Ezra Emmett's Arc

Chapter 3 of 5

Ezra sat on the cellar floor with a page in his lap and read it again by the tin box candle. The magistrate's name sat black in the middle. Around it, only anger. No dates. No ledger numbers. No witness. He had printed two hundred sheets of accusation and nothing more. Anyone who read it would call it slander and burn it in the stove. Alex came down the stairs with a loaf under one arm and set it on the stone. Ezra held the page up. "This is not enough," he said. "They will laugh at it." Alex read the sheet once. "You are right," he said. "You need the ledger." He did not soften it. He tore a crust off the loaf and handed it over. "Where is it kept?" Ezra had thought about that for four years. The false ledger that convicted his father had gone into the magistrate's own house after the trial, out past the mill road, behind a white picket fence and a porch with two lamps. A log home that looked like any other. He had walked past it twice a year and never once stopped. He told Alex the house. Alex nodded like a man told the weather. "I cannot get in," Ezra said. His hands shook on the crust. "I have tried to plan it. I cannot." "You will not," Alex said. "I will." He pulled his hood back an inch and looked at Ezra straight. "Three years I have waited for a door worth opening. That is the door." He would not say why. Ezra asked once and got nothing. Alex tied the loaf back in its cloth and stepped to the stairs. "Hold the pages here. Print no more. If I bring the ledger out, we set the numbers beside the name and pull a second run. Then it is proof." Ezra sat with the two hundred sheets after Alex left. He stacked them face down under a board so the ink would not smudge, and he pushed the stack against the wall. He blew the candle out and listened to the boards above the cellar. No footsteps. No dog. Only his own breath. He had made a paper that named a man and proved nothing, and he had just handed the second half of the job to someone he did not know well enough to trust. The pamphlet in his satchel was still an accusation. It was not yet the truth. But for the first time since he had cut the plates, he knew what the truth would need, and he knew who had gone to fetch it.