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“He left town, and I think where he went might be related to what he was researching when he came in.”
She pulled back and stiffened. “We don’t look over people’s shoulders here. What they choose to read is their own business.”
“Of course not. But I’d like to find him, and I just wondered if you had any insight.”
“Boyfriend?” she asked with an arched brow.
“Not mine, a friend’s, and she’s very distraught. I thought I’d help her if I could.”
Mrs. Lukens nodded along, apparently satisfied that I wasn’t a stalker. “A research project?”
“His name is Lee Pollock.” I used the present tense, not as willing as Pris to write him off as dead yet. “And he was here every Saturday for quite a while. That’s as much as I know.”
“You don’t know what he was looking into?” she asked.
I shook my head. “No.”
She bit her bottom lip. “Well, if he doesn’t have a computer, he might have come in to use ours. Otherwise, he could have been looking up any one of a number of things in our materials. We have many years of back copies of magazines, microfiche of theGazette, recent copies of the big newspapers likeTheNew York Times, even old phone books.
“Do you have records of any of those? What’s being looked at, I mean?”
She pulled a card from a stack on the desk. “If you want to see something that’s in the basement, you fill out one of these.”
It had a place for the customer’s name in addition to what was being requested. “Do you keep these?”
“Of course.” She patted a file cabinet and pulled out a drawer. “These top three drawers are periodical requests. Like this one.” She pulled the first card and handed it to me.
Patron: Abigail Smithers
Item: Consumer Reports
Date: March 2008 - April 2008
“You can look through them,” she said after I handed it back. “If that would be helpful, but please don’t remove any from the drawer, as they need to stay chronological.”
“Thank you. I’ll be careful, I promise.”
It was two hours later that I found the first clue.
Patron: Lee Pollock
Item: Gazette
Date: January 2009 - March 2009
I soon found several more covering a span of five years of the local paper. Joy, oh joy. I filled out a card to start with the earliest date range he’d looked at and brought it to Mrs. Lukens at the checkout desk.
“Did you find what you are looking for?” she asked.
“I don’t know yet. I’ll have to do some reading.” I handed her the card.
She returned with a folder of microfiche, and I started paging through the old newspapers, hoping I’d recognize what Lee had been searching for.
* * *
A few hours later,I pulled up to Pris’s cabin, exhausted by my day at the library. This was not going to be a quick project. It would take more than the few days I had left in Clear Lake before Grace returned.
Pris pounced on me as soon as I opened the door. “What’d you find?”
