"I can't believe I let you talk me into this," Ever said as she led the way to City Hall.

Slinking behind her in the dark alley, Sarah smirked. Convincing Ever to help had actually been simple once she found the girl's weak spot. So simple, in fact, that she was now kind of mad at herself for taking almost a week to figure it out. But the promise of unlimited invitations to on-campus parties with college boys starting next semester for the high school senior was too irresistible to refuse. Even for a little breaking and entering.

Arriving at a nondescript door in the back, Ever punched in some numbers on a keypad. The door clicked open, and after looking around one more time to make sure they hadn't been discovered, the two girls went inside.

Sarah immediately activated the flashlight in her cell phone, but Ever—a few steps ahead of her—freaked out.

"Turn that thing off!" she hissed in an angry whisper, glancing over her shoulder.

Caught by surprise, Sarah obliged without question. But as they started down the hallway again now in inky blackness, she had to know.

"Is this really necessary? You said there was just one guard and we didn't need to worry about him," Sarah whispered, following Ever's vague outline while drawing her hand over the adjacent wall for guidance.

"Yeah, all he does is watch porn and sleep, so as long as we stay out of the security office, we're fine," she said with a chuckle before her footsteps stopped. A door handle clicked. "But there were still some windows on this floor and someone from the street could have seen our lights and gotten suspicious. Come on. There are no windows down here."

She opened the door barely enough to let an average-sized teenage girl slip through.

"Hurry because this isn't exactly inconspicuous from the outside, now is it?" Ever urged as the faint, red light of an emergency exit sign streamed out.

Sarah entered the stairwell and her partner in crime quickly followed.

"Better?" Ever asked as she took the lead again, bounding down the risers with a measured softness.

"What?" Sarah asked, trying to keep her Doc Martens from thump thump thumping all the way down. Maybe she should have worn sneakers, too. If only she owned any.

"I meant being able to see, but whatever. It doesn't matter," Ever replied as she rounded the landing half-way down to the first subterranean level.

Sarah grimaced in confusion. Was this an attempt by Ever at small-talk? She'd never been good at reading people to feel comfortable with random chit-chat because it either felt like she shared too much or not enough. So in the end, she usually didn't try.

But this girl was doing her a favor—risking parental wrath and possibly even legal charges—to give her access. So the least she could do is make an attempt.

"I'm not a cat so I don't have built-in night vision," she said lightheartedly. "I don't know about you, but most people want to avoid blindly tripping around in the darkness."

Ever stopped at the bottom. "Well, I'm not a cat either, but I'm definitely not worried about what's lurking in the shadows," she said as she opened another door. "There are plenty of things openly roaming around in broad daylight that want to get us. Those scare me more."

"Huh," Sarah vocalized her surprise. Was Ever Moore a secret philosopher?

"You think that's dumb?" Ever asked as she finally turned on her own flashlight and entered the basement hallway.

Sarah shook her head. "Not at all. You're actually dangerously close to me starting to like you."

Ever laughed. "Well, we wouldn't want that," she said, as her light landed on a door marked 'Records Office - Authorized Personnel Only.' "Bingo."

"What exactly are we looking for?" Ever asked once they were inside the large room lined with rows and rows of shelves. Each was stacked from floor to ceiling with banker's boxes labeled by year and various other tracking codes.

"Property ownership records from probably around 1940 to 1950. I'm thinking deeds, building permits, or zoning requests. I don't think the current address would help because my aunt said that the street has been renamed at least twice from what she remembers."

Ever examined the side of the box closest to her, her flashlight casting a bright circle on the yellowed cardboard. "These don't seem to be cataloged by address anyway. They're a bunch of numbers separated by dashes. The first is four digits, then there are two doubles, another four, and finally two again. Got any clue as to what those could be?"

"Ooh, those sound like property lot numbers," Sarah said before digging into her pocket. "I have what we need written down right here."

She pulled out a crumpled piece of paper. "0562 dash 08 dash 02 dash 0006 dash A1."

Ever slowly walked down the aisle while scanning the box labels. "So ten year's worth of random numbers out of a possible—what do you think: are there two or three hundred boxes in here?" She paused for effect rather than an answer to her obviously rhetorical question. "Yeah. Should be a piece of cake."

"Won't know if we don't try," Sarah said, squatting to the first box on the bottom. The label read '1940.' "You start at the end of the decade and I'll start at the beginning and we'll meet in the middle."

Nearly an hour in and they still hadn't achieved much other than paper cuts, dust allergies, and disappointment. The only reference to the property Sarah mentally called the Black House was a repossession filing dating from 1946. But other than the name of the bank that took ownership of the building and surrounding five acres, there was nothing to go on.

"Well, that was a bust," said Ever with a sigh as she replaced the top of the last box marked 1944. She was able to get through more than her share of half the records because Sarah had occasionally gotten lost in the details, hoping that a more thorough review would lead to success.

"We just need to look earlier, that's all," Sarah said, finishing her last box, too. "The family we're probably looking for obviously owned the house in forty-six for it to have been taken away. It's not unusual for there to be no other records if they didn't make any renovations and stuff in the Forties. Maybe we just need to go back far enough for when they bought it and the deed last changed hands."

Ever's flashlight cut out a few times and she gave it a shake to keep it going.

"Nah-uh. For all we know, that house had been in one family for generations until 1946. We could be here until morning and still not get anywhere," she said. "And my light is almost out of juice."

Sarah was undeterred. "Just one more year, please. I feel like we're so close," she begged, betting on using the excuse for the rest of the Thirties if she had to.

Ever sighed. "Fiiiine. We'll do 1939 because it looks like that has only two boxes. One each and then we go home."

Drawing her finger down the label on the front, Sarah looked for a reference to lot 0562 -08-02-0006-A1, which by now she had memorized. But her eyes didn't want to cooperate. The zeroes looked like eights and the fives resembled sixes. While reluctant to admit it, she was exhausted. If this kept up, there was no way she was going to find the stupid lot even if its records were in the box.

Sarah stopped her search about a third of the way down and blinked rapidly, trying to focus her vision.

"Uuh, I think I found something," Ever said from beside her.

In her shock, Sarah lost her grip on the box that had been partly balanced on the edge of the shelving. Falling to the floor, it landed with a thud and scattered its contents everywhere.

"What the fuck?" Ever muttered, shining her light into Sarah's eyes. "Do you want to get caught or something?"

"Of course not!" she snapped back, stepping over the pile. "I just got excited. What did you find?"

Ever sighed. "False alarm. Sorry," she said, sticking a file folder back between the rest of the records. "I misread a number."

Sarah's shoulders drooped, but she couldn't fault Ever for the gaffe when her own eyes were burning from the strain.

"Don't worry about it," she said as she bent down to pick up her mess. "Let me get these put away and we can go."

But even as she gathered the scattered papers, Sarah couldn't avoid trying to make sense of what was on them. Looking for the lot number that was now burned into her mind, she often didn't get past the first four digits to know she hadn't found a lead.

1136. 0098. 7410. 0893. 2233. 5270. 0562. 3641. Wait. What?

She flipped back two pages to the previous sheet in the growing stack in her hand.

0562 were the correct first numbers, but Sarah almost didn't dare to look at the rest. Yet when she did, she couldn't believe her eyes. 08-02-0006-A1.

"This is it," she whispered as her hand began to shake.

Ever glanced up, her arms also full of documents. "What?"

Sarah quickly scanned the dense writing on the paper. "This is a page from a mortgage agreement dated July 18, 1939 for the Black House. The seller was the Middlesex County Land Grant Program whatever that means and the selling price was a . . . oh my god, a whopping four thousand dollars," she said with growing excitement.

"Cool, cool." Ever nodded furiously as her eyes urged Sarah to continue. "And who was the buyer?"

Sarah turned the document over in anticipation of reading the rest. But her heart sank.

"It's blank," she said before looking down at the pile in front of her. "Oh shit. Page two with the rest of the information is somewhere in this mess."

"Or in this one," Ever said, shrugging with the stuff in her own hands.

Sarah attacked the pile. "We have to find it."

They dove in, rushing to get through as many pages as possible while pausing long enough with each to make sure it wasn't the one they sought.

"It has to be here," Sarah muttered as she systematically examined and then moved each useless document. "If we found one page, there—"

A door slammed.

"Ssh." Ever stopped her own search and put a warning finger up against her lip. "Did you hear that?"

Sarah froze, a paper still in her hand. She nodded. "What was that?"

Thump. Thump. Thump.

Ever gasped. "The stairwell door. Someone's coming down here."

"Fuck," Sarah said as she turned her attention back to the scattered papers. "You said the guard wouldn't be a problem."

Ever stood, dumping everything in her hands into the original box. "I also said to stay quiet, but you had to go and knock this shit down. Leave it!" she ordered, tugging on Sarah's shoulder. "We have to go."

But Sarah continued. "We can't. I need to know who the buyer was. If I could just find that one page—"

A walkie-talkie beeped on the other side of the wall and there was a faint muffle of words.

"The guard is right there, bitch," Ever grumbled, the fear in her demeanor unveiled. "If you want to stay and get caught, that's on you, but I'm outta here."

Sarah was ready to take the chance when her eyes caught the familiar lot number on the top of another document, it's corner sticking out just enough from under a bunch of others. Pulling the paper out, she hoped it would provide the answers and jumped to her feet. "Let's go."

They made it to the secondary exit door just as the main way in had clicked open. Tiptoeing up the back staircase, they rushed across the ground floor hall and exited back into the alley unseen. Outside City Hall, a blanket of soft powder covered everything in sight.

While they were inside, it had started to snow.