Commissioner Dale Kessler called me SWEETHEART into a live microphone, and forty people in folding chairs laughed along with him.
I’d fought two years for the deputy recorder job, and that paycheck kept my mother’s insulin in her fridge.
The next morning the custodian caught me at the elevator and folded my fingers shut around a note. The outside said BOOK 41, in pencil.
I’d only stood at the podium and said the Voss deed had a PROBLEM.
“Let the grown-ups worry about deeds,” Kessler said, and the front row slapped their knees.
My ears stayed hot all the way home.
Lonnie Duvall has run his buffer down the second-floor hall at 6:30 every morning since before I was born.
He’s seventy-some, with knees that crack when he crouches and a coffee can of rock salt on his cart in October.
He sat in the back row through all of it, his face still.
Unfolded, the note had one more line. Check the notary.
The Voss parcel was a rezoning for Kessler’s brother-in-law that he’d pushed onto the agenda three times.
I pulled Book 41 from the vault at lunch. The Voss deed carried Shirley Gaines’s seal, dated 2023.
I record thirty deeds a week. I knew that name, and her obituary ran in 2020.
DEAD for three years.
I found him by the drinking fountain. “Lonnie, how did you know?”
“I read the books while the wax dries,” he said, eyes on the buffer. “Thirty-three years’ worth.”
That night I typed Duvall into the county personnel portal. Hired 1993, Facilities.
Below that sat one grayed-out line, a prior position from 1979 to 1992.
OUR CUSTODIAN HAD BEEN THE PETTIS COUNTY PROSECUTOR.
A text from an unsaved number came in at 11:40.
Careful, SWEETHEART.
I held my phone out to Lonnie at 6:30.
“He’s sent those for nineteen years, Courtney,” he said. “It hasn’t worked once.”
Kessler had the microphone off its stand before I reached the podium two weeks later. “Look who’s back, our little RECORDS GIRL,” he said.
Lonnie came down the aisle in a gray suit, a folder under his arm, and took the microphone out of Kessler’s hand.
“Sit down, Dale,” he said. “I’m going to read this room what it’s been laughing at.”
The laughing stopped.
The folder
Lonnie didn’t hurry.
He laid the folder open on the podium and held the microphone close, like a man who’d held one before.
“Book 41, page 212,” he said. “A warranty deed. Ardith Voss to Pruitt Land and Cattle. The Voss quarter, out past the fairgrounds.”
He lifted a photocopy so the front row could see the round seal in the bottom corner.
“Notarized by Shirley Gaines. Her seal. Dated 2023.”
He set it down and lifted a second sheet, a newspaper clipping gone soft at the folds.
“Shirley’s obituary, out of the Democrat. She died in 2020. I was one of her pallbearers.”
A man in the fourth row set his coffee down on the carpet.
I took the second copy of the deed out of Lonnie’s folder and walked it to the second row.
Janelle Oakes from the prosecutor’s office sat on the aisle with a legal pad on her knee. She was the only one in that row who hadn’t laughed two weeks ago. Instead she wrote something on the pad.
She took the copy without a word and held it close to her face.
Kessler hadn’t gone back to his seat. He leaned across the commission table to the little gooseneck mic at his place, and the speakers popped.
“Lonnie, Shirley stamped half the paper in this county,” he said. “Somebody hit the wrong key on a year. That’s all this is.”
A couple of men in the front row nodded.
One of them was Wes Pruitt, his brother-in-law, in a canvas coat he hadn’t bothered to unzip.
“And if anybody wants to know who let it through,” Kessler said, “ask our records girl whose initials are on the recording stamp.”
Janelle turned the page toward me.
The county’s recording stamp sat in the top margin, where it sits on every deed I’ve ever touched. Book, page, date, time, and a short line for the clerk who took it in.
I’d read that line two weeks ago in the vault, with Book 41 open on the cart, and stood there until my lunch hour was gone.
The back room had indexed the deed under VISS, one key over from VOSS. My own search had walked right past it.
C.B.
Courtney Bauer.
Mine.
The kolache box
I started in the recorder’s office in 2021, at twenty-two, in the back room where the indexing gets done.
I typed grantor and grantee names eight hours a day and shelved whatever came back from the scanner.
I scanned and shelved every page recorded in 2022, the whole of Book 40, one at a time.
Rita Ostrander moved me up to the front counter in 2023.
My first week out there, Dale Kessler came through the glass door at ten in the morning with a white bakery box under one arm and a stack of deeds under a rubber band.
“Kolaches for the girls in the back,” he said, and set the box on my counter. “And a few papers for folks out my way. They don’t like the drive in.”
He knew my name. He knew my mother’s.
Kessler had sat two pews behind her at church since before I could walk, and every time he saw either of us he asked how her sugar was running.
He asked that morning too.
I told him her numbers were better. He said good, good, and peeled bills off a money clip for every deed in the stack.
Back then every fee went into a carbon receipt book.
The customer got the white copy, the county got the yellow, and the pink stayed bound in the book. The clerk wrote the date, the document, the fee, who brought it in, and her own initials.
I wrote hundreds of them a month.
Rita put the receipts on the computer in 2024 and told me to box the carbon books for the shred.
I filled six boxes. Lonnie rode them down the freight elevator with me to the boiler room, where the county keeps its shred bin.
“Stack them by the boiler,” he said. “The shred truck comes when I call it.”
I applied for deputy recorder in 2023, and Rita gave it to a man from Warsaw who lasted four months.
I applied again. She made me wait a year.
I got it in 2025, and the raise is what moved my mother’s insulin off the credit card. The pharmacy printout is still on our fridge under a magnet. It says $587 a month without the county plan.
Kessler buys the grand champion steer at the State Fair every summer. The Democrat runs the same picture of him every year, the ribbon in one hand.
Ardith Voss is eighty-eight and has lived at the nursing home on the east side since her husband passed. My mother sends her a card every birthday.
Wes Pruitt had a trucking outfit from Kansas City waiting to buy the Voss quarter at $2.1 million once it was zoned for warehouses. That number was on page three of the rezoning packet.
Page two said Pruitt Land and Cattle had bought the quarter from Ardith by warranty deed in 2023. It gave no book and no page.
I typed Voss into our index the night the packet came out. The last line under her name was 1971, the year she and her husband took the quarter. Nothing had ever gone out.
As far as the county’s own index knew, Wes was rezoning land he didn’t own. That was the whole PROBLEM I’d stood up to report.
Kessler brought the gavel down once.
“The commission will table the Voss application to November,” he said into the gooseneck, “so the recorder’s office can check its own work.”
Maybe six people laughed this time.
Rita Ostrander stood up in the third row with her coat already buttoned.
“My office,” she said to me. “Eight-fifteen tomorrow.”
The vault key
Rita didn’t offer me a chair.
She held out her hand, palm up, and waited until I worked the vault key off my ring and laid it there.
“A bound book came out of my vault,” she said. “Copies of a recorded page went to a custodian, and he read them into a live microphone.”
“Lonnie found it.”
“Lonnie mops floors.”
She dropped the key into her desk drawer.
“Unpaid leave, starting now, while I review how records get handled in my office. Keep the badge. You’ll want it back, if you’re smart for the next two weeks.”
“The notary’s been dead since 2020, Rita.”
“Dale has been good to this office,” she said. “Close the door on your way out.”
I closed it.
My login was dead by the time I got back to my desk.
The public index terminal sits by the front counter, for title people and anybody else who walks in off the square. I typed Voss into it because I didn’t know what else to type.
A new line sat at the top of the list, recorded at 8:02 that morning.
AFFIDAVIT OF CORRECTION. Book 44, page 9. Voss to Pruitt Land and Cattle.
I opened the image.
A single page, signed by Wes Pruitt and sworn in front of a notary in Kansas City who was very much alive. The date on the Voss deed, it said, was a clerical error and should read 2019.
The recording stamp in the margin said R.O.
Rita had taken it in herself, thirteen minutes before she took my key.
I took the stairs to the third floor.
Janelle Oakes had a desk by the window and a stack of files with sticky notes on the tabs. She let me show her my phone. I’d photographed page 212 in the vault the day I pulled Book 41.
She looked at it, and then at the affidavit, which she already had up on her own screen.
“Kessler calls it a typo, and now there’s a sworn paper that agrees with him,” she said. “A picture on a phone doesn’t argue with that.”
“Shirley was still alive in 2019, Janelle.”
“I know when Shirley was alive.”
She handed my phone back.
“Bring me something that argues.”
I passed the recorder’s office on my way out. Rita’s door was shut.
Through the glass, Kessler sat in her visitor chair with a white bakery box open on his knees.
Book 40, page 77
My mother was at the kitchen table when I got home at ten in the morning.
“Rita send you home?” she said.
I told her Rita had given me some time off.
She looked at the fridge, then at me.
The butter shelf on the door is where her pens live, caps all facing out. She counts them every night. She got up and counted them right then, with the door hanging open, and didn’t say the number.
“Dale called here last night,” she said. “Asked how my sugar was running.”
“And you said?”
“I said it was running fine. He said he hoped it kept on.”
I sat down across from her with my phone and page 212 and read the whole deed, down to the legal description.
Partway down, it described the land as the tract shown on the survey recorded in BOOK 40, PAGE 77.
Book 40.
My back-room year. I’d scanned every page of it.
I didn’t remember page 77, and I wouldn’t have. But I knew the year on its spine.
The next morning I stood on the public side of my own counter and filled out a request slip like anybody off the street.
The clerk who had my counter now was nineteen, with her ponytail pulled through the back of a ball cap. She read my slip twice.
“Rita said if you came in, I’m supposed to call her,” she said.
“Call her, then.”
She looked at the phone on the desk, then at the slip.
“The public gets to see the books, though,” she said, and went into the vault.
Book 40 came out on the cart with its corners rubbed white. She opened it to 77 and turned it around to face me.
A survey of the Voss quarter.
Section lines, the fence along the county road, a creek bending through the northeast corner. The surveyor’s block sat in the bottom right, with his stamp, his signature and a date in 2022.
And a line above the signature, in capitals.
PREPARED FOR: WES PRUITT.
A year before the deed. And three years after the date on Wes’s affidavit.
Wes had paid a man to walk Ardith Voss’s land while it was still hers.
I asked for a certified copy. The clerk’s hand shook a little on the embosser.
Janelle Oakes read it standing up.
She laid it next to the affidavit on her desk and moved her finger from one date to the other and back.
“A deed signed in 2019 that points at a map drawn in 2022,” she said. “Wes has a PROBLEM.”
“And Kessler?”
“Kessler’s name isn’t anywhere on this.”
She tapped the copy.
“Wes will say a lawyer drew it up and somebody else took it from there. Courtney, who handed it across your counter?”
Six boxes
I recorded thirty deeds a week as deputy. My first year on the counter it was more, and I wanted everybody who walked up to think I was fast.
I didn’t remember the Voss deed.
I remembered a bakery box.
The buffer was halfway down the second-floor hall at 6:30 the next morning, with Lonnie behind it, both hands on the bar.
He saw my face and shut it off.
“The carbon books,” I said. “The six boxes.”
He didn’t ask which ones. He parked the buffer against the wall and rang for the freight elevator.
The boiler room is the warmest place in the annex and smells like hot dust. A pair of work gloves had dried stiff over a pipe.
The six boxes sat where we’d stacked them in 2024, against the cinder block.
Lonnie had written KEEP across the tape on every box, in black marker, with his initials.
“Rita wanted these gone,” I said.
“I was the prosecutor in this county for thirteen years,” Lonnie said. “I don’t shred paper I haven’t read.”
“And the floors?”
“Lost an election in ’92. Needed a job with a key to every room.”
“And you’ve read these?”
“Some winters.”
He lowered himself onto an upturned bucket, and his knees cracked.
“Help yourself.”
The recording stamp on page 212 had given me the date and the time. I found the box with 2023 written on its end, and the book that covered that week, and I sat down on the concrete with it in my lap.
My handwriting was rounder then. I dotted my i’s with little circles until Rita told me to quit.
I turned the pink sheets one at a time.
That morning had five receipts in a row. Five deeds in twelve minutes, all cash.
The fourth said WD, VOSS TO PRUITT LAND AND CATTLE, $24.00.
“He used to come in when somebody new had the counter,” Lonnie said.
I put my thumb under the last line on the fourth sheet.
PRESENTED BY: D. KESSLER. RECEIVED: C.B.
Line nine
The Voss application came back on the November agenda as item six.
I called Janelle Oakes the night before and told her what I had and where it had come from. She didn’t say anything for a while.
Then she said she’d be in the second row.
I knew what carrying that book out of the boiler room was going to cost me. I put it in a canvas grocery bag anyway.
The sign-up sheet for public comment hung on a clipboard by the door. I wrote my name on line nine.
Courtney Bauer, Sedalia.
Lonnie had set out sixty folding chairs this time, and people stood along the back wall anyway.
Wes Pruitt sat in the front row in the same canvas coat. Rita sat in the third. Lonnie sat in the back.
Kessler ran the first five items fast. When he got to six, he read the sheet in front of him and smiled into the gooseneck.
“Line nine,” he said. “Folks, that’s our former records girl. Courtney, you get three minutes like everybody else, and I’ll save you a couple. The recorder’s office already corrected that little error on the Voss deed. It’s on the books. Rita took care of it.”
A few people laughed, the ones up front.
I walked up and set three things on the podium.
The certified copy of Book 40, page 77. The copy of page 212. The carbon receipt book from 2023, open to the fourth pink sheet.
“Book 41, page 212,” I said. “Book 40, page 77. And the county’s receipt from the morning that deed came in.”
Janelle Oakes got up out of the second row and read the open page standing next to me. She didn’t touch it.
Kessler leaned in.
“Those are shred books,” he said. “Those were destroyed in 2024. Rita, tell these folks. Rita’s office destroyed those.”
Rita didn’t stand.
“They went to the boiler room,” she said.
“Then it’s on your office, Rita.”
His voice came out of the speakers too loud, and he didn’t back off the mic.
“Rita’s office lost track of its own books. Rita’s office recorded that correction, not me. I carried some papers in for neighbors who don’t like the drive. I’m a cattleman. I don’t read notary seals and I never have, and not one person in this room ever asked me to.”
Wes Pruitt stood up out of the front row.
“Dale,” he said.
That was the only word he said. He walked out the side door with his coat still zipped, and Kessler didn’t watch him go.
“And Courtney,” Kessler said.
He found me over the top of his reading glasses.
“I sure hope your mother’s got a few of those pens put by, sweetheart.”
The front row didn’t laugh.
Rita stood up in the third row and spoke loud enough that she didn’t need a microphone.
“That book was in a box marked for destruction,” she said. “Courtney carried county records out of this building, and I want her badge on that podium.”
Janelle held out her hand.
“I’ll need the book, Courtney.”
I closed the carbon book and gave it to her.
She put it under her arm, walked to the clerk’s table and asked for the whole Voss file. The commission clerk handed it over without looking at Kessler.
The commissioner from the north district leaned to his own mic and moved to strike item six from the agenda. The south district seconded.
Kessler didn’t call the vote, so the north district called it himself. It carried two to nothing.
I unclipped my badge and laid it face up beside the microphone stand.
Lonnie held the door with his foot, the way he holds it for the buffer.
The back row
I bought two coffees at the gas station on the corner at 6:20 on a January morning and carried them up to the second floor.
I work across the square now, at Pettis Abstract and Title. I bring deeds to the counter instead of taking them in, and the girl in the ball cap types my name on the presenter line.
It pays $3.10 an hour less.
The pharmacy printout on our fridge has a new number on it in my handwriting, and I circle it every month when I pay it.
Page 212 still has my initials on it. A stamp doesn’t come off.
My mother drove out to the east side in December to tell Ardith Voss herself. Ardith asked her who Wes Pruitt was.
The meeting room was set for the night. Forty folding chairs, the handheld mic back on its stand with the cord wrapped twice around the base.
Kessler’s nameplate was in a cardboard box on Lonnie’s cart, face down under the coffee can of rock salt.
“They put in new speakers,” Lonnie said. “Say something.”
I took the microphone off the stand.
Lonnie walked to the back row and sat down in the last chair and folded his arms.
“Book 41,” I said.
“Louder, Courtney,” he said.
If somebody you know got laughed at for reading the fine print, send this one their way.
For more tales about unexpected moments and the people who make them, check out My Cousin Posted a Photo From My Chair. He Chose My Third-Grader’s Tablet Passcode., My Daughter Sat in the Mud. His Mother Wanted My Phone Read Aloud., or I Covered My Best Friend’s Divorce. She Booked the Second Cabin Seven Weeks Early..
