Typical morning.
After a moment of digging around, I found my son curled up in the covers. My wife was away, and he'd been waking up in the night and coming to bed with me. He'd done it about three in the morning last night. And he'd brought along my limited-edition Lucy Lawless action figure, as she'd appeared on the Simpsons, which he'd been playing with the night before.
I let him sleep and headed for the shower. It wasn't the weirdest morning I'd ever had.
The coffee started while I was in the shower. We have one of those automatic timers, which may be the most useful technological advance of my lifetime. I pulled on my "I'd Rather Be Ghost Hunting" T-shirt, and I was on my third cup of coffee by the time my daughter arrived to watch the little guy. So I got my jacket, climbed on my bike, and went to work.
"Work" is generally the local public library, but as for what I do there, it's a little hard to describe.
I have no idea how to describe my career. When people ask what I do for a living, I usually stammer a little. I'm a librarian, tour guide, paranormal investigator, curator, writer, and historian. There's no term that sums all that up. "Ghost writer" is already taken.
I suppose I got lucky.
I grew up to get paid for all the stuff I dreamed of doing as a kid.
"I just read an article where people believe that America's leading UFO experts are being systematically murdered," I said to Tracey at the desk.
She frowned. "Oh, no."
"So if I don't come into work for a couple of days," I said,"Maybe just check on that."
Tracey smiled. I said,"Actually I don't think it's gonna happen, but just in case."
"I'll leave a note on the bulletin board. So what're you working on now?"
"I was asked to check into the angel statue up at Highland Cemetery. There's this huge angel sculpture up there, at the top, looking over it all. The Cemetery Association has no record of it being made or paid for, and yet, there it is. I'm looking into who might have created the thing."
The phone rang, and I picked it up. "Ross Library."
"I'm looking for Lou," said the voice on the other end.
"That would be me."
"You recently wrote about the Held shooting," said the voice. "This is his niece."
"You okay?" asked Zach as I stood by the shelf in the back room.
I nodded. "Thanks, man." Pretty clearly I looked upset. "I just got my first reaming over the Held piece."
Zach winced. "Oh, man. I'm sorry."
"Yeah. The guy who committed a mass shooting at the paper mill in 1967; I wrote about him in my column Saturday. Some of the relatives are upset about it. I tried to be as sensitive as possible, but the call I just got was mad." I shook my head. "Thing is, it was the fiftieth anniversary of the shooting. The Express was going to have someone write about it; there was no avoiding that. I figured better me than someone who wouldn't be gentle about it. But they're not happy."
"Sorry, Lou."
I shrugged. "It hurts some, it's disturbing, but it happens. It's not the first time I've gotten these calls, it won't be the last."
It was after eleven, and I was sitting in my haunted house watching BoJack Horseman. Don't judge me. It was the episode where BoJack goes hunting for his daughter's birth certificate, and gets all tangled up in paperwork at the county courthouse.
That's wrong. They can't make you fill out a million forms for this stuff; it's public information. They can't prevent you from getting it. and birth certificates aren't kept at the county level anyway; they're state documents. This whole episode is wrong.
I should check before making any claims, though. The show is set in California, and though courthouses tend to be uniform, maybe there was some discrepancy. I was halfway to my computer before I re-thought that.
You're really going to call California to debate an episode of BoJack Horseman?! Seriously, like you have nothing better to do?
What's really bothering you?
Instead, I walked back downstairs. I pulled on my jacket, and went out for a walk.
South Summit met Peach Street at a bend right by the parking lot. Currently, it was the lot of First Quality, but before about 2001, it had been Hammermill Paper. The site of the shooting. I was standing, late at night, looking out at the lot where it had all begun fifty years ago.
I looked through the fence at the lot. That was where it had all happened, before I'd even been born. Where one man had spent one morning changing peoples' lives, causing pain that would last half a century.
I was just doing my job, goddammit.
I sighed and walked back to the house.
"I got an angry call from the Held family," I said to my daughter in the kitchen.
"I'm not surprised," Tif said. "I still think you shouldn't have written that one."
"Someone had to."
"No, they didn't."
Tif was unpacking the groceries she'd brought up. My little boy, Paul, was darting from room to room and carrying his toys.
"It was the fiftieth anniversary," I said. "Someone was going to write about it."
"It didn't have to be you."
"I figured the Express would get someone else if I didn't do it," I said. "The Sun-Gazette and the CDT had people write about the incident, and that had nothing to do with me. And they were brutal; I figured at least I could be sensitive. I tried."
"But the family doesn't see it that way."
"No. They want it to just go away, which isn't going to happen. It's news, but I wanted to handle it right."
When I got to work, I started working on the angel statue. It was on the Kintzing plot, so clearly the request for it had come from someone in the Kintzing family. In the Pennsylvania Room, I pulled the cemetery index, and looked up the Kintzings.
They were actually buried all over the cemetery, but there were only about a dozen of them in that one plot. The first to be buried there had been Reese Kintzing, in 1940. He was a likely candidate to have ordered the thing, but I needed proof.
I looked up his obit, in June of 1940. I scanned through the microfilm---Of course it would be the last issue on the roll, at the very end of the film. I was hoping for something like "A fine angel sculpture was placed at the grave of Reese Kintzing, created by...." but that wasn't happening. The obit was barely anything at all, odd for such a prominent family.
I paced for a while.
"Looking for something, Lou?" Adam asked at the desk.
"Yeah, I'm trying to track down an angel statue, and I can't figure it out. How'd you know?"
"You always pace like that."
"Well, I'm stuck trying to figure out who made the thing. If I could find out exactly who paid for it...." I stopped and thought for a moment. "I need to look at wills."
I spent some time changing out October's displays, and putting up November. This meant I had to get all the ghost books and ghost-hunting equipment out of the display cases, put it away, and put out all the Indian weapons and artifacts. I have to stress that this was all work-related.
A pleasant-looking woman with glasses spotted me by the desk.
"You must be Lou," she said.
I nodded. "You're the new boss."
We shook hands. The Director was retiring, and this was the first day I'd gotten to meet New Boss, who would be taking over fully in January.
"You're the ghost hunter," she said.
I grinned. "That's me."
"Well, I'm looking forward to hearing more about that."
"You'll get your chance," I said. "If there's anything you need from me, let me know."
"How much you guys want for copies?" I asked the Register and Recorder in the courthouse.
She waved her hand dismissively. "For you? Nothing. Take them."
"You realize you're just driving up everyone's taxes."
She grinned. "We're pretty self-sufficient."
"Well, that would make one government office that is."
"I liked that piece you wrote about Pat Tyson, and her investigations. She spent a lot of time searching for things in here." I'd recently written about Pat; earlier in the month I'd found a file Pat had left behind, with pages of handwritten information on local paranormal legends. I'd looked into a local witch story, and gotten a pretty good column out of it.
"Oh, thanks," I said. "Yeah, that was a fun one. I loved Pat."
"We all loved her."
I went back to the records room, lined with deeds and other documents. A moment later I came out. "If I ask about Will Book M, am I gonna get some story about how it perished in the seventy-two flood?"
"It's in the back room, on the microfilm."
I went back, got the film, and put it into the machine. I found the will and all the estate documents of Reese Kintzing, the first member of the family buried in the plot with the angel.
"Still need to investigate a little more," I told Tif. "But I can make a pretty good case that Reese Kintzing was responsible for having the angel built."
We were upstairs, in my home office. Tif was on my computer, and Paul was running around playing with his toys. I said,"I pulled his will at the courthouse. Now, Reese was the head of the household, and it's logical he'd have been the guy who ordered up the angel sculpture. Now, it would make sense that they'd have used some company that they're already familiar with, that they have some sort of in with. Right?"
"That would make sense," said Tif.
"Reese Kintzing owned four shares in the Lock Haven Mausoleum Company."
"Ah," said Tif. "That sounds logical."
"It's circumstantial," I said. "But Lock Haven Mausoleum sounds like a good possibility."
"More than that," said Tif. "It sounds like a fair bet."
"Call on line one for you," said Sue. "At least, I assume it's you. The guys wanted to talk to the paranormal investigator."
"Thanks, Sue," I said. I picked up on the line.
A few minutes later, she came back to my desk. "Felt like messing with you. Anything good?"
"Not so much my thing," I said. "He felt there was something paranormal going on because there is a higher than usual number of rabbits in his yard. I don't see anything paranormal in that."
"No....I don't know much about animals, but I don't think that's due to ghosts."
"I've checked on the angel up at Highland Cemetery," I said. "Looks like it was created by the Lock Haven Mausoleum Company, and probably in the 1920s. That was when Reese Kintzing's son George died, and it's a safe bet that the angel was created then. The Mausoleum Company was at 313 Vesper Street, and it's a reasonable theory that they're the ones who made the angel."
"Well, awesome."
"I even found an article form 1926 where they'd had an especially hard winter. The ground was all frozen, and to do burials in March, they actually had to use dynamite."
"No way!"
"Seriously. Now I get to report back to the Highland Cemetery Association on where the angel came from. And I'm gonna ask for some dynamite."
I sat down at my desk and checked my e-mail. I had coffee in my Bigfoot mug. I signed into my e-mail account and looked it over.
There was a note from the daughter of Pat Tyson.
I read the e-mail.
Dear Lou - Thank you so very much for the article in today's Express. Once again you outdid yourself; reading it brought a tear to my eye. My mom was always very proud of you, and I can't tell you how many times she would ask "Did you read Lou's story today?" Thank you for remembering her, it means a great deal to think that others still hold happy memories, not to mention that she would be trilled to be on the front page again after all these years. Thank you again.
I smiled.
It made me feel a little better.
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