Lisa Perry Proctor

Member of the Proctor (Yorkist) bloodline who never carried the calling but kept the family's ledgers and secrets.

Lisa Perry Proctor has been called Perry since the age of four, because the household on the east side of Houston already held one Lisa Perry and a house, in the opinion of her grandmother, can only be expected to answer to so many. She was born in 1990 at Houston, Texas, and is living today in that city, where she works as a paralegal for a firm of maritime and property lawyers among the shipping channel, oil offices and bayous that she has never wished to leave. She is of the House of Proctor and the White Ledger, the Yorkist line that descends, with the Faulkners, from Thomas Faulkner and Isabel Proctor, who married in January 1486, but she is not a hunter and not a vampire slayer, and she has no alias, archetype, craft or gear of her own beyond a highlighter, a stamp and a sound grasp of the Texas statute of limitations. She is the elder daughter of the shipyard welder Scott Proctor and of the secretary Lisa Perry, both living, and the sister of Shannon Proctor, born in 1992. In 2010 she married the software tester Travis White, and they have no children, which is a settled and cheerful arrangement on both sides. The family remembers her as the lawyer's hands of the White Ledger, the one who sees to it that a house in which the family hides its cousins is, on paper, nobody's business. She was born in the same hospital as her sister, two years earlier, in the heat at the end of a September, and was brought home to a house on the east side with a workshop in the garage and a grey filing cabinet in the hall. It was a house in which the parents spoke in two different registers. Her father Scott, a large, quiet man with a burn scar on the back of one hand, said as little as the conversation permitted, and when he was moved to say something it was nearly always about iron. Her mother, who was twenty-nine and a secretary on the ship channel, spoke in full paragraphs, in the order in which the events had occurred, and said that a thing was either filed or lost. The child inherited the one from the other. She was a short, round-faced, freckled girl with her mother's eyes and her father's wrists, who spoke rarely, wrote everything down and was found at six, on the floor of the hall, sorting the cabinet's index cards into the order of the alphabet and, in a second pile, the order of her opinion of them. Her earliest memory was of a Saturday. Her father had a gate in the back of a truck that he was fitting to a house on the bayou, a heavy iron one with a bolt that dropped across the passage on a cord, and he let her pull the cord. It fell with a sound that she says she can hear still. He said that it was a gate for a house with a cellar, and that she might tell anybody who asked that it was for keeping out burglars. She told her kindergarten teacher, at five, that her father made gates for cellars that kept out things that were not burglars. The teacher wrote to her mother. Her mother wrote back, with a copy kept on file, to say that the child had a vivid imagination. It was the first time, Perry says, that she understood that the family had a second language and that a sentence might have two readings, one true and one that would pass. She was told the whole of it at fifteen, over a plate of eggs, in the kitchen, by both her parents at once, with the grey cabinet in the hall and a card index of a thousand names on the table beside the toast. Her mother produced the index with a very small flourish. Her father said that it was an old family business and that the girl might leave it alone. Perry looked at the index and said that she had always supposed it explained the shorthand. She asked, with the carefulness that is her grandmother's, whether the White Ledger had a lawyer. Scott said that it had two, and that one was in San Antonio and the other was a retired judge in Beaumont who was a good deal past eighty. She said that they would need somebody younger. She went to a university in the city, took a degree in legal studies by night while working in a firm's mailroom by day, and in 2008 had the post of a legal assistant at a firm of maritime lawyers on Louisiana Street, a bluff, dry and kindly set of partners who dealt in cargo claims, collisions and the ownership of salvage. She was eighteen. In the next year she found that she was a better lawyer's hand than any of them, a girl who could read a deed, a lien or a charter-party in the time that it took another to find his glasses. She took the paralegal certificate in 2010, and has been a paralegal since. She is quick, exact and a little dry, and has the reputation in the office of the person who knows where the bodies are buried, though in her case, as she says, the bodies are generally in the file. She met Travis White at a university library in the autumn of 2008, over a photocopier that had jammed, and he fixed it. He was eighteen, a tall, thin, gentle young man with glasses and a strong dislike of the unexamined, who was reading computing and who, as it turned out, had been writing tests for programs since he was fourteen, for fun. He told her that the machine had a ghost in it and that he could prove it. She said that she thought she might believe that. They were married in 2010, at twenty, in a small church on the east side, with her uncle Marcus as an usher and her grandmother Mildred, up from Corpus Christi in her best brown dress, who cried a little, and her father Scott, who inspected the lighting and was understood to be pleased. Travis was told the truth about the Ledger on the Sunday after, at the kitchen table, by Mildred, with a pan of cornbread, and he took it, she says, as he takes everything, by asking what the failure mode was. He is a software tester, and has been so for sixteen years, for a company that makes systems for the port. His profession consists of breaking a thing in every way that it can be broken, in order to find out which way it will, and the Ledger has found that this is a faculty that it can use. He has never carried a pistol and has made two or three locks that would stand up to a siege. They have no children, and have never wished any. It is a decision that they made at twenty-two, over a cup of tea, and neither has revisited it, and the family, who are used to a good deal worse, has taken it with perfect composure. Mildred said that there were enough Proctors. Perry says that the family does not run short of people to look after, and that she has a sister, a very large number of cousins and a house full of paper. The paper is her contribution. A hunting family that keeps safe houses along a coast, a cellar here, a spare room there, an iron gate on a bayou, needs somebody who sees that the houses belong to somebody and that the somebody is not asked questions. Perry set up, over eight years, a set of small trusts and limited companies that hold the title of nineteen houses along the Gulf, from Beaumont to Mobile, in the names of dead aunts and plausible partnerships, and she keeps their annual returns, their insurance and their boundary disputes in a cabinet, in the hall, which was her mother's. She has gone to court twice on the Ledger's account, for a cousin whose land had been seized, and she has won both. She does it on her own time and charges nothing. Her mother's index is, as she says, the finding aid. Hers is the deed. In the pandemic years the firm moved onto screens, the courts to a telephone, and the Port of Houston to a stand-off between thirty ships and a closed channel, and she was thirty and did a great deal of paper for people in a hurry. She worked from the spare room, with Travis in the next, the two of them tapping at each other through the wall in a code of their own, and on Sundays went to the east side to sit with her parents on the porch, at a distance, in masks, with a thermos. Her mother took the Ledger's dictation as usual, over a speaker. Her father said that she would have made a good welder, since she had the patience for the long join. She lives now in a brick bungalow in the Heights, with Travis, an old cat and a very large filing cabinet, and she is thirty-six. She has her mother's habit of stopping in the middle of a sentence to ask whether a thing has been put in the right place, and her father's of being right about it. Lisa Perry Proctor is remembered in the Proctor family as the paralegal of the White Ledger, the elder daughter of the welder and the secretary who gave the family's hidden houses a clean title. In the Slayerverse she stands for the lawyers and clerks of the old houses, who were never called to the hunt, who learned that a safe house is made as much of deeds and filing as of iron, and who proved that to keep a thing lawfully hidden is one of the quietest and most necessary of crafts.