By Jessie Clark. A free reader bonus.

A Witnessed bonus scene, told by Arlette Biddix, Clerk of Superior Court. March 2016.

Spoilers: this scene is best read after you finish Witnessed. The novel releases January 8, 2027.

Martha Rominger came up my stairs at ten past four on a Thursday, which told me something before she'd said a word. She was a morning person. She'd been a morning person when I was sixteen and she was handing back my paper on Silas Marner with more red on it than black.

I took my thimble off the stack I was counting and put it back on.

"Mrs. Rominger."

"Arlette. You've gotten old."

"Yes, ma'am. So I hear."

She had on the navy suit. There's one in every county, and ours belonged to her. She'd had it for court, for Dean's funeral, and for the bank board. It had never once looked like anybody else's. Her hands didn't go with it. They had big knuckles, two of them broken and set wrong, and she'd scrubbed them for the occasion and lost. There was dirt down in the corners of her nails, in March, and I don't know where she'd found any. She had Dean's garnet on her right hand.

She laid a long white envelope on my counter and kept one finger on it.

"I'm told you've got a place for these."

I do. Hardly anybody knows. It's in the General Statutes, and I've taken in maybe nine in all my years, mostly from old men who'd fallen out with their sons. A person can leave a will with the clerk, sealed, and it'll sit in the vault until it's wanted. Nobody opens it while she's alive. Nobody but her can take it back.

I told her that. I told her it would go in the index, by name and date, and that I'd need her to sign the book.

"Who sees the index?"

"Anybody who asks. Nobody ever asks."

"And who sees what's inside?"

"Nobody, Mrs. Rominger. I won't either."

"You'll want to," she said. "You always read ahead."

I got out the book. It's a bound book with numbered pages. I'd like that noted, since there's a person in this county who thinks she invented them. I turned it around on the oak and held out my pen. She looked at it the way you'd look at something on your shoe.

She unscrewed a black fountain pen out of her jacket. The nib had worn down on one side. She wrote her name on my line without hurrying, starting that big plain M from the top and coming straight down, as if it were a fence post she intended to have stay there. Then she blew on it. Sixty-six years old, and she blew on it, and looked at me until I looked at the page.

"Is there something I ought to know?" I asked.

I don't ask that. I've run that counter for a long time on not asking that. But she'd come at ten past four, and she'd come herself.

She turned her head and looked at the vault. The door was open, the way it is in business hours. I keep a stool beside it that nobody's allowed to sit on, and she looked at that too.

"I've got a nephew," she said. "He's got a nice truck and a bad subdivision, and he's taken to driving up on Sundays to admire my view. He tells me what it would bring. His wife comes too. She's very attentive. She's been up three times this winter to see how I'm getting along, and she's looked in my medicine cabinet twice."

"Did she say why?"

"She said I ought to have someone looking after me." She took her finger off the envelope and looked at it, as if to see whether it would stay. "I've made arrangements for the place. They're in there. They're typed, and they're plain, and they're witnessed by people with no reason to care. I don't expect a soul to thank me. I want them somewhere nobody can get at them. Not a family. Not a lawyer with a nice voice. I don't want it in a drawer at my house, Arlette, and I don't want it at the bank, where they all go to church with each other."

"It'll be right there," I said. "On the second shelf."

"And when I'm dead?"

"Then I've got a paper with your name on it and proof you've gone, and I'll open it in front of a witness. The statute lets me. It doesn't make me."

She looked at me for some time. I've seen juries get less.

"You had a B in my class," she said. "You'd have had an A if you'd stopped writing what you thought I wanted."

"Yes, ma'am."

"See that you do what it lets you."

That's as close as I've ever come to being given an order I was glad to have.

The swinging gate at the end of my counter has a squeak I've been meaning to see about for 20 years. I looked past her, and there was a young woman coming through it with a canvas bag on her shoulder and her hair pulled back so tight it made my own head ache.

I'd known her since she weighed six pounds.

"Miss Arlette, I'm sorry, I can wait," Lacey Burleson said. Then she saw whose back that was, and she stopped.

She didn't step back. I'll give her that. She stood where she was with one hand on the strap. She was 26 that spring. There'd been a house fire on Tanner Street that week, and old Mrs. Tolliver had lost the only copy of her deed. That girl had been up my stairs twice already getting it certified for her, on her own time, for nothing. She'd looked at the ashes and gone a little white around the mouth. I'd thought at the time it was the smell.

Martha Rominger turned around.

I've gone over this. I go over most things. It didn't take long, and nobody said a word. Mrs. Rominger looked at her the way she'd once looked at me across a paper, straight on and all the way down, from the hair to the bag to the good cheap shoes. And Lacey looked right back. I've watched that girl read every pair of hands that's crossed my counter since she was 21. She didn't so much as glance at those. She looked Martha Rominger in the eye for as long as she could stand to, and then, because she was raised by somebody, she looked at the floor.

"Excuse me, Mrs. Rominger," she said.

"Miss Burleson."

That's all. The whole town would've paid to see it, and that's all it was.

Mrs. Rominger screwed the cap back on her pen and went on out past her. She didn't hurry. She had a good straight walk then, before the hip. The gate squeaked. I listened to her go down the stairs, one at a time, with no hand on the rail.

"I just need the certified copy," Lacey said to my counter. Her voice was perfectly level. It's a very good voice. I've wondered who she learned it from, and I know.

I got her the copy. She checked it against her notes, every line, standing up. Then she thanked me and asked what she owed, and I told her. She counted it out exact.

"Is it true you can get a scanner that sends things up to some computer in another state?" she asked, at the gate. "So if your house burned, you'd still have it."

"I wouldn't know," I said. "I've got a vault."

"Yes, ma'am," said Lacey Burleson. "I don't."

After she'd gone, I took the envelope in both hands. It didn't weigh much. I carried it into the vault and set it on the second shelf. It went between a man who'd cut off his son in 1998 and a woman who'd never told anybody what she had. I squared it to the edge.

I wrote it in the index. I took off my thimble, which I don't do, and I stood there for a while with the light on.

I did want to read it. She was right about that.

Then I shut off the light and went back to my summonses. It was a quarter to five, and I had a county to run. That envelope sat in the dark for ten years and seven months. It didn't ask anybody for anything. It didn't have to. That's the good thing about a paper, if you put it somewhere safe.

It'll wait for you.