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and hold student conferences. But he had to pick Matty up at school and take him to Little League practice on the other side of town. He also had to stop off at the Registry of Deeds to photostat the deed for their house because their original was destroyed when a bad storm in March flooded their cellar. |
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Although it was just three hours before the rush hour, the ride to the registry, just across the Charles River, took him forty minutes. Somewhere along the line there was a breakdown that brought the city to a halt as if there had been a nuclear alert. It was one of Boston's oldest traditions, and not one he'd be able to miss. |
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The Middlesex County Registry of Deeds was a huge red brick Gothic-revival structure designed with turn-of-the-century optimism. The second floor was a human counterpart to the traffic jam. A huge open room with endless rows of standup slant desks at which people were busy taking notes from the large tomes of deeds that filled the shelves in side rooms and the upstairs gallery. |
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The procedure would have been painless were it not for the lunch-hour mob doing title searches. Calvin waited at least fifteen minutes for the next available computer, then, entering his name and address, found the bound volume number his deed was registered in. In one side aisle he found Book 13664 and carried it to a slant desk. |
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There it was on page 486. On the top written in large, emboldened Gothic type were the words: "Know all Men that we Calvin Hazzard and Teresa Krueger Hazzard, Husband and Wife both of Carleton, Middlesex County, Massachusetts . . ." The quaintness of wording echoed a bygone era. But looking at their signatures, he felt a twinge of nostalgia. When that ink was still wet, they were ten years younger, still in their twenties and just starting out. Matty was just two, and life was green with promise. |
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He put a marker in the pages and headed for the copy machines. There were five pages in all, most of which consisted of the finely printed gobbledygook spelling out grantor covenants. There was also a page detailing the size, orientation and boundaries of the property with simple schematic diagrams. At the bottom of one was the footnote reference to Plot 5, with a volume and page number. Apparently the property had been part of a larger parcel that had included some of the conservation land of Magog Woods before it was subdivided into the plan that was sold to the Samborskys. "For |
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