Elaine tapped her fingernails on her leather notepad. “Clara, look at this entry from three weeks ago.”
I set the box down and adjusted my reading glasses, leaning over her shoulder to look at the blue ink log.
“The registration log has a gap,” she said, pointing to a missing line between the tenth and twelfth of October.
“That log is always sequential,” I said, tracing the empty space where a clerk signature should have been.
“Someone checked out the current district boundaries on the eleventh,” Elaine said, “but they did not sign their name.”
“The rules require a full signature and a seventy-five dollar fee for any certified copy,” I said.
She closed the ledger with a soft thud. “This ledger has been the absolute standard for twelve years, but now the numbers are drifting.”
“Who had the vault keys that day?” she asked.
I did not answer because the key log was kept in the main office upstairs, and I had not checked it yet.
