by Molly Macrae
“Which might be a leap, but pinning the words ‘of interest’ onto the back end of the word ‘people’ is fair enough.”
“Cool. Give me everything you already know, no matter how inconsequential you think it is. You never know what tidbit will provide the point of access to research gold. You’ll be at the potluck tonight?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll see you there and bring what I’ve found. What are you bringing?”
I must have looked blank.
“Sorry, my mind flipped to the Food Channel. What food are you bringing?”
“Er…” I really was blank on that. I’d put off making a decision, wondering what one should take to one’s first Historical Trust Annual Meeting and Potluck, not wanting to overthink it, hoping for inspiration…which finally struck. “I know. I’ll swing by Mel’s and pick up one of her coconut cream pies.” Mmm, Mel’s pie. It was a beautiful solution in every sense.
“No, that’s no good,” Thea said. “That’ll be cheating and everyone will know it. Come on, you’re Ivy’s granddaughter. There are potlucks and there are potlucks, but this is The Potluck. Capital T, capital P. The least you can do is throw together a green salad. With a honey-mustard dressing or something. And put on a skirt.”
“Really?” I should have realized there was such a thing as potluck etiquette. But there should be time after work to make a run to the grocery store out on the highway for fresh spinach. And tomatoes if they looked any good. Maybe an avocado. “I wonder why Ardis didn’t clue me in.”
“She probably thought you knew or she didn’t want to embarrass you. But sure. Green salad will be great. People loved Ivy’s salads.”
“Huh, okay. I guess I’ll do that, then.”
“Everyone will be glad to see it. Oh, and I’ve been meaning to tell you. Some of the TGIFs donated money to the library in Ivy’s memory.”
“Aww.”
“Yeah.” Thea was actually quiet for ten or twenty seconds. “There’s a box of Kleenex to your right. Yeah, Ivy was something special. She lived her life her own way and she touched a lot of lives. I’ll send you a letter with the details so you know what books I bought and you can thank anyone who doesn’t want to remain anonymous.”
“Thanks.”
“One book already came in, though, and I especially want you to see it. It’s brand-new, covers all aspects of natural dyeing. Ivy would’ve loved it. It’s full of color pictures, planting guides for gardens, recipes for dyes—the whole shebang—and it’s beautifully presented. Like one of those coffee table cookbooks that’s part travelogue, part drool inducer, except with fiber and color. It’s a real knockout. Not a book you want to drop on your foot.”
“I’d love to see it.” I looked toward the shelves of new arrivals.
“That’s the problem, though. It’s so gorgeous it checked out immediately. I should have put a hold on it for you as soon as I ordered it. You want me to do that now?”
“Oh, absolutely. Who checked it out?”
“Librarians never tell. I’m sorry I didn’t put it on hold for you to begin with, though. I’ll do it with the rest of the books and…” She stopped, listened, looked left and right, as I’d done earlier, then lowered her voice even though there still didn’t seem to be anyone else in the library. “And I’ll bring the dossiers with me tonight.”
“Can you say ‘dossiers’ without compromising your scruples? It sounds spyish and associated with ‘suspects.’”
“It’s a harmless word meaning file, folder, record, and report in addition to meaning profile. If it had room for any more meanings it would be a portmanteau. I like it. I think I’ll start using it more often.”
“You can e-mail the information to me if it’s easier.”
“Better I bring it tonight. Believe it or not, I don’t have a computer at home. I spend enough time staring at one while I’m here—and I’m here most of the time, anyway. And my phone isn’t smart enough, either.”
“But…” I pointed at the computer in front of her. I wasn’t following her logic. “From here? You don’t ever e-mail from here?”
“Of course I do. And I could. But.”
“But what?”
“Why take chances?”
“Are you serious?” Making sure no one overheard my snoopy request for other people’s personal information was one thing, but what was Thea worried about? Someone sinister sneaking through the stacks? Danger in the Dewey decimals? Venal volunteers or archfiendish assistants? But she wasn’t smiling, so I kept a straight face. “Won’t you be using this computer for your research and creating a file and saving information to it? You aren’t worried about that?”
“Don’t you read the tabloids while you’re waiting in line at the grocery store?” she asked. Now she did smile, but she didn’t back down. “I can control my end. I’ll clear my search history and I won’t keep a file. Humor me on this, though. Maybe I’m odd, but sending sensitive e-mails out there into the big bad airwaves or wires or ether or whatever, all on their own…Well, things really do go astray and things get leaked and, like I said, why take chances?”
“Okay.” Maybe Pen or Sylvia knew how to hack e-mail systems. Or Clod. Or maybe it was less complicated and Thea was simply paranoid. She was doing me a favor, though, so it wasn’t worth arguing about. “There’s something else, though, if you don’t mind. Have you got old newspapers on microfilm?”
“Let me guess. You’re looking for the original stories about Will from a couple of years ago, right?”
As soon as she mentioned them, I knew I should be looking for those articles, but I hadn’t even thought about digging them up. What kind of investigation was I running that I didn’t think of such obvious avenues of information?
“Because you know all that stuff is online these days,” Thea said. “The Bugle’s site isn’t the easiest to search, but there’s no need to get carsick scrolling through microfilm anymore.”
Ah, yes, that’s the kind of detective I was—the kind who didn’t need to worry about being on the dense and dim side because I had an intelligent, self-starting posse keeping track of the details I let slip.
“Good. So what do you think? Is it worth reading the original reports? Will they shed light on anything that happened Monday? It might at least be interesting to compare the originals with that summary in yesterday’s paper. See if there are obvious discrepancies.” I grabbed a piece of scratch paper and a golf pencil from a holder on the desk, started making notes to myself, and stopped. “Holy cow. Did the Bugle only come out yesterday?”
“You didn’t give me a chance to answer your first question, but the answer to that one is yes, only yesterday.”
“What was my first question?”
“Do I think the original articles are worth reading? It doesn’t matter if I do or don’t. Someone else does. We had hard copies of the original articles in the vertical file and they’re missing. The articles, not the filing cabinet.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Even with security strips and the gate, it happens, and vertical file materials don’t get strips anyway. And when there’s a major event, like a natural disaster or a celebrity’s death, it’s not uncommon for someone to suddenly decide he needs to own the special reports or commemorative issues of Time or Newsweek or someone’s complete works on CD or a favorite DVD. It’s cheaper, though, to just take the library’s copy.” She shrugged. “A murder-suicide counts as a major event.”
“Someone took the articles as souvenirs?”
“It takes all kinds, doesn’t it? It might be a coincidence, though.”
“But you’re the kind of person who won’t use a library computer to send sensitive information in an e-mail, so you don’t think it is a coincidence or that they were taken by a souvenir hunter. Okay, well, maybe not. But think about it. It probably wasn’t someone trying to cover tracks or cover up anything else, either, because surely no one is dumb enough to think the library had the only copies o
f those articles in existence. You said it yourself—they’re available online.”
“But maybe they were taken by someone doing his own research,” Thea said, “and the library was the most convenient place to find hard copies.”
Pen and Sylvia. Those rats. Maybe that’s what Sylvia was up to last night. “Do you have security cameras?” I turned in a circle, scanning the ceiling and corners of the room.
“I wish.”
“An alarm?”
“A building alarm? Kind of fritzy.”
“Is there any way to figure out who took them? Or who’s been in the library this week? Do you at least know when the articles disappeared?”
“Calm down. On figuring out who took them, only a very anemic maybe. Knowing when they disappeared? It could’ve been yesterday or it could’ve been five months ago. Anytime between when the last person read them and when I went looking. I do know they were here six months ago when a volunteer inventoried the files. As for who’s been in the library in the past week? Do you have any idea how many people are in and out of here on a weekly basis?”
“But if I described a couple of people, tourists, maybe someone would remember?” I was remembering Sylvia’s beautiful scarf.
“It’s our policy not to keep records on the materials patrons check out or use in the building, so that’s a dead end. But there is that anemic maybe because we keep the archive room locked and the vertical file’s in the archive. I haven’t unlocked the room for anyone in the past week, but maybe someone else did. And if they did, maybe they’ll remember something. We do get a lot of out-of-town types in here on ancestor hunts. But it’s a long shot and maybe a tempest in a teapot. Maybe the articles are misfiled or tucked between a couple of cookbooks. Stranger things have happened. I found Curious George shelved next to The Silence of the Lambs last month. That put some icky pictures in my head.”
“But you don’t think they’re misfiled.”
“No. Because I looked. And I’m good at looking.”
“If they’re gone and they weren’t taken by a souvenir hunter, then that adds another layer of questions to the questions we already have. And that makes a whole buncha-buncha-bunch of questions.” I bounced my fingertips off my lips with the “buncha-buncha-bunch.” It didn’t help. “Huh. Well…” What was my original reason for coming here? “Oh, wait, what about even older papers? Turn of the century and before.”
“Turn of which century?”
“Nineteenth to twentieth.”
“Which paper?”
“There’s more than one?”
“Come on over here.” She came out from behind the desk and led me along the wall that divided the public and staff areas of the building. We stopped at a door and she pulled out a ring of keys.
“You might think this is a closet,” she said, putting faux snoot in her voice, “but it is the J.F. Culp Memorial Archival Repository.” She opened the door, reached around the edge of the jamb, and flipped the light switch. A bulb hanging from a socket in the ceiling came on. “Notice I didn’t have to pull a string to turn that light on,” she said. “We’re classy. Where do you want to start?”
I didn’t like to tell her, but her repository was a closet—a roomy janitor’s closet, maybe, but no bigger. It was lined with shelves from floor to ceiling on two sides. Three filing cabinets stood against the third wall. There wasn’t room for anything but the door in the fourth wall. I eyed the shelves with their boxes and boxes of microfilm and pictured myself getting snarled in the reels and tangled in loop after loop…“Is there an index?”
“We’re not that classy. What are you looking for?”
“A picture someone described.”
“Picture or photograph? And before you ask, yes, it makes a difference. Photographs, the way we think of newspaper photographs, weren’t around until the 1880s and not common in the Bugle until the late nineties and not all that common even then. I know this is true because a fifth grader came in and told me last week and after she left I verified it with my own research so that I’d look good the next time it came up. Who knew it would come up again so soon? I’m so glad you came in and asked.”
“Glad I could help.”
“Does that narrow the range of dates for you?”
It did and it didn’t. What if Geneva’s description of the clothing in the picture was confused? Or completely wrong? What if the photograph she remembered wasn’t in a newspaper? What if the nebulous memory of lovers lying dead in the grass wasn’t hers but came from one of her blessed movies or TV shows? At that point I felt a chill on my neck.
“Can we go now?” a sepulchral voice heavy with grump said in my ear.
“What?” I couldn’t believe it. Thea and I had talked for a while, but not that long. She’d been perfectly happy about looking at books. She’d had the nerve to tell me not to do anything to get us kicked out. And now she wanted to go? Then I remembered where I was and to whom I’d just responded with such short-tempered annoyance. Oops. I glanced sideways at Thea. She was pretending not to notice my outburst.
“Tell you what,” Thea said, handing me the closet key and speaking gently. “You take your time here. Lock the door when you’re finished. The microfilm reader is along the wall there in the corner. Before you go, though, make sure you give me the information you have on those people you want me to look up. And remember to give me back my key.”
“Sure. Thanks. Um, one more thing?” I shivered and moved away from Geneva. She’d rested her chin on my shoulder and was sighing ponderously in my ear. “Cole Dunbar told me the historical society has archives, too.”
“Yeah. They did a photo-history project a few years back. They put out a call for people to bring in their old pictures and then they made copies or scanned them. If you’re looking for a picture, then that might be your best bet for finding it.”
“Are they indexed?”
“You’d hope so, but I don’t know. I’ve never set foot in the place and probably never will. The volunteer who runs it used to volunteer here, and that’s all you need to know about that or I might color your perception of the dear woman. With your background, though, I’m surprised you haven’t gone over there to root through their trunks of old clothes and check how their quilts are hanging. Or are you afraid you’ll come across as the big bwana expert come to tell the small fry what she’s doing wrong?”
“Some of that, maybe.”
“She’ll take it that way, too.”
“Great.”
A commotion erupted at the book drop. A family had just come in and a small boy wailed as he watched his father and older sister slipping all their books into the return slot. Thea said something that sounded like “bubble time” and was gone.
“Now can we go?”
I looked at Geneva, looked at the closet-slash-archives. “Come here,” I whispered and crooked a finger at her. “We need to talk.” She sulked after me into the small space and I pulled the door mostly shut. “What’s with you?” I whispered. “You talk to me and then you won’t talk to me. You’re happy…well, no, you’re never happy, but then you go totally miserable. You come in here and say you want to look at the books and then suddenly you can’t wait to leave. I know you’re dealing with issues that I, as a living person, probably can’t comprehend. You’re dead. Okay. I get that. But it’s not like you haven’t had plenty of time to get used to it. What are you, a ghost or a sullen, sulking teenager?” I stopped midtirade. “Oh my God. Are you a teenager?”
“I don’t think that’s possible.”
“Why not?” It would certainly explain a few things.
“Teenagers sing and dance and roll packs of cigarettes up in their sleeves. They drive hot rods and have bonfires at the beach and play something called blanket bingo. Plus they have names that sound like small pieces of hardware. I’ve seen the documentaries on television.”
“I think those might have been movies.”
“Or docudramas. They looked quite realistic.”
I was standing in a closet with a ghost discussing Gidget Goes Hawaiian.
“I’ve never been to a beach,” she said. “You should take me. I could scare the sharks away so they won’t bite your legs off. I’ve seen those documentaries, too.”
I tried to picture her relaxing on a sunny beach, listening to waves lapping the shore, reading a good book, a cozy mystery maybe, or Private Investigating 101, idly turning the pages of Teen magazine…“Oh my gosh. You can’t read any of those books out there, can you?”
“How rude. I can read every bit as well as you.”
“But you can’t turn the pages so you can’t read books anymore. That must be like being in…”
“Well, it isn’t like being in a blanket bingo documentary—I can tell you that.”
“Come with me. I want to show you something.”
“You’re very bossy today.” She huffed a bit but she trailed after me out of the closet, tsking and offering her own instructions all the way back to the circulation desk. “Don’t forget to turn off the light and don’t forget to lock the door. I didn’t say slam it. We’re in a library, for heaven’s sake.”
Thea stood at the circulation desk with a bottle of bubbles in one hand and a bubble pipe in the other. The previously crying child gazed at her with open adulation. I handed her the key.
“Find what you wanted?” she asked between puffs.
“I’ll come back when I have more time.”
“Okeydoke.”
“Where are your audiobooks?”
She blew another cloud of bubbles and pointed. Geneva stayed for a moment, watching the boy pop as many of the bubbles as he could catch, and then followed me past the low shelves of picture books in the children’s area to the other side of the room. On the way I stopped at one of the computer catalog desks and scribbled a note on a piece of scratch paper and took three or four more pieces along.