The Cat Translator Clause

Chapter 3 The Papers on the Windowsill

The next morning I got up before Daniel and drove to the county records office.

It was a low building with brown carpet and fluorescent lights, and the clerk behind the counter was a woman in her sixties named Mrs. Lyle who had known my mother. She found the parcel file in eleven minutes.

"Here it is," she said. "Halloran to Ellis. Quitclaim, 2009. And there's a survey attached from 1998."

She turned the page toward me. I saw the drawing first: a rectangle of land with the water on one side and the road on the other, and a dotted line marking the stone wall, and a solid line marking the fence.

The stone wall was forty feet east of the fence line. The stone wall was the legal boundary. My mother's parcel did not include the dune. My mother's parcel did not include the beach grass.

I stared at the drawing.

"The fence was put up by the previous owner," Mrs. Lyle said. "There's a note here. The Hallorans put it up for their dogs, and it was always understood to be a courtesy fence. It was never meant to be a boundary."

"So the land between the fence and the wall belongs to the adjoining parcel."

"That's what the survey says."

I thought about the dune. I thought about the beach grass I had planted, and the hydrangeas, and the studio at the end of the garden, and the fact that the studio sat twenty feet west of the fence, which meant it sat on land that was technically Franklin Bennett's.

"And who owned the adjoining parcel in 1998?" I asked.

Mrs. Lyle looked at the file. "The Bennetts," she said. "Franklin's father. It's been in the family since the forties."

I drove home with the survey photocopied and folded in my purse. I did not go into the house. I went around the side to the garden and stood at the fence and looked at the dune.

The red flags were still there.

Pearl came out of the studio and sat on the fence post. She looked at the flags, and then at me.

"There are more," she said.

"More what?"

"Flags. On the other side. Near the big house."

I walked to the far end of the garden, to the corner where the fence met the hedge, and parted the branches. Franklin's property ran along the other side. There were three more red flags on his lawn, and a fourth further up near the driveway, and a man in an orange vest was standing by the flagpole with a clipboard.

They were measuring the line all the way to the road.

I went inside. Vivian was in the kitchen, making coffee. She was wearing a pale blue sweater and pearl earrings and her hair was set, and she looked up at me with the mild expression she used when she wanted to seem harmless.

"You were up early," she said.

"I went to the county."

The mild expression did not change. "Did you."

"I saw the 1998 survey. I saw the note about the Hallorans' dogs. I know the fence was never the boundary."

"Well," Vivian said, and poured the coffee. "Then you understand why we need to correct it."

"I understand that you've known this for years and never said anything."

"There was nothing to say. It's a bookkeeping issue. Franklin's lawyer is handling it."

"It's not a bookkeeping issue. It's my land."

"It's not your land," Vivian said. She set the pot down and looked at me. "It was never your land. You married into this family, Nora. You didn't bring anything with you except your mother's little house and that cat. The house is Daniel's. The studio is on our acreage. The garden is on our acreage. That's what the survey says."

"The studio is twenty feet inside the fence."

"And the fence is not the boundary."

I stood in the kitchen doorway with my hands at my sides and felt the floor tilt under me. Four years. Four years of Sunday dinners and shared bank accounts and a cat we had adopted together, and I had signed nothing, and owned nothing, and I had believed that was okay because we were married and Daniel loved me.

"Where is Daniel?" I asked.

"At the office."

Of course. The office. It was a Tuesday morning in July, and Daniel was at the office, and he would not be home until seven, and by then Vivian would have had eight hours to arrange everything.

I turned and walked out to the studio.

Pearl was on the desk. The stack of old mail was still there, and the county notice was still open, and I sat down and pulled out my phone and started searching.

Warren Cole. Franklin Bennett. Lot-line adjustment. Quitclaim.

It took me two hours to find it. Not on the assessor's site. On a state database of property filings. A 2016 petition for lot-line adjustment, filed by Warren Cole on behalf of Franklin Bennett, seeking to "formalize the existing fence line as the true boundary between the Bennett parcel and the Ellis parcel."

It had been withdrawn.

I stared at the screen. The petition had been filed in March 2016 and withdrawn in June 2016, and there was no reason given.

My mother had been diagnosed that February. She had died in November.

I sat back in the chair. Pearl walked across the desk and put her paw on my hand.

"Your mother," she said. "She stopped them."

"How do you know that?"

"I don't know it. I heard it. The old one and the one with glasses. They said it last week. They said her mother was sick for a year and nobody remembers anything from a year like that."

I closed my laptop.

"I need to find out what my mother filed," I said.

Pearl looked at me.

"And I need you to keep listening."