I knew it was a good day when the skull came in the mail.
I was getting my coffee in the back room when Sue called to me. "Lou? Guess what's here."
She had a large plastic container on her desk. I walked in and opened it, lifting out a skull. I said,"Oh, yes. This is going to be great."
I'm actually not a psychopath. I work for the library.
In addition to standard library duties, I'm a paranormal investigator. I teach a class for teenagers on how to investigate the paranormal. I'd ordered a forensics kit from the Williamsport Library to help teach them about lost societies and archaeology. It included the skull and two leg bones, plus the guides to figure out who they'd belonged to.
"Oh, yeah," I said, turning the skull over in my hands. "Male, that's easy....Caucasian...No, wait....Asian. Adult, but young adult---The lines are fused, but the teeth show little wear. Look! They included extra teeth! The kids are gonna love this. I'll have them figure out all the details."
"Now, don't tell them," Sue said. "No hints."
"Oh, no," I said. "They're gonna sit and pass around this skull and figure it out on their own, like my teacher made me do."
"You're the person I was looking for!" the woman said at the front desk. "I was hoping you'd be here today."
I get some variation on this about eleven times a day. My career is a little hard to explain, but it involves history, paranormal investigation, library work, museum work, and freelance writing. I never know what box to check on surveys. People read my columns, and they come in to talk to me about stuff. Some of it even winds up making sense.
"Well, what can I do for you?" I asked.
She handed me three envelopes and an old tintype photograph. The envelopes were stuffed with letters. I unfolded one and began reading it; it was dated March 1917.
"This is a hundred years old," I said.
"I found them in the wall of my house," she told me. "Up on the hill on Bellefonte Avenue. I didn't see much point to keeping them, but I didn't want to throw them away, either. I was thinking you might be able to use them for something."
I skimmed through one of the letters. It was from someone named Jack, to a woman who appeared to be someone's mother. A lot of old handwriting gives you a migraine just walking past it, but these actually weren't too bad. The letter talked about gossip, and things that he'd found out.
"Wow," I said. "This guy seems to be blackmailing someone."
"I thought you might want these," she said.
"You thought right," I said.
"Daddy!" Paul Matthew came running to me when I got home, like he always does. I hugged my little guy.
"How was your day, little man?"
"Good. I find rocks wif Sissy."
"How was the library, Dad?" my daughter asked.
"Busy day. I got a donation. Check this out." I handed her the letters, which I'd placed in acid-free sleeves. These things were a century old; I wanted to be careful with them.
Tif skimmed through the letters. "Wow. How come you get all this good stuff?"
"Well, I'm the guy in the paper all the time. People know where to find me. To sum up, we have a teenaged girl named Claire a hundred years ago, who fell for an older man named Jack, a teacher at Bucknell. She was seventeen, he was thirty. They had a lost-distance thing for a while, and then she found out he'd been married before and hadn't told her. Her mom wrote to him and told him to stop contacting her; her parents wanted to send her to boarding school. Jack sent a letter blackmailing her mother, saying he had information on the mom he'd found out. Fascinating." Jack had, in fact, presented a singularly unappealing picture historically, involving controlling behavior, chasing an underage girl, and blackmail. If Monday were a person, it'd be Jack.
"And someone gave these to you?"
"Yep, found them in the wall where it happened. Jack and Claire did get married the next year; I found their certificate. Her obit says he predeceased her; I think they were still married when he died."
"I wonder what he blackmailed her mother with?"
"That would be one question. It's something I'll have to look into. I may get a column out if this."
"Looks like you have enough information for one."
"Yeah. A lot of it's going to depend on whether Jack and Claire have any children still living. She died in 1978, and I don't want to get hate mail from descendants."
Okay. I got half an hour before the library opens, and I gotta look up these obits, marriage certificates, and cemetery records. So it all comes down to how fast I can do what I do.
Let's do this thing.
I started with the obits. Jack didn't seem to have one. I got Claire, her mom, and her dad, who had actually once served on city council. Claire herself was buried out of the county, which cut out cemetery records for her and Jack. I found her parents in Highland Cemetery and made a photocopy. Claire and Jack had a marriage record. So did her parents. I photocopied those. Claire had been married to Jack in September 1917, about six months after Jack had blackmailed her mother. Claire's parents had been married in 1897, when her mom had been twenty-three.
None if this gave me any indication of what the blackmail drama had been all about.
I looked at my watch.
Five of two.
Did it.
I was just under the wire. I went to the desk and got the key, opened the doors, and did my job.
Four hours later, after my desk shift, I returned to the letters. I was wearing my Giwoggle T-shirt---Clinton County's official monster. I read the letters through again, looking for anything I'd missed the first couple of times. Because, as everyone knows, randomly staring at stuff is exactly the way to discover something new.
The clue turned out to be not in the letters, but on an envelope.
The blackmail letter to Claire's mom was addressed to Mrs. "Doc". Which seemed odd to me---Claire's father was a carpenter; there was no reason anyone should be referring to him as Doc. I just happened to notice this as I flipped past; this is a common research technique known as "getting lucky."
"Doc." Hnh.
I wondered if it was a hint at the blackmail. Back a couple of pages, in a February letter, Jack had mentioned to Claire that he'd gotten a visit from a Doc Mark, and spent some time having a meal and watching a basketball game with him. I read through that part again.
I checked our index. Doc Mark was there---He'd been a local dentist who had also acted as a football coach at Claire's school, at about the time all this was going on. I pulled his obit---Doc Mark had fixed teeth in Lock Haven while playing football games. There was a photo of him in the Clinton County Times.
I took a look at the tintype that had been in the wall with the photos. It showed two men. One of them might have been Doc Mark.
I walked to the desk. "Hey, Sue, you're female."
"Huh? Last I checked."
"Take a look at this. I need a woman, someone who think there's a difference between cream and eggshell paint. Tracey, you look, too. Do these guys look like the same guy to you?"
Tracey got out a magnifying glass. Both of them studied the newspaper photo and the tintype.
"Could be," said Sue.
"It's hard to tell," said Tracey,"But maybe."
"I'm kinda thinking so," I said. "I think it explains a lot about these old letters. Claire's mother may have had an affair with this dentist."
"People haven't changed much in a hundred years," observed Tracey.
"Not as much as you might think. I think the dentist told Jack about it, and Jack blackmailed her over it. She hid the letters and the tintype in the wall, where it didn't turn up for a hundred years. I love being me."
The tintype photo ran in the Express on Thursday. I'd stopped by the newspaper to have them scan the photo and write a caption, asking for anyone who could identify it. The UPS guy, who is used to seeing me at both Piper and the library, saw me on the way out. ("How many jobs do you have?" he'd asked incredulously. "All of them," I'd said. "In Lock Haven, I have all the jobs.")
I was hoping that someone would recognize the men in the tintype, and come to me with a name. Ideally, they'd confirm my impression that it was Doc Mark. On the first day, I received two e-mails telling me that the tintype showed Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, which seemed unlikely. This is why I don't go to the general public for answers.
And nothing else. What I had already was it.
So on a Monday, I sat down and wrote it all into a column.
Sue saw me writing at my desk.
"Working on an article, Lou?"
"Yeah, I'm writing up the blackmail story. I'm changing the names, though. I hate doing that, but these people have grandchildren who are still alive, and I don't wanna be getting hate mail from relatives. I've had enough of that lately."
"And you're sending it to the Express?"
"Well....Probably. You never know. Maybe I'll just print the whole thing out, and stick it in a wall for a hundred years." I grinned. "Now, where'd I put my skull?"
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