Dead Letters Read online

  “Of course.” I smiled, even though it made my face hurt.

  She disappeared without saying goodbye, and I slumped in my chair. I don’t do devious well, and I hate lying to people. Latoya’s interest only put more pressure on me to find whatever-it-was sooner rather than later.

  The hours crawled by as I waited for the building to clear out at the end of the day. Thank goodness people were used to seeing me at my desk late, so I didn’t have to invent any feeble excuses for my presence. It was past six when I finally found myself alone. I knew I would not be observed. We couldn’t afford guards, so we relied on an antiquated alarm system that covered only the outer doors and ground-floor windows, and that didn’t affect me. Anything as sophisticated as cameras or sensors throughout the building was years away, assuming we could ever raise enough money for such things. In short, when the building was closed I could come and go as I pleased. Good thing I am honest.

  The documents that might contain information on Arthur Logan’s family were scattered all over the building, the result of years of random acquisitions. In my first night’s foray, I had identified a number of collateral family lines linked to the Logans, which had done nothing to narrow my search. I could only hope the records were where the catalog said they were—not a guarantee in this rambling old building. But I had known it would not be an easy task when I accepted the challenge from Arthur Logan. I headed back to the third floor where I had begun searching the night before.

  As I emerged from the stairwell, I turned on the lights and stopped for a moment, listening. I could hear the distant sound of street traffic, the rumble of the subway trains that ran under the building. The HVAC system was inadequate up here, so there was little sound of air moving. All was quiet. I unlocked the metal gate and made my way to the spot where I had been working yesterday, my heels echoing on the concrete floors. I counted tiers of shelving until I arrived at the right bay.

  The paper I had inserted between files was lying on the floor. Nothing odd about that, I told myself. Staff members sometimes came up here to retrieve items for our library patrons, and the vibrations from the trains had been known to jar things loose. I picked up the paper and laid it on a shelf, since I would probably need it again. I didn’t really need it to remember where I’d left it the night before—the top shelf. Where there was now a folder I hadn’t seen before, sticking out several inches. It definitely hadn’t been that way when I had left the night before. What were the odds that another staff member had looked at the same material at this particular time? Had Latoya been doing some snooping of her own? I reached up and pulled out the folder.

  On first glance it didn’t appear to be anything unusual: a thick sheaf of personal letters, dating from the early years of the twentieth century. Good quality paper, monogrammed; educated handwriting. I looked around for a chair, then dragged it under one of the few lightbulbs. If someone else had looked at this particular folder, I wanted to know why.

  The letters had been written by a single author and presumably saved by the recipient, identified as only as Josie; the writer had signed herself “Aunt Laura.” I made a note to check the Logan family genealogy and see if they fit anywhere. I could easily do that during the day without triggering any alarms among the staff, as I was always doing background checks on possible donors.

  I scanned the contents of the folder. Most of the letters were cheerful accounts of daily events, the occasional party, trips into the city to hear the symphony or visit a museum. From the tone of the letters, I surmised that Josie was a young adult, and that Aunt Laura was substantially older—she often repeated “when I was young” and added details that had to date to the 1880s. I made the assumption that if Laura had been a child during the Civil War, she would have mentioned something about it, but there was no mention of the war. Perhaps she had been too young to remember it. So Laura, whoever she was, was writing to Josie, whoever she was, around 1920, and recounting events of the 1880s. Why had anyone bothered to look at this?

  I found a possible answer toward the back of the folder. Apparently young Josie, on the verge of marriage, had taken an interest in Logan family history and had asked Aunt Laura for her help. And Aunt Laura had stopped her cold. One phrase in particular stood out: You would do well not to look too closely at our family’s history. Let the past be, for the good of all.

  I had to wonder if this was the same issue that was troubling Arthur Logan. But what would have upset him? He was a man in his eighties, and would have witnessed most of the relaxations of Victorian moral codes during his adult life, so it seemed likely to me that the occurrence, whatever it was, dated to his parents’ or even his grandparents’ generation. Others back then, including Josie’s Aunt Laura, had apparently known something that they didn’t want spread around. But what?

  There was little else of interest in the letters, although I read through them all. Josie had apparently heeded her aunt’s warning, and had not brought the matter up again, at least in her letters. So this was the only hint of anything suspicious in the Logan family’s past? A skeleton in the closet? An out-of-wedlock birth? A criminal record? I did some quick math: If Josie was twenty or so around 1920, and her aunt was a generation older, what kind of event would have been too shameful to talk about? And why would it matter to Arthur Logan now? This hardly seemed important enough to meet his criteria, just a vague reference to some unspecified blot—or did I mean blight?—on the family tree, back a few generations.

  I checked the time: nearly ten. I had been so wrapped up in the letters that I had lost track. I made a few notes of names and dates; there was nothing specific enough to warrant signing out the folder or taking it with me. But as I stood up to replace it on the shelf, I could have sworn there was someone else in the stacks with me. “Hello?” I said, but my voice came out as little more than a whisper. In any event, nobody answered. I slid the folder back where I had found it and gave myself a shake. You’ve got the megrims, Nell—the heebie-jeebies, the willies. It’s late, and you’re tired. Go home. So I did, after closing up carefully behind me.

  The next morning I was more curious than ever about what I was calling the Logan quest, and I thought I could do some innocuous snooping without setting off anyone’s alarms. I was clearing my desk of more ordinary stuff—solicitation letters, thank-yous, invoices, and invitations—when my assistant, Eric, poked his head in, a sheaf of papers clutched in his hand.

  “Are these yours, Nell? I found them on the copy machine.”

  I held out my hand. I knew I hadn’t left anything behind and hadn’t printed anything this morning, but maybe I could identify whose they were. “Let me see.”

  He handed the stack of papers to me. I looked at the first page: it appeared to be a family tree, from a printed book dating from the early twentieth century, or so I guessed. I was about to dismiss it when my eye caught the name “Logan.” I looked more closely, then leafed through the following pages. It was indeed a family history for the Logans. Was somebody else in the building looking at the family? Had I tipped my hand to Latoya?

  I made a quick decision. “Oh, thank you, Eric. I must have forgotten them.”

  “No problem,” Eric said cheerfully and returned to his desk outside my office.

  When he was settled there, I studied the family relationships on the copied pages, hoping to locate Josephine and her aunt Laura, and I did. If I read the tree correctly, Josephine had been some sort of cousin to Arthur, like first cousin once removed; Laura had been Josephine’s uncle’s wife and Arthur’s grandmother. Nothing out of the ordinary there.

  I added the copied pages to the Logan folder I had started, which I slipped into a drawer, and made my way back to the stacks. The upper floors were certainly less eerie by daylight, and I could hear one of the library assistants pushing his rolling cart through the aisles, stopping to reshelve books. All quite normal.

  As I rounded the corner of the aisle where I had been working the day before, I saw a book lying on t
he floor. Had a staff member dropped something? They were usually so careful. I picked it up and read the title on the spine: The History of the Logan Repeater. Logan again. Had someone been using the book and left it to be reshelved? I looked at the call number, and even I could tell it didn’t belong in this area, let alone on this floor. Curious now, I leafed through it. In rather florid prose, the book outlined the meteoric rise of the innovative Logan Repeating Rifle, which was credited with turning the Civil War around for the North, and the equally rapid decline and dissolution of the company that had manufactured it just a few years after the war ended. The founders had been Jeremiah Logan and James Reilly. If I recalled the family tree I had seen correctly, Jeremiah had been the father of James Logan, husband of the Laura whose letters I had been reading. I skimmed on: apparently Jeremiah had squirreled away a nice piece of the proceeds in the brief glory days of the Logan Rifle Company and had weathered the company’s demise, going on to found another postwar company that had significantly restored the Logan family fortune. James had not fared as well and had died a few years after the war.

  What was this book doing on the floor here? For all I knew Arthur Logan had sicced half of my staff on his little project, and we were all skulking in corners looking for the same thing and being rather sloppy about it.

  But I didn’t really believe that. Based on my quick reading of Arthur’s character, he’d seemed sincere, and he had come directly to me, and only me. He was clearly accustomed to dealing with the highest level. He had found something in his own records that upset him. He wasn’t trying to cover anything up; he only wanted confirmation. At least, that’s what I wanted to believe. Now, at the end of his life, was he putting his affairs in order, righting old wrongs? If so, was it for his own moral satisfaction, or was there something larger at stake? Could it have something to do with the Logan fortune, of which he was the heir and custodian?

  John Catherwood, the shelver, pushed his rolling cart around the end of the row of stacks, and I headed toward him.

  “Hi, John, how’s it going?” John had been with the Society for years and had never been promoted past shelver, but apparently he had never wanted anything more.

  He bobbed his head. “Great. Nice to have time to catch up with the backlog here.” He nodded at his overflowing cart of books and document cases.

  “Well, I won’t get in your way. But before I go, um—you spend a lot of time alone up here, don’t you?”

  “Sure, all the time. Why?”

  I felt silly asking my next question. “Do you ever get the feeling there’s somebody else up here, even when you know there isn’t?”

  “Sure, all the time.” John flashed a shy smile. “You thinking of Thomas?”

  “Thomas?”

  “The Society ghost.”

  In the five years I’d been working at the Society, nobody had ever mentioned to me that we had a ghost. But then, many of the staff had been here less time than I had, so maybe they didn’t know either. I was intrigued. “Tell me more. Who’s Thomas?”

  “Used to be the librarian here, and just about the only staff member, back around 1900, when this place was more or less a gentlemen’s club. He actually lived in an apartment here, kind of like a caretaker. It was on the third floor—you can’t see where it was anymore because of all the renovations since.” John paused for a moment before adding, “He died here, too.”

  “You mean in the building?”

  “Yup. He’d been here for years—didn’t have any family. Luckily he was found pretty quickly.”

  Thank heavens! I didn’t want to contemplate what would have happened if he hadn’t been found fast. “Why do you think he’s still around?”

  John shrugged. “Odd things, now and then. I find a book or folder where I know I didn’t leave it, although there are staff members who are lazy about putting things where they should be. Or like you said, I kind of sense somebody watching. It’s hard to say—this is an old building, and funny things happen sometimes. But if it’s him, he’s never done anything harmful, so I just leave him in peace. Were you looking for something up here, Nell?”

  “Just checking a reference for a grant proposal. I’ll let you get back to work.”

  I slipped past him to the collection I had been looking at the day before, wondering why no one had ever mentioned to me that the building was haunted. But it was hard enough to hire people at the skimpy salaries we offered, and probably no one had wanted to scare applicants off. I smiled to myself as I envisioned a job description that included the line, “must be willing to work with ghosts.”

  So far I had amassed a cache of personal letters, a family tree, and a history of the Logan rifle, all linked by the Logan name. And, I realized with a small chill, all had come to me under rather odd circumstances: a folder shoved askew on the shelf, papers left behind in the copier, a book I was bound to stumble over. Was somebody leaving me a trail?

  I all but flew down the stairs, back to my office: I wanted to look at the family tree chart again. I brought with me the Logan Repeater book. I had to think that it must have appeared in my path for a reason, although I didn’t want to look too closely at the “how.”

  An hour later I had cobbled together a likely scenario and a candidate for Arthur Logan’s scandal. The Logan Rifle Company had been founded by James Reilly and Jeremiah Logan, great-grandfather of Arthur, before the Civil War, but it had become successful only when the Logan Repeater had been introduced. The company made a lot of money, quite legitimately, but apparently overreached, collapsing into bankruptcy only a few years later. James Reilly had died at about the same time. Reading between the lines I guessed that either he had drunk himself to death or had killed himself, unable to deal with the shame of his failure. Jeremiah, on the other hand, had risen from the ashes and moved on to found new businesses. He had had at least two sons: Joseph, who had fathered the correspondent Josephine, and James (named for his partner, in the early glory days of the company?), Arthur’s grandfather. Laura, the author of the letters, had married James.

  And I still had no insight into why Arthur would be so upset by this. A family business had gone bust in the chaotic years after the Civil War. It had happened to a lot of companies. One partner had moved on and flourished, the other one had given up. Where was the scandal?

  But the name Reilly rang a faint bell, and I reached over to my bookshelf for the history of the Society that had been written a few years earlier, and turned to the chapters dealing with the early years of the twentieth century. Yes! That librarian Thomas whom John had mentioned had borne the surname Reilly, and a quick check of online genealogy websites verified that he had been James Reilly’s son, born shortly before the senior Reilly’s death. Was it really dead Thomas who was leaving me a trail of clues? That was ridiculous. I was a sane and sensible adult, and I refused to believe a ghost was feeding me information. There had to be someone else looking at the same materials and neglecting to return them to their places.

  But what if . . . ? Ghostly guidance or not, I still didn’t see anything that Arthur Logan might have found shameful—just a rather sad family history. There had to be something more. If Thomas was my informant, would he talk to me by daylight, or did I have to wait until the building emptied before seeking him out?

  Nell, you’re going nuts. You are not seriously thinking about talking to a ghost, are you? But there was one tangible thing I knew I could do. If Thomas Reilly had been sole custodian of the collections, he must have left records of his time at the Society, and from the Society published history I could tell that its author must have located them. If she could find them, so could I, and a quick check of the footnotes in the book verified that there was a cache of early Society records. I turned to my computer to look at the online catalog and found that they should be stored on the third floor, not far from where I had been looking, and that they included some Reilly citations. I headed back upstairs.

  All was serene on the third floor as I made m
y way to the correct tier of shelves. There they were: the Society papers, including one box neatly labeled “Reilly papers,” most likely by Thomas’s own hand. What was I looking for in that box? Were there Logan files? Corporate files?

  The box stood out about three inches from the others on the shelf. I pulled the box down and, clutching it to my chest, made my way to a table by a window and sat down. Opening the box, I found on top a folder labeled “Logan Rifle Company.” Nice to know I was on the right track. I opened it to find a hodgepodge of letters, newspaper articles, and corporate records, but on the top of the pile were two documents pinned together: the award for the patent for the Logan Repeater rifle and the rough draft of the application form. The final patent bore the name of Jeremiah Logan; the draft did, too, but also included the name of James Reilly. I leafed through the rest of the papers in the box and found that many were preliminary sketches for the rifle design—all signed by James Reilly.

  I sat back in my chair. It looked to my inexperienced eye very much as if Jeremiah Logan had stiffed his business partner and erstwhile friend James and had hogged all the rewards from the successful patent, which had added significantly to the Logan family fortune while, according to the book about the company, James had died a pauper. Was this what Arthur had found in his own documents?

  I had to find out. It was still early in the day, and I needed to talk to Arthur Logan. When I returned to my office, the box of Reilly papers tucked under my arm, I called his number, and he answered. “Ah, Miss Pratt, you have something for me so soon?”

  “Maybe,” I said cautiously. “May I come talk to you?”

  “Of course. I will expect you for tea at four.”

  Tea. Well, of course. I agreed, then hung up and sat for a moment, trying to put my thoughts in order. Trying to decide what I would tell him, and what I still needed to know. I grabbed a lined pad and started outlining.