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Tuesday afternoon I walked into Winters Wonderland with sawdust on my jeans and asked Nora for something I had no right to.

She was behind the register with a stack of papers I recognized as vendor schedules in front of her, and she’d been pretending to review them since I came through the door, which I knew because the top sheet was upside down.

“The beam’s ordered,” I said. “Douglas fir, full dimension, so it matches what Frank’s father used. It comes Thursday.”

“Good.”

“I need to see the original Main Street plans in the municipal archive.”

She looked up. “The archive under the community center?”

“Frank says his grandfather left copies of the 1902 plans there. The west footing beneath Winters Wonderland has shifted. My current repair plan requires opening the floor inside your shop, but the original plans may show whether the load transfers through the party wall into Sweet Provisions. If it does, I may be able to shore part of the floor from Pearl’s basement and remove less of yours.”

She was quiet for long enough that I heard the furnace come on.

“The town owns the community center, and that archive isn’t open to the public.”

“I know. That’s why I’m asking.”

“Owen has to authorize access and release the key through the municipal office.”

“Of course.”

“Which will take him two days, because Owen doesn’t answer anything on a Tuesday.” She squared the vendor schedules, right side up now. “And if he says yes, I’m coming with you. Those plans are more than documents. They’re part of the town’s memory, and somebody needs to provide context.”

“I’d want that anyway.”

“Don’t thank me yet,” she said. “He might say no.”

At seven Thursday morning, Nora met me in the back hall of the town-owned community center. Owen had authorized access to the municipal archive, and she had collected the key from his office the afternoon before. We had two hours before Winters Wonderland opened.

The basement door hid behind a supply closet so unremarkable I had passed it on the way to festival meetings without noticing it. Nora signed both our names into the access log, then worked a key that looked older than both of us combined into the lock. “We can examine and photograph the plans,” she said, pulling a flashlight from her jacket. “Nothing leaves the archive. Owen was specific enough to make me think somebody once tried.”

“I understand.”

The stairs creaked beneath our weight. The air cooled with each step and smelled of old stone and paper.

At the bottom, Nora found a switch. Bare bulbs came on over filing cabinets, wooden crates, and archival boxes stacked between the community center’s old stone walls. On top of the nearest pile sat a carton labeled NATIVITY—MISSING SHEEP in three different hands and three different decades of marker.

“This is where Holly Creek keeps everything nobody has needed recently enough to move upstairs,” Nora said. “Council minutes, licenses, property files, and several decades of Christmas decorations nobody is legally required to use but nobody is brave enough to throw away.”

For once, the building around me was not the problem I had come to solve. The paper inside it was.

“Frank said his grandfather left copies of the original plans down here,” Nora said. “He didn’t say where.”

I looked at the cabinets, crates, and boxes. “That narrows it down to one basement and several thousand possibilities.”

“Welcome to municipal memory.”

We searched from the front of the room to the back. Behind two filing cabinets and a box of parade bunting, we found a wooden cabinet marked ARCHITECTURAL. Its drawers stuck when I pulled them, revealing rolled documents yellow with age and brittle at the edges.

“Careful.” Nora reached past me, her shoulder brushing mine. “Some of these haven’t been touched in decades.”

Her hair smelled faintly of cinnamon, the same scent that filled Winters Wonderland. Apparently, Christmas had followed her to the community center.

We spread the first one across a cleared section of floor, weighting the corners with archive boxes. The plan was hand-drawn and dated 1902, with the commercial block drawn in detail.

“This is the hardware store.” I traced the footprint. “And here’s the lot where the bookshop stands now. But look at these annotations.”