Chapter 10: The Archive Beneath the East Wing

The drain schematic was not where Maren had said it would be.

This was, Elliot had come to understand, characteristic of information at Ashenmoor — it existed, but it had been encouraged to exist inconveniently, filed in the wrong section or bound into the wrong volume or placed in a drawer that required knowing which drawer to open before you could find the drawer. The 1962 plumbing surveys for the East Wing were not in the maintenance section of the library's ground-floor archive. They were not in the East Wing's own records cabinet, which Sable had checked on a Tuesday when the prefect who normally monitored the wing was occupied with a disciplinary hearing on the west side. They were not catalogued under E, or East, or Wing, or Survey, or 1962.

They were, as Sable discovered on the second Thursday of Elliot's seventh week, filed under M for Mains. Subsection: Water. Shelf four, eastern stacks, general reference.