Everyone Who Loves Me Dies

Chapter One

The chain went back to 1968 and there was something wrong with it in 1988, and it took her until twenty past ten to find out what.

Maëlys worked backwards. It was the only way that made sense to her and the reason Brackley had hired her at twenty-four. You started at the present owner and walked out of the building the way you had come in. Transfer, transfer, charge, discharge, transfer. Each instrument handing the property to the next pair of hands, each one with a number and a date and a name that either matched the name below it or did not.

Most of them matched. That was the truth about the work and she had never minded it. Six days out of seven you read forty years of a stranger’s arrangements and everything lined up, and you wrote a paragraph saying so, and somebody bought a house.

At 1988 the names matched. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was a charge registered in September of that year, a mortgage for sixty-two thousand dollars in favor of a trust company that had been swallowed twice since, and no discharge anywhere after it. The property had sold in 1994 and again in 2007 and again in 2019 and nobody had ever gone back and lifted it off.

She checked the 1994 transfer for a statement about it. Nothing. She checked whether the 2007 solicitor had registered anything to clean it up, an application to delete, a court order, a certificate. Nothing. Somebody in 1994 had either not looked or had looked and decided it was the next person’s problem, and then it had been the next person’s problem three times in a row.

She wrote it up. Instrument 344871, charge in favor of Sterling Fidelity Trust, no discharge registered. Requires discharge or title insurance treatment prior to closing.

She has been asked, since, what she was doing on the tenth of March, and the answer is that she was doing this. Nine hours of it. It is the last ordinary working day in the account and nobody has ever wanted to hear about it. Somebody’s grandmother had probably paid that mortgage off in 1991 with a cheque and a handshake and had never once wondered whether the paperwork followed. That was almost always what it was. The debt was gone and the record of the debt was immortal.

The parcel register gave her the numbers and the dates. For the instruments themselves she had to open them, and three of the four opened fine, scans of typed pages with the registrar’s stamp bled through from the back. The fourth was a transfer from 1974 and there was no image behind it. Just the line on the register, the number, the date, the two names.

“Oh, come on,” she said, to nobody.

It happened. Pre-conversion instruments from the old registry books were hit and miss depending on the county and how thorough the imaging project had been in whatever year they got to Wentworth. Some of them were sitting in a box in a building. If you wanted the actual document you filled out a request and paid the fee and waited, and the wait was eight days or it was three weeks and nobody would tell you which in advance because nobody knew.

She flagged it on the file as an item to order, moved the whole thing into the pile for Wednesday, and forgot about it inside of a minute.

It was ten thirty in the morning on the tenth of March. Outside the window the parking lot behind the office was gray and wet and half the spots were still walled in by the snowbank the plow had built in January. Somebody’s shopping cart had surfaced out of it in February and was still there.

The condo on Bay South had a status certificate dated the eleventh of December, three weeks past the point where anyone would rely on it, and she wrote the line asking for a fresh one and knew it would cost the buyer a hundred dollars and two weeks and that somebody would be annoyed with her about it on Thursday.

The farm north of Cayuga was thirty-one hectares and the description ran on for a page and a half. Metes and bounds, the old kind, chains and links converted badly into metric in 1979 by somebody who had rounded twice. Halfway down there was a call to a creek.

Creeks move. That was the entire problem with creeks. A boundary described by the center line of a watercourse in 1911 is a boundary that has been quietly relocating itself for a hundred and fifteen years, a foot here and eight feet there, and whether the boundary went with it depended on whether the movement had been gradual or sudden, and nobody had stood there in 1954 with a notebook to say which.

She flagged it for a surveyor and moved on. There was a whole afternoon in it somewhere down the line and it was not this afternoon.

Nadia was on the phone at the desk behind her, being nicer to somebody than they deserved.

“No, I completely understand,” Nadia said. “No. No, that’s frustrating.”

Her father’s watch sat on her left wrist where it had sat for three years, a steel Bulova with a scratched crystal, running two minutes fast because he had set it that way in 1998 and she had never corrected it. She checked it against the corner of her screen out of habit and did the subtraction without noticing she was doing it.

At half past eleven Lorna sent a message.

Lorna: Stager can come today instead of Thurs if that works? She’s in Ancaster this am. Say yes, she books up.

Maëlys said yes, because saying no would have required a reason.

At noon she drove to Dundas.

* * *

It was ten minutes up the hill and the ditches were running. That was the whole of March in the valley: the snow going off the escarpment all at once, every culvert full, the shoulder of Osler soft where the water came across. The trees were still bare and would be bare for six weeks.

The agent’s name was Lorna and she was already there, standing in the driveway with her phone up, taking a photograph of the front of the house that would not be used, because the front of the house was not the selling point. The selling point was the lot. Sixty-one feet of frontage backing onto the conservation land, and if you stood in the kitchen in March you could see all the way down to the water through the bare trees, and if you stood in the kitchen in July you could see a wall of green five meters away.

The sign was up. For Sale. Lorna’s face on it at twice life size, and a rider hanging underneath that said Coming Soon even though it had been on the market for nine days.

“There she is,” Lorna said. “I brought the stager.”

“You said Thursday.”

“She had a cancellation.” Lorna said it the way she said everything, as though a small thing had gone slightly right. “Ten minutes, that’s all. She just wants to walk it and tell you what she’s thinking.”

The stager was called Priya and she was maybe thirty-five and she went through the house at a pace Maëlys respected. Front room: rug’s fine, take down the mirror, the mirror makes the wall look shorter. Dining room: this table is enormous, do you want to sell the table. Kitchen: nothing, honestly, the kitchen’s the kitchen, don’t touch it, people can see it’s from 1994 and they’ll price it.

Upstairs took six minutes for three bedrooms and the recommendation for all three was fewer things on the surfaces.

The basement took longer, because Priya wanted to know what the room at the back had been.

“It was an office.”

“It’s got a sink in it.”

“It was a darkroom in about 1996 and then it was an office.”

“Can we take the sink out?”

“No.”

The sump was in the corner under a piece of plywood with a brick on it. Priya lifted the plywood, looked at the pit, put the plywood back and did not say anything. The pump was a Zoeller that Trevor Rowan had installed himself in 1990 and had been proud of, and the float switch hung off it on a bracket he had bent out of a piece of strapping, and it worked, and it had worked through every spring for thirty-six years including the one where the water came up over the sill on the west side.

In the garage there were fifteen flat-packed boxes leaning against the wall where Maëlys had left them in January, and Priya looked at those too, and also did not say anything. In the back bedroom Priya opened the closet, said “oh,” and shut it again, because it was full to the rail with a dead man’s shirts on wire hangers.

“That’s on the list,” Maëlys said.

“It’s not a problem for photos. We just shoot it closed.”

“It’s on the list.”

“Sure,” Priya said, and wrote nothing down, which Maëlys appreciated more than she would have appreciated tact.

Then the back hall.

The back hall ran from the kitchen door to the side door and it was six feet long and it had been painted a color in 1994 that could most kindly be described as almond. Priya stood in it with her hands in her jacket pockets.

“This is the first thing anyone sees if they come in the side,” she said. “Which is what people will do, because that’s where the drive goes. And it’s dark, and it’s this color, and it makes the kitchen behind it look yellow. If I do one thing in this house it’s this hall.”

“So paint it.”

“Beige, off-white, something with a bit of warmth. It’s two hours.”

Maëlys nodded and Priya was already moving to the side door and rattling it to check whether it stuck, which it did, and saying something about a plane and a strike plate.

The pencil marks were on the door frame at the kitchen end, on the strike side, running up the wood from about a foot off the floor. Five of them. Her father had done them with a carpenter’s pencil and a set square from the garage and he had written the date beside each one in his small blocky drafting hand.

M. Jun 01. M. Jul 03. M. Aug 05. M. Sep 07. M. Aug 09.

Every two years, roughly, and always in the summer, and then he had stopped, because she had turned thirteen in the spring of 2010 and had told him it was babyish and he had taken her at her word the way he took everybody at their word.

He had done them with the door open and her back against the jamb and her heels together, and he had made her take her shoes off every time, and he had put the set square flat on her head and held it level with two hands and then said don’t move and made the mark left-handed while holding the square with his right, which was why the lines were slightly crooked, all five of them, in the same direction.

There was a sixth one that had never gone on the wood. In 2011 he had measured her in the same place, in the same way, out of habit, and she had said you’re not writing that on there and he had said no , and had gone and written it on the inside cover of a paperback in the front room instead, which she had found in 2023 and had thrown out with four hundred other books.

Priya came back down the hall and stopped where Maëlys was standing and looked at the frame and then at her.

“I can mask around those,” she said. “If you want to keep them.”

“No.”

“It’s not a problem to leave them. People like that kind of thing, actually. It reads as a family house.”

“It’s fine. Paint it.”

Priya looked at the frame for another second and then wrote something on her phone and went out to the car for her tape measure, and Lorna came in from the kitchen talking about the offer date, and that was that.

* * *

Maëlys stayed after they had both gone. She stood in the hall with her keys in her hand. The furnace came on under the floor and ran for a while and stopped.

There were things in the house worth doing that afternoon. There were fifteen boxes flat-packed in the garage that she had bought in January and not opened, and there was the closet in the back bedroom, and there was a filing drawer in the basement with his tax returns going back to 1987 and a folder marked Warranties that had a receipt in it for a dishwasher that had been replaced twice.

She put her thumbnail on the top mark, on the little ridge where the graphite had worn a groove into the wood, and held it there.

Then she went out through the side door and pulled it hard until it caught, and drove back to Hamilton, and was at her desk by two.

At four she remembered the 1974 transfer and put the request in properly, with the file number and the county and the firm’s account, and got the automatic acknowledgment, and closed the tab.

She ate at the counter in her apartment at eight, standing up, and did the Kilbride opinion on her laptop because it would take twenty minutes and she was awake anyway.

The apartment was on the second floor of a building on Marlatt Avenue in the north end. It was a coincidence that had stopped being funny in about the third week. Two streets with the same name in two municipalities that had been separate until 1974 and had never bothered to sort it out afterwards. Her mail went to the wrong one twice a year.

She slept in the front room on the couch, which she had been doing since August, and had not examined.

Chapter Two

Nadia brought food on Wednesdays. It had started in November as an apology for something that had not required one and had turned into a fixture, and now there was a bag of samosas on the corner of the printer at half past nine and Nadia standing beside it distributing them onto paper towel like a woman dealing cards.

“My aunt makes forty at a time,” she said. “Forty. There are three of us in the house.”

“You’ve said this before.”

“I’ll say it again in a month.” Nadia put two on a paper towel on Maëlys’s desk without asking whether she wanted them. “Owen’s door is shut.”

“He’s on the phone.”

“He’s been on the phone since I got here.”

Maëlys did not answer that. She ate one of the samosas and it was very good and she said so, and Nadia looked pleased in the whole-face way she had, which at twenty-six she had not yet learned to ration.

They worked. Nadia was faster than Maëlys on anything electronic and had stopped pretending otherwise around Christmas, which Maëlys thought was the most sensible thing about her. She could pull a parcel register, a plan, three instruments and a corporate profile in the time it took Maëlys to log in and think about where to start. She said things like I’ll just grab that and then had it, and had a second monitor turned sideways, which nobody else in the office had thought of, and seven browser windows open at once, and she never lost anything.

She was also, in a way Maëlys had noticed in October and had not mentioned to anybody, the only person in the building who read the whole file. Ellen read the parts of the file that concerned Ellen. Brackley read the letter on the top. Nadia read all of it, including the correspondence, including the parts from 2019 that had nothing to do with anything, and every so often something came out of that.

“The vendor’s got a different middle initial on the 2011 transfer,” she said once, in November, about a file nobody had asked her to look at. “It’s H there and it’s J everywhere else.”

It had been a slip of the finger and it had taken an hour and a half to prove that, and if it had not been one it would have been the whole file.

Maëlys had been doing this for five years and had found three things in that time that mattered. Nadia had been doing it for fourteen months and had found one. The ratio was not in Maëlys’s favor and she had worked that out in about February and had not enjoyed working it out.

At seven she came around the partition and put her elbows on the top of it.

“Kilbride Street,” she said. “There’s a right of way in the description and I can’t find where it came from. It’s in the transfer, and it’s in the one before that, and it’s in the one before that, and then it just isn’t.”

“How far back are you?”

“1961.”

“Then you’re not far enough back.”

“There’s nothing on the register before 1961.”

“There’s nothing on the parcel register before 1961,” Maëlys said. “Because that’s when this property went into the abstract you’re looking at. Before that it’s in the abstract book for the township, and the township abstract books are scanned but they’re not indexed the way you’re expecting. They’re just books. Somebody wrote in them with a pen.”

Nadia’s face did the thing it did.

“Show me,” she said.

So Maëlys showed her, and it took twenty minutes and she enjoyed all twenty. You went to the historical books. You found the right township, which for that address meant knowing that the city boundary had eaten it in 1974 and that before that it had been somewhere else with a different name. You found the concession and the lot. And then you were looking at a photograph of a page of handwriting where a man in 1907 had recorded a sale in a copperplate hand with the ink gone brown, and the entries ran down the page in a column with a rule between them, and everything was abbreviated, and the abbreviations were not consistent because they were one man’s abbreviations.

The right of way was there in 1889, granted in a deed to a man named Awrey so his neighbor could get a cart to the road.

“That’s insane,” Nadia said, with reverence. “That’s a hundred and thirty-seven years ago and it’s still on my file.”

“It’s still on your file because nobody ever released it and nobody ever will. The road went in a different place and everyone forgot.”

“So it’s just there. Forever.”

“It’s just there forever. Somebody in 2090 is going to find it and think the same thing you’re thinking.”

“How do you even know where to look?”

“You do it for five years and then it’s obvious.”

That was not a real answer and both of them knew it, and Nadia waited, and Maëlys gave her the real one.

“You look at what changed administratively,” she said. “Boundaries, township names, when the county converted, when the plan went in. Land doesn’t move. Everything that happens to a piece of land is somebody deciding to write it down in a different place, and if you know where the writing moved to you can follow it.”

Nadia wrote the lot and concession on her hand, the way she wrote everything, and went back to her desk. Forty minutes later Maëlys heard her explain the historical books to somebody on the phone with real authority, getting one detail wrong and fifteen right.

“You’re welcome,” Maëlys said, to the partition.

“I said thank you.”

“You said that’s insane .”

“That’s thank you,” Nadia said, “in my house.”

* * *

At lunch Nadia ate at her desk and turned her chair around.

“Can I ask you something.”

“You can ask.”

“Do you still have family in Dundas? You said you were up there Tuesday.”

The kettle in the kitchenette clicked off and Maëlys got up to deal with it, which gave her three seconds.

“The house has a sump pump that runs off a float switch from about 1990,” she said. “And when it rains the way it did last week it runs and runs and I have to go up and make sure it hasn’t burnt out. That’s what I was doing.”

“Right,” Nadia said. “That’s a nightmare.”

“It’s on the list.”

“My landlord’s got one that doesn’t work at all. He knows. He just doesn’t.” She was already turning back to her screen. “He came in December to look at it. He stood in the basement for about a minute and said he’d send somebody and then he sent me a message on the twenty-third saying he’d send somebody in the new year, and it is now March.”

She said it lightly and she did it smoothly and she was three sentences past it within nine seconds, and Maëlys watched the whole recovery from the kitchenette door with a teabag in her hand.

She could have said it. Yes, my father’s house, I’m selling it, it closes in October. Nine words and then whatever came after, which would be the part with the dates in it.

She took her tea back to her desk and started the Kilbride title opinion instead.

* * *

Four desks in the searchers’ room. Three of them had people at them. The fourth had a monitor and a chair and a keyboard with a rubber band around it, and had been like that since Deepa left in September and had not been replaced, and every so often Nadia put her coat on it.

The third desk was Ellen’s, who was sixty-one and had been at the firm since 2004 and did residential closings and nothing else and left at four thirty every day of her life.

Brackley’s door was shut at noon, and it was shut at one, and at half past two it opened and he came out with his glasses pushed up into his hair, looking for a file that Nadia found for him in nine seconds on the shared drive, and he thanked her twice.

“You’re a marvel,” he said. “You’re an absolute marvel.”

“It’s under the client name, Owen. It’s always under the client name.”

“Under the client name,” he said, and wrote it on a post-it, and took the post-it into his office and shut the door.

Nadia looked over the partition at Maëlys with her eyebrows up and Maëlys shook her head very slightly and Nadia let it go. It was the whole conversation and it was the second one that month.

* * *

At three she came back from the printer and Nadia had a photograph up on the sideways monitor, an aerial, and was frowning at it.

“The Kilbride right of way,” she said. “You can see it. Look. That’s the cart track.”

It was there in the field pattern, a paler line running diagonally across two properties toward a road that had been a road in 1889 and was now the back of a subdivision. A hundred and thirty-seven years of ploughing and it was still legible from four hundred meters up.

“Nobody’s used that since the war,” Maëlys said.

“But it’s there .”

“It’s there.”

Nadia sat back in her chair with the whole-face thing again, and Maëlys went back to her own desk and did ten more files, and thought about the aerial twice more that afternoon and did not say so.

* * *

Ellen went at four thirty. She said “night, girls” to the room the way she had said it since 2004, and put her coat on at her desk rather than in the hall, and was gone.

At ten past five Brackley came out again. He stood in the doorway of the searchers’ room with a file open on his forearm and looked at the page for a while.

“Maëlys. The Hillier file. Did we get the sub-search back?”

“It came Tuesday. It’s on the drive under Hillier.”

“Under Hillier,” he said.

“Under the client name, Owen.”

“Under the client name.” He looked at the page a moment longer. “Yes. Of course it is.”

He went back in and shut the door, and the light stayed on behind the glass until after six, and Maëlys left at twenty to and did not knock.