Something in the Blood
Copyright© 2026 by Sparhawk99
Chapter 15: The Older Ledger
Saturday came in cold and bright, the kind of December morning where the sun looked like it was trying without much conviction. Eli walked to the library with the envelope in his jacket pocket instead of his backpack, like it needed to be closer to his body than that.
Samir met him on the front steps, breath fogging, a granola bar half-eaten in one hand. “You sleep okay?”
“Six,” Eli said, which had become its own kind of language between them — a number instead of a story. Samir nodded like that settled the matter and held the door.
The archive room smelled the way it always did—old paper and the particular dust that seemed to exist only in rooms nobody vacuumed on a regular schedule—and the same woman sat at the desk, a retired teacher named Joan Whitfield who volunteered three days a week and had, over the fall, stopped asking Eli and Samir what project they were working on. Eli had come to understand this meant she’d guessed it wasn’t a project.
“Back again,” she said, not unkindly, sliding her glasses up. “You two want the microfilm or the clip files?”
“Clip files,” Eli said. “Property notices. Eighties, maybe late seventies. County line, out past the Voss road.”
Joan didn’t write anything down. She just looked at him a second longer than the question required, then got up and disappeared into the back room. She emerged five minutes later with a gray archival box that had MISC. LEGAL / LAND — 1975–1989 written on a strip of masking tape gone yellow at the edges.
“This is what we’ve got scanned to microfiche,” she said, setting it down. “There’s more in physical storage that never got digitized. Budget cuts, back in—I don’t even remember. If you need something specific, tell me the date range and I’ll go look, but it might take me a minute.”
“The one we’ve got is dated,” Eli said, and read her the date off the newspaper clipping Mara had mailed him.
Joan’s face didn’t change much, but something in it went a little more careful. “That’s an odd one,” she said. “That whole run of the paper, county notices section—there’s a gap. A few issues just aren’t in the collection. I noticed it a while back doing something else. I always figured somebody borrowed them decades ago and never brought them back, which happens more than you’d think.”
“Which issues?” Samir asked.
“I’ll have to check. Give me a few minutes.”
She left again, and this time it was closer to twenty minutes. When she came back, she carried a second folder, thinner than the first, and wore a look on her face that Eli was starting to recognize from adults who’d been circling something without quite letting themselves land on it.
“So here’s the strange part,” she said, sitting down across from them like she’d decided this conversation deserved sitting for. “The gap isn’t random. It’s not water damage or a printing error. Whoever pulled those issues pulled exactly the ones with the county-line property notices. Every other week’s fine. The weeks with those particular notices—gone. Four of them, going back to ‘81.”
“Somebody took them on purpose,” Eli said.
“That’d be my guess. I can’t prove it. Papers go missing for boring reasons all the time. But four issues, same section, over eight years—that’s not a boring reason.” Joan slid the thinner folder toward them. “This is what I did find. Not the notices themselves, but the county recorder’s cross-reference index. Nobody thinks to steal it because nobody remembers it exists. It just lists which parcel numbers had filings in a given month. No detail. Just numbers and dates.”
Samir flipped through it while Eli looked over his shoulder. Neither of them understood what they were looking at for almost a full minute, until Samir said, quietly, “There’s four filings. Same parcel number. Different years. 1981, 1988, 1994, 2003.”
“Same land,” Eli said. “The Voss land.”
“Looks like it.” Joan tapped the parcel number. “You’d have to go to the recorder’s office to get anything real out of that. This just tells you something happened four separate times on that piece of ground, roughly every six or seven years, and somebody didn’t want the newspaper account sitting on a library shelf where anyone could walk in and read it.”
Eli sat with that a second, the cold library air suddenly feeling thinner.
“You said you found this a while back,” he said. “Doing something else. What were you looking for?”
Joan hesitated. For a woman who’d spent thirty years finding things for teenagers doing homework, that hesitation was itself an answer.
“A woman came in here, maybe six years ago now,” she said finally. “Older than you, younger than me. Asking almost exactly what you’re asking. Same road, same kind of gap in the record. She didn’t have a name for me to go on, just a feeling that something had happened to somebody in her family and nobody would say what. I helped her as much as I could, which wasn’t much, and she left, and I never saw her again.” Joan looked at Eli steadily. “I’m not saying that to scare you. I’m saying it because you’re not the first person to come in here asking about that land, and I’d bet money you won’t be the last. That tells you something on its own, whatever the notices actually said.”
Nobody said anything for a while. The heating vent above them clicked on with a small mechanical shudder.
“Do you remember her name?” Samir asked.
“No. I wish I did. She might’ve written it in the guest log, if we still had that book—we switched to digital sign-in in 2019, so anything before that’s gone unless it got boxed.” Joan started to stand, then stopped, one hand still flat on the table, like something had caught up with her a beat late. “Actually. Hold on. Don’t go anywhere.”
She was gone longer this time—almost half an hour—and when she came back she was carrying something with both hands, careful in a way she hadn’t been with the folders, the way you carry something that might come apart if you tilt it wrong.
It was a ledger. Small, bound in cracked board covers the color of a bruise gone old, the spine split enough that a few pages had worked loose and been slid back in without being reattached. Water had gotten to one corner at some point and dried, warping a fan of pages into a stiff, brittle curl.
“This isn’t supposed to be out here,” Joan said, setting it down like she was still deciding whether she meant to go through with it. “It came in with a box of unrelated county estate records maybe fifteen years ago, donated after somebody’s clean-out, never cataloged properly because nobody could figure out what it actually was or who it belonged to. It’s sat in the same drawer as the recorder cross-reference ever since, which is honestly the only reason I thought of it. I want to be clear I don’t know that this has anything to do with what you’re looking for. But you asked what I was looking for six years ago, and this is the thing I never got anywhere with, and it’s been bothering me on and off ever since.”
She opened it with two fingers at the corner, the way you’d open something you didn’t fully trust to hold its own weight.
The handwriting inside was small, slanted, done in at least two different hands over what looked like years, maybe decades. Most of the entries weren’t sentences at all—just initials, dates, a word or two, sometimes a single mark repeated in the margin that made Eli’s stomach drop before his mind had even finished registering why: a small loop, three lines through it, the same shape he’d drawn in his own notebook a dozen times without ever seeing it written by someone else’s hand.
“That’s it,” Samir said quietly, tapping the air above the page without touching it. “That’s the symbol.”
“What symbol?” Joan asked, and then, when neither of them answered right away, “Never mind. Not my business unless you want it to be.”
Eli leaned in. The dates ran earlier than anything they’d found so far—1958, 1963, 1967, the ink faded to a rust-brown that made the numbers hard to trust at a glance. Beside some of the dates were sets of initials, two or three letters, occasionally followed by a single word: resolved. removed. transferred—Sask. absent, no return. One entry, from 1967, had a full surname instead of initials: Halloway. Not Calder. Not Voss. A name Eli had never heard in his life, sitting in a book that seemed to be keeping the same kind of record his own family kept, just older, and about someone else entirely.
“Halloway,” Samir said. “That’s not—”
“No,” Eli said. “I don’t know that name.”
“There’s more than one family in here,” Joan said, and she didn’t sound like she was trying to reassure them, she sounded like she was working it out for the first time herself, out loud, in real time. “Look—here, and here. Different surnames scattered through it. If this is what you think it might be, it’s not just your people. It goes back further than your people, and it isn’t only your people it happened to.”
Eli felt something in his chest go very still, the way a room goes still right before a window breaks, when you can already hear the sound about to happen. He didn’t reach for the ledger. He wanted to, badly, wanted to flip every page and read every faded initial and match every one of them to a face, a name, a person who had walked around not knowing what word to put on the thing that had happened to them, the way he hadn’t known for eighteen years. But some instinct, small and stubborn and recently earned, kept his hands in his lap.
“Can you make copies?” he asked instead.
“Some of it. The water-damaged pages, I’d want a conservator to look at before anybody handles them more than they have to—turning them wrong could finish what the water started. But the readable ones, yes. I can do that this week.”
“Is there anything about Rachel Voss,” Eli asked. “Or Peter Calder.”
Joan went through slowly, careful with the spine, and after a few minutes shook her head. “Nothing with those names specifically. The most recent entries I can find stop somewhere in the early seventies, best I can tell from the dates. Whatever this book was keeping track of, it looks like somebody either stopped using it or started a new one we don’t have. If your Rachel Voss and Peter Calder are from ‘81 like the newspaper gap suggests, they’d have their own book, if there is one. This one’s older than them. It’s not their story. It might be the story of whatever came before their story.”
“So this doesn’t tell us what happened to them,” Samir said.
“No,” Joan agreed. “It tells you this has been going on longer than anybody currently alive probably wants to admit, and it tells you it wasn’t confined to one family’s ground. That’s not nothing. It’s also not an answer.”
Eli sat with that a second, the cold library air suddenly feeling thinner than it had a minute ago.