By three in the afternoon, the cooperage loft had been converted into an orderly town archive. Corvin had spent five hours scrubbing down four oak flour bins with vinegar, lining them with dry straw and oilcloth, and arranging Hal Rook’s forty-two handwritten service folios in chronological set.
On the white-washed timber wall, Corvin had pasted a massive master index drawn in red and black ink. Every flood, every weir repair, and every underground under-road drain digging dating back thirty-five years was indexed with cross-references to the current pressure readings Ada was feeding across the Courtesy Bridge.
‘Look at this pattern, Pella,’ Corvin said. She pointed with a bone paper knife to Volume Fourteen. ‘In Year Minus-Twelve, during the midsummer freshet, Hal recorded a sudden three-foot drop in the Upper Tor pool that was not with an outflow at the weirs. He spent two weeks searching the bluffs and found an underground sinkhole behind the limestone quarry.’
Pella climbed the ladder to examine the entry. Her father’s neat, sloping handwriting was with a careful watercolor sketch of the quarry wall, showing a natural fissure six feet wide where the water was disappearing into the bowels of the mountain.
‘He marked it with an iron benchmark,’ Pella read aloud. ‘Benchmark Fifty-Four. He warned that if the quarry bypass was ever high-pressure, the water would force that fissure open and wash out the entire western levee.’
