The surveyor's truck pulled in at seven in the morning. By a quarter past, three of Walt Brenner's fence posts were lying in the frost.
Walt watched from his porch with his coffee going cold. Biscuit sat against his boot, one ear up, the way she did when strangers came.
He had set those posts himself in the spring of 1979. Black locust, split by hand, sunk three feet deep with a post-hole digger and plenty of stubbornness. Locust doesn't rot. Those posts had outlasted two tractors and a barn roof.
Now a young man in an orange vest was pulling them out with a chain hooked to the back of a pickup.
Walt set his cup on the railing and walked down the hill.
"Morning," he said.
The young man nodded but kept working. The door of his truck said DUNN LAND SURVEYING, COLUMBUS. Leaning against the tailgate was a tall pole with a gray dome on top. A GPS rover. Walt had seen them on TV.
Across the field, Brandon Hale was already walking over.
Brandon had bought the twelve acres next door in August. Grady Pruitt had sold them to him, and Grady had been bragging about the price at the diner ever since. Brandon was from Cincinnati. He had a nice jacket, a nice smile, and boots so new they squeaked.
"Mr. Brenner," Brandon said. "Glad you're up. Saves me a trip."
"Didn't know I needed saving."
Brandon laughed like that was a joke and handed him a rolled-up paper.
Walt unrolled it on the hood of the pickup. It was a survey map, clean and printed, with a red line down the middle. Along his side of the line ran a thin yellow strip.
"Your fence is five feet over," Brandon said. "On my side. Been that way for forty-some years, apparently."
Walt followed the yellow strip with his finger. Five feet wide. Eleven hundred feet long.
It ran right through his tractor lane. The only way to reach his back hayfield. Twenty acres of hay, and without that lane he'd have to drive a tractor two miles around on the county road to get to it.
"I'm not trying to be a jerk," Brandon said. "I'm building a wedding barn. The county says I need a twenty-foot access road, and that strip is the only way I get it. I'll pay you two thousand dollars to sign a boundary agreement. By Friday."
"And if I don't?"
Brandon's smile got smaller. "Then my lawyer files in county court, and you get nothing. He says it's open and shut."
Walt didn't argue. He had learned a long time ago that the man who talks first usually talks most.
Instead, he looked at the surveyor. "Son, where'd you tie in from?"
The young man stopped. He looked surprised that Walt knew the words.
"County control point on Route 9," he said. "And the 1998 plat. Kyle Dunn, by the way."
"Walt." They shook. "You find the stone?"
Kyle frowned. "What stone?"
"Sandstone. About the size of a bread box. Chiseled X on top. Northeast corner, down by the creek, four feet south of the twin hickories."
Kyle looked toward the creek. There were no hickories. Just two gray stumps, half hidden in the weeds.
"Those came down in an ice storm years back," Walt said. "Stone didn't."
"Sir," Kyle said, patient, the way people talk to their grandfathers, "this equipment is accurate to under an inch."
"I believe it," Walt said. "It's accurate to wherever you started."
Kyle opened his mouth. Then he closed it.
Brandon checked his watch. "Mr. Brenner, with respect, I have a contractor coming at nine."
"Won't take long," Walt said, and walked back up to the house.
Biscuit stayed. She sat down right on the yellow strip and stared at Brandon, which Walt would have paid good money to see.
When Walt came back, he was carrying an old Folgers coffee can. The red paint had mostly rusted off. The lid was tied down with baling twine, knotted three times.
Brandon laughed out loud. "What's that, your retirement plan?"
Walt set the can on the hood and worked the knots loose with his thick fingers. He took his time. He had always taken his time.
Inside was a bundle wrapped in oilcloth. Inside the oilcloth was a folded paper, brown at the edges, soft as cloth.
"I bought this place from Emil Lutz in 1979," Walt said. "At the closing table, he slid this can across to me. Told me to keep it dry."
He unfolded the paper. It was a survey too, drawn by hand in black ink, with neat little arrows and numbers. At the bottom was a county surveyor's signature and a date: June 4, 1951.
In the corner, in small careful letters, it said: *Begin at sandstone monument, chiseled X, NE corner, 4 ft. S of twin hickories.*
"Emil said, 'Someday somebody's going to tell you the land moved,'" Walt said. "'Land doesn't move, Walt. People do.'"
Kyle leaned in. He read the corner note twice. Then he read it again.
"If that stone is still in the ground," he said slowly, "and it's the original corner, then it controls. Not the plat. Not my GPS."
Brandon wasn't laughing anymore. "What does that mean?"
"It means," Kyle said, "we'd have to start over."
"Then let's go find it," Walt said.
The three of them walked down to the creek, with Biscuit trotting ahead. The grass was wet and the stumps were slick with frost. Walt stood between the two stumps, faced south, and counted off four steps. He didn't need the paper. He had walked this corner every fall for forty-seven years.
He pushed the weeds aside with his boot.
Then he stopped.
Where the stone should have been, there was a hole. Someone had filled it back in and raked the dirt smooth, then scattered leaves on top to hide it. But the leaves were the wrong color. Green on the bottom. Fresh.
The stone was gone.
And from the look of that dirt, it had been gone less than a week.
Walt stood up slowly, knees cracking, and looked at Brandon.
Brandon looked just as shocked as he was.
That was the part that worried Walt most.