rose garden, past the boxwood hedge and the old greenhouse at the far end.
The greenhouse was his aunt's last holdout. The glass was intact but filmed with grime, and the wooden frame was warped in a way that would need real work. The door was locked with a brass padlock, and the key had been in his aunt's keepsake box, wrapped in tissue paper, with a note in her handwriting.
*For the greenhouse. Don't open it until you're sure.*
He hadn't opened it. He'd held the key in his palm, turning it over in the light, wondering what could be so important that she'd felt the need to lock it away. She'd never mentioned the greenhouse to him, except to say that the glass would need replacing eventually and that the roses were the real treasure anyway.
Monday came. Tuesday. Wednesday morning, Hollis found the first crack in the club's united front.
It happened at the water station, the little table set up at the edge of the terrace with a pitcher and plastic cups for the Wednesday work party. Hollis was carrying a pair of shears back to the shed when he heard the voices from behind the hedge, close enough to be audible without being truly private.
"—can't do that, it's not legal." A woman's voice, older, clipped.
"Laws are interpretation, Millicent. The town hasn't touched this property in thirty years. They're not going to start now." Claudia's voice, bright and untouchable.
"You can't just evict someone without a documented basis. I know I'm not the one who handles the paperwork, but I know that much."
"I'm not evicting anyone." Claudia's tone had ice in it now. "There's no lease. There's no documented tenancy. He's an employee the club hired, and the board has the right to terminate employees. It's that simple."
"He wasn't hired by me," Millicent said. "He was hired by the previous secretary, and that was before my time. And I've been going through the old records, Claudia. I can't find evidence that anyone ever hired him in writing. Did you approve that hire?"
The silence lasted three full seconds.
"I approved an expenditure," Claudia said. "The details were handled by the committee."
"They weren't. I checked the minutes. The word 'groundskeeper' doesn't appear anywhere in this year's records."
"Then the records are incomplete."
"They're complete enough to matter." Millicent's voice had an edge of quiet satisfaction. "And if there's no written record of the hire, there's no written record of the termination. You can't fire him, Claudia. There's nothing to fire him from."
Hollis stood very still behind the hedge, the shears cold in his hand.
"You don't know what you're talking about," Claudia said.
"I know what I can read. And I've read everything, going back to the beginning of the club's records. There was never a formal lease with the Barrett family. There was never even a letter of agreement." Millicent paused. "Do you know what there is? A series of receipts for maintenance costs, paid to the estate trust every year, signed by presidents going back to the nineties. Maintenance payments. Not rent."
"So we've been maintaining the property all these years. That's a form of ownership."
"That's not what the receipts say. They say the club pays for the upkeep. Nothing about what the club gets in return."
Hollis heard Claudia's sharp intake of breath, the click of her bracelet as she gestured.
"This is pointless," Claudia said. "The vote is Friday. I have the votes. The groundskeeper will be gone by the end of the day, and we'll hire a proper service that knows how to leave a garden alone."
"Fine," Millicent said. "But before you cast your vote, read the trust documents. The estate's owner has the final say on any agreement, and the owner's signature is the one thing nobody has."
Hollis stepped out from behind the hedge.
The two women stopped talking. Millicent was a trim, grey-haired woman in a straw hat he'd seen at the table all week; Claudia stood by the water station, her back straight, her silver-blonde bob catching the light.
"Good morning," Hollis said. He kept his voice even. "I was just headed to the shed. Didn't mean to interrupt."
He walked past them, the shears in his hand, feeling both sets of eyes on him until he rounded the corner and disappeared down the path.
In the shed he sat on the overturned crate his aunt had used for years and stared at the wall.
Millicent was a clue. She'd been reading the records, and she'd found the same holes Priya had found. The verbal-only lease. The missing paperwork. The absence of anyone's signature.
But she didn't know the half of it. She didn't know about the deed in his pocket, the parcel number that matched the plaque. She didn't know that the owner she kept referencing had been dead since the spring, and that the ownership itself had passed to the man she'd just seen walking past her carrying a pair of old shears.
Hollis looked down at his hands. The scar on his left knuckle was pale against his skin, the rose thorn's gift from a summer long ago.
He hadn't wanted to make a scene. He'd wanted to work the garden, keep the land in the family, and let the club go on doing what it had always done.
But Claudia was going to push this to Friday. She was going to stand in front of her board and announce that she was having him removed. And she'd built her whole position on a foundation of paper that did not exist.
Thursday he went to the town office at the county clerk's building, a low brick structure on the main street that he'd passed a hundred times without ever entering. A woman at the counter found the plat records in under a minute, tracing her finger along the map to the parcel in question.
"Willowmere Estate," she read. "Parcel ledger number 1142. Owner of record: Barrett, Hollis Q., as of April. Inherited." She looked up, her expression not quite curious. "You know the property?"
"Yes," Hollis said. "I'm the owner."
The woman blinked once, then wrote down the address of the office where he could get a certified copy of the deed for a fee of eight dollars.
Hollis paid it.
He walked back to Willowmere in the late afternoon light with the certified copy in a manila envelope under his arm, the original deed still folded warm in his back pocket. The envelope had the county seal on it, and the woman's handwritten note in one corner confirming the owner of record.
He didn't open the envelope. He put it on the table in the cottage, next to the key to the greenhouse, and stood looking at both for a long moment.
Friday was tomorrow.
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