For several days Elias refused to discuss it.
Clara did not force him.
Instead she went to Blackwood alone.
She told him she needed flour.
He knew she was lying.
She knew he knew.
Still, he let her go.
Perhaps because choice had to apply even when he disliked it.
The county records office occupied two rooms behind the courthouse.
The clerk had known Clara since childhood.
He seemed surprised to see her.
“Married life not keeping you busy enough?”
Clara smiled.
“I need newspapers from twenty years ago.”
His amusement vanished.
“Why?”
“Curiosity.”
“About?”
“The Blackwood mine collapse.”
The clerk stared.
Then:
“Those records are incomplete.”
“Show me what remains.”
He hesitated.
Clara smiled more pleasantly.
“I can ask the judge.”
The clerk sighed.
She spent four hours reading.
The official story was simple.
November 1868.
An explosion at Blackwood Consolidated’s Number Three shaft.
Eleven miners dead.
One foreman missing.
The company blamed stolen blasting powder and sabotage.
A bookkeeper employed by the company was accused of falsifying wage records and conspiring with labor agitators.
His name was Thomas Thorne.
Elias’s father.
Clara stopped breathing.
The article said he fled before arrest.
His wife and young son were questioned.
The child later became “seriously ill.”
Two months later the mother died.
The boy was sent to live with an uncle in the mountains.
Clara read the words again.
Seriously ill.
No illness named.
She copied every line.
Another article, dated three weeks after the explosion, reported that the company stable on River Road burned.
Accident.
A third piece announced the bank’s acquisition of several foreclosed miner cottages and two farms whose owners had died in the explosion.
Clara’s fingers went cold.
She searched deed books.
The transfers shared something.
Mortgages issued by Blackwood Bank.
Debts increased shortly before foreclosure.
Signatures from witnesses who later left town.
One surname appeared repeatedly.
The old bank president.
The father of the man now running the bank.
Clara sat back.
Her father’s mortgage was with the same institution.
Same lending book.
Different generation.
She asked for the original.
The clerk became nervous.
“Why?”
“Because it’s my family’s farm.”
“That note is bank property.”
“Recorded mortgage is public.”
The clerk swallowed.
He fetched the volume.
Clara found her father’s signature.
Then the interest amendment from three years later.
Her father’s signature again.
Except it did not look like his.
She had watched him write her entire life.
He made his B with an unusual backward loop.
This one did not.
Clara copied it.
The clerk watched.
“Mrs. Thorne.”
She looked up.
“Be careful.”
“Why?”
He lowered his voice.
“Because people who ask about old records often discover there’s nothing useful in them.”
“Is that a warning?”
“It’s advice.”