The Last Page

by David J. Walker

  She couldn’t hear the hum of the boiler any more, and wondered when it had gone off. If it was a gas boiler, didn’t it have a pilot light? If it did, she couldn’t see it. In fact, she was disoriented and couldn’t remember exactly where the boiler was. She wasn’t about to try to find the stairs and feel her way all the way up those steep metal steps to fumble around for the light switch.

  Then she realized she must have spun around when Mr. Finstead turned out the lights, so the door to the storage room must be behind her. She turned and cautiously reached out, moving forward…and finally felt the wood door. She’d have hugged that door if she could have. Instead, she stood holding her palms against it.

  Then, slowly, she began to feel her way along the wall to the workbench. After several sideways steps she bumped into the mops and brooms against the wall. She stepped around things and kept going, and when she reached the bench she slid one hand along the wooden surface and moved her other hand through the air above it, until her arm hit a hanging string. She pulled on the string and…the light over the bench went on!

  She’d barely heaved a sigh of relief when the door upstairs opened. “It’s me,” JJ called. “Sorry it took so long.” He started down, his shoes clanging on the metal steps.

  “Turn the lights on from up there,” she said. “Otherwise, when—”

  “Oh…yeah, you’re right.” He went back up, flipped the switch above the door, and started down again. When he got down he said, “I didn’t know Mr. Finstead was still here. Lucky thing you—” He stopped in front of her. “Are you alright? You look like you seen a ghost.”

  “I couldn’t see anything. That’s the problem.”

  “Oh…yeah. It gets dark down here with the lights off. I remember last month when we had a big thunderstorm and—”

  “JJ?”

  “Oh, yeah.” He started sorting through his ring of keys. “Let’s see…only me and Ms. Adams had this particular key.” He held up a key.

  He unlocked the door and flicked the light on, and they stepped into a smaller room. It was warm and dry, and the air smelled stale, but not unpleasant. The walls were lined with metal shelves, and the shelves were mostly full of cardboard boxes, not like the mailing cartons in the boiler room, but like the file boxes stacked around the law office where Julia had interned. These, too, were built to hold file folders, but these had tops that lifted off, and rectangular openings cut in the sides to use as handles.

  “That’s a lot of boxes,” Julia said.

  “Yep. Seventy-nine of ’em,” JJ said. “Ms. Adams…she saved every damn piece of paper she ever wrote on. ’Course since computers come along there’s a lot less.”

  “Good thing. You’re almost out of room.”

  “Yep. I hadda bring a lotta these up to Ms. Adams’s office, one at a time. She’d look through a box and then call me and have me take that one down and bring up another. That went on for a couple of days, including the day she died.”

  “Did she find what she was looking for?”

  “I think she did, y’know, ’cause the last box I brought up was in the morning that day, and she didn’t ask for any more that afternoon. That one was still in her office the next morning, after she died…or after she…” He stopped. “Ms. Fairbanks?”

  “Yes?”

  “I know what you’re gettin’ at.”

  “What I’m ‘gettin’ at?’ What do you mean?”

  “You say you’re writin’ an article, but you think someone killed Ms. Adams, right? Otherwise, why would you and me be sneaking around here at night?”

  “Well…I…I don’t have any real evidence. It’s just that…” Julia wasn’t sure what to say.

  “You don’t have to explain. It’s a feeling. I understand. Fact is, I wanna help. She was…Ms. Adams I mean…she was a real bitch, if you wanna know the truth. But she did right by me. Plus, I knew her old man…I mean her father. He was a mean drunk, goin’ nowhere fast. Ms. Adams came from nothin’, and pulled herself up to a pretty high job. I admire that. So if you think someone killed her…”

  “Well…I’m not accusing any—”

  “But you think it’s sorta suspicious how she died, I can tell. Thing is, I do, too. Sure, the woman had some kinda heart condition. But she had that for years. She bragged a lot about how she followed doctor’s orders like she was s’posed to, and ate all the right foods. Said most people are too dumb or too lazy to live right. Said she was healthier in her fifties, than she was before she learned about her heart condition—which was like ten years ago.”

  “She said that?”

  “Said it all the time. And she played tennis, and went skiing, and all kinds of sports. I mean, when you think about it, why should her heart pick just the time when she’s standing at the top of them steep stairs, all alone, at night? She sure wasn’t doing any hard work like carrying stuff. She just happens to have a heart attack right then? And falls down the stairs? I mean…it’s suspicious.”

  “Yes…well…I’m thinking her death might be connected somehow to what it was she was looking for. I think she found it, too.” Julia paused. “But it’ll take me forever to go through all these.”

  “You won’t have to,” he said. He went over to a shelf and tugged at a box. “Here’s the one you want.”

  “What? I mean, how do you know which box I want?”

  “’Cause if Ms. Adams found something, it must’ve been in this box. It’s the box that was still in her office the morning after. I hauled it back down here.” He carried the box out into the boiler room and set it on the floor directly below one of the light fixtures, and dragged a chair over next to it. “I’ll just work on this here bicycle while you look through it.”

  She took the top off the box and found that it was stuffed full of file folders, some of them fat and full of papers, and some with just a few sheets. Even this one box could take a long time to go through, when she didn’t know what she was looking for.

  * * *

  Half an hour later JJ had the bike tire repaired and the wheel back on. And Julia had the file folder she was looking for. She was sure of it. She could tell by the red circles on some of the pages. The pages were notes of research work Barbara had done for library patrons, some almost thirty years ago. The markings, made with a felt-tip pen, stood out on the old, dry pages. And a quick check through all the other folders in the box showed no other markings at all.

  These were the pages that Barbara had in front of her when she left those two phone messages, and drafted that unsent email. Julia was sure Barbara wanted badly to tell someone what was on these pages, and she’d picked Julia’s mother to call.

  But why Mavis Fairbanks? Maybe because she’d known her for so many years, and knew Mavis would take her seriously, wouldn’t patronize her.

  Julia kept the folder while JJ put the box away and re-locked the storage room. They climbed the steep steps, locked everything back up tight, and JJ walked her to her car. She had parked down the street from the library, so her car in the lot wouldn’t draw attention.

  “I guess I helped, huh?” he asked, as she slipped behind the wheel of the Miata.

  “You sure did. I can’t thank you enough.”

  “So…what’s next?”

  “I don’t know, JJ. I’ll have to figure that out.”

  TEN

  By eleven o’clock Julia was at her desk. Her Constitutional Law casebook lay open, and her legal pad, pen, and Diet Pepsi were at hand. Normally she did her best studying late at night.

  Tonight, however, though she’d laid everything out, and though she was behind in her reading, it was a lost cause. She shoved the fat, heavy law book to the side and opened the folder she’d taken from the library.

  She had to figure out what those notes, and the red markings, meant to Barbara Adams. Because right now, to Julia, they meant nothing at all.

  * * *

  At midnight she drained the last drop of Pepsi and stared down at her legal pad. Nothing but doodles.
The swift progress she’d initially made at interpreting what lay in front of her had raised high hopes, but she’d soon slammed into a wall, her hopes collapsing like one of those test cars in the TV ads. And she was the driver, the dummy.

  The folder she’d taken was labeled “Research 1979” and held about fifty pieces of paper. Some were eight-and-a-half-by-eleven sheets; some smaller, note-size; some fragments torn off larger pages. There were typed notes and handwritten ones, as well as some photocopies—mostly copies of cards from the card catalog. Julia had glanced through everything quickly in the boiler room, and noted that the handwriting looked the same. She’d shown a sample to JJ. “Yep,” he said, “that’s Ms. Adams’s writing.”

  Many of the notes were dated, a few stating just a day of the week, such as “Tues.” Usually, though, the day and the month were indicated, like “9/21.” Seven of the dates included a year, always 1979. So this was a folder of notes made either by Barbara or for Barbara, during a period covering several months during 1979. That would have been one of the earliest years Barbara had worked at the library, possibly while she was still in college.

  From reading the notes, it was clear that one of Barbara’s duties then was to help with research. Julia decided the typed notes were directives about what some library patron was looking for, and the handwritten notes—sometimes on the same page as the directive, sometimes on a separate sheet—summarized what Barbara had found. The photocopies showed where the patron could go for the information. Of all the pages, just three of them held the red-inked circles that had caught Julia’s attention.

  She reminded herself that back then people couldn’t just go on the internet and find out who played Pontius Pilate in Ben-Hur, or what the “hand clap koan” is, or the antidote for cyanide, or the year the Blackhawks first won the Stanley Cup—all of which, the notes showed, were among the matters Barbara had been asked to look up in 1979. While the research desk, she supposed, was still a key position in a good library, back in the olden days—like the 1970’s—it must have been even more crucial. Research librarians back then must have needed lots of help as they fielded an endless stream of questions. During a four-month period in 1979, there may have been hundreds of requests to the library for research help.

  Why Barbara saved these particular notes would have been a mystery in itself if not for JJ’s statement: “Ms. Adams…she saved every damn piece of paper she wrote on.” It was interesting that anyone at all would save notes like these, especially after she’d reported her findings to the research librarian or the library patron.

  Barbara must have known, even as a part-timer, that reputable libraries didn’t keep records of what books patrons consulted, or what information they were looking for. In fact, it took Julia about thirty seconds of computer time to find the American Library Association’s Code of Ethics. Number three on the list was:

  We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.

  So Barbara, by saving these notes, had broken a cardinal rule. But then again, as JJ had put it, Barbara “used to break rules just to break ’em.”

  None of the typed directives included the name of the person seeking help, but nearly all Barbara’s handwritten notes included what Julia deduced were indications of the information seeker’s identity. For example, Barbara wrote: “For 1:1, Blackhawks first Stanley Cup,” and “For 7:25, Utah Nat’l Parks.” For whatever reason, she’d kept track of who was looking for what. And, apparently knowing there’d be trouble if anyone found her notes, she referred to the persons by numbers, not names. It didn’t surprise Julia that many of the numbers turned up more than once…some of them many times. Once people realized how easy it was to get someone else to do their work, they’d come back again.

  That was the easy part.

  Where Julia hit the wall was in trying to figure out who the people were. It was impossible. And what made that so frustrating was that she only needed to identify one of them, because the red-inked circles were all on the notes of just three jobs Barbara had done…all for the same person. The first two circled items were handwritten notes, the third was a photocopy:

  For 23:2 (7/2/79)

  Shakespeare, historical plays, ten (but about only 7 kings)

  See Encycl. Brit.

  For 23:2 (7/31/79)

  Jonestown mass suicide

  Time magazine, 11/16/78

  For 23:2 (8/13)

  Title: Drug identification guide.

  Edition: 5th ed.

  Publication info: Oradell, N.J.: Medical Economics, 1977.

  General Note: Reprinted from 1977 Physicians' desk referen.

  General Note: Includes a comprehensive list of poison

  control centers.

  Subject term: Drugs—Catalogs.

  Subject term: Poison control centers—United States.

  Added title: Physicians' desk ref to pharmaceutical

  specialties and biologicals.

  No other notes referred to person 23:2. What did these three mean? And who was this person 23:2, whom Barbara helped nearly thirty years ago? Was there an answer here as to why she so badly wanted to talk to her friend Mavis Fairbanks? Did this explain why she had toppled down those steep metal steps?

  ELEVEN

  The following afternoon, Julia hurried into the library. It was one of those October days that augured winter: gunmetal sky, bitter chill, dead leaves eddying in swirls when the wind gusted. It was a perfect day to check out a book from the library and curl up with it at home. But Julia had other plans.

  Mark Wainwright, the library’s IT guy, had agreed to meet her at three. Unfortunately, it was already three-thirty. Her Crim Pro class had been late getting out, and the el was slow. Happily, there was light coming from his office. She knocked on the half-open door.

  “Come! ”

  She stepped in. There was no window, and the office was tiny. It held a desk, two chairs and a file cabinet, and was suffused with an eerie blue light that came from the monitors on the desk. Two of them, each connected to a tower on the floor. An electric hum filled the air, and it was warm.

  “Hi, Mark. I’m Julia. Sorry to be late.”

  Wainwright, seated at his desk with his back to her, was leaning toward one of the monitors. He swiveled around and looked at her. Then his eyebrows arched, and he awkwardly got to his feet. She smiled and felt her face turning red. She found herself hoping he liked what he saw.

  He was about her age, and didn’t look at all like her idea of a nerd. No pocket protector or glasses. In fact, he was a brawny bull of a man, with sandy hair that hung a little over his ears, and a blue sweater that matched his eyes. His face was pleasant, his chin surprisingly strong.

  “No problem.” He stepped around his desk and stuck out his hand. He was wearing penny loafers, she noticed. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen anyone in penny loafers. No coins between the flaps, though. “…nice to meet you,” he was saying. “I mean…I had to be here, anyway.” As they shook hands, she saw a flush creep up his neck. She wasn’t the only one who could blush.

  She smiled again, lowered her right hand, and smoothed her hair with her left.

  He looked down at his own hand, as if he didn’t know what to do with it, then stuffed it in his pocket. “So…uh…what can I do for you?”

  “May I?” She gestured to one of the chairs.

  “Of course.” His cheeks were crimson now. He sat down, facing her, his desk behind him, and she sat too.

  “First of all,” she said. “I want to thank you for sending on that email from Barbara Adams to my mother.”

  A worried look came into his eyes, and he gave her a quick nod.

  “It meant a lot to us. It was probably the last communication Mom got from her.”

  He shifted in his seat. “Actually, I shouldn’t have done that.”

  That’s why he’s so uncomfortable. H
e shouldn’t have read that email, much less sent it on. Maybe I can use that. “In fact,” she said, “it was that email that triggered a few questions for me. But before I go into them, I need to ask a favor .”

  “A favor?”

  “Just that I’d appreciate it if you’d treat this conversation as confidential.”

  A line appeared between his eyebrows. “Why?”

  “I can’t really discuss it. But it’s sort of the same reason why my mother and I haven’t told anyone you sent that email. It’s just better that some things don’t get spread around.” She smiled as sweetly as she could. “I’d like to think I can count on you.”

  His frown deepened. “I don’t know...”

  “Oh, don’t worry. I’m not asking you to do anything illegal or anything like that,” she cut in. “More like just…explaining things to me about the computer system at the library. I understand you set it up. You’re the expert.”

  “Well...yes. I am.”

  Julia bit her lip. She didn’t know what she’d do if he wouldn’t cooperate.

  He stared at her in silence.

  She squared her shoulders. She’d never know unless she tried. “Well…I realize all the checkouts at the library are done by computer these days.”

  “That’s right.”

  “And I know there’s a barcode on my library card…and on everyone else’s.”

  “Yes.”

  “That would seem to indicate that information about who’s checking out a book or a video or something is being kept track of somewhere in the system, right?”

  He jerked his head up. “Excuse me, but that’s something I can’t discuss with anyone.”

  She held up her palm. “I know all about confidentiality. Believe me, I have no problem with that. What someone reads is their own business. Not even the government should have a right to look over your shoulder.”