WESTON HAD read the book about the factory at least half a dozen times since he’d taken over the historical society, and yet he’d never paid much attention to the picture taken after the fire. The official word, according to the book and to Weston’s older relatives, was that the fire door had closed after everyone except Oliver and Larry had escaped, and they’d been trapped inside.
No one would have questioned the “official” word at the time, especially when the town’s existence depended on the factory and the Chaffees. But now that Andy had pointed out the lack of evidence of fire on the side of the wall where the door’s rope would have been, Weston had to wonder who’d been paying the town officials.
It didn’t really matter. The fire had occurred well over a century ago. Even if someone had lied, no purpose would be served in pursuing it now.
But his curiosity was roused. “If the rope didn’t burn, how did the door close?”
“Someone could have cut the rope,” Andy said without hesitating. “That would explain how the door closed and why no one other than Oliver and Larry were in the room.”
Weston stared at him. “You think someone set them up to die?”
Andy snorted. “Yeah. Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it? Like you said, conspiracy theory. But there really isn’t any other way to explain it if we start from believing the rope didn’t burn.”
“Yeah.”
Weston held up a hand, hoping Andy would take the hint to be quiet. Some piece of memory niggled at the back of his mind. Something that might lend credence to Andy’s train of thought, if only Weston could get hold of it.
Then he remembered. “My great-grandfather told me once that his parents started fighting a lot after Larry died. Great-pa—that’s what us kids called him—said he was about six then, so he didn’t remember everything. He was almost ninety when he told me about this. But according to him, his father said something along the lines of Larry not making the family look bad anymore.”
“Odd thing to say when you lose a brother,” Andy said.
“Yeah, now it definitely seems strange. I was five or six when he told me about it, so I didn’t really wonder. Everything adults did was odd.” Great-pa must have believed there was something wrong with his father’s comment, though. Otherwise it wouldn’t have stuck in his mind for over eighty years.
Andy looked thoughtful. “Why would your great-great-grandparents have fought about Larry’s death?”
“I wouldn’t know.” But Weston wondered that himself. Arguing about a relative’s death didn’t seem logical.
“Do you think it was because of the whole ‘isn’t making the family look bad anymore’ thing?” Andy asked. “Maybe they didn’t agree that he’d done anything wrong in the first place?”
“Could be.” Weston frowned. He was getting sucked into Andy’s mental meanderings now. They couldn’t change the past. If someone had cut the rope as Andy had suggested, they weren’t around anymore to face questions or charges, and Weston doubted anyone in town would care. It would be useless information.
Except in Weston’s opinion, nothing about history was useless. Even as he tried to talk himself out of wondering any more about Larry’s and Oliver’s deaths, he knew damn well he would try to find out as much as possible.
“Larry was a pieceworker in the factory,” he said slowly. “Even when my dad worked there, the regular workers didn’t have much to do with the management, and little to no contact with old man Chaffee. They knew who he was, of course, and once in a while he’d leave his office and wander around the place to check on whether everyone was doing their jobs, but that was about it.”
“So a worker and one of the new owners died together.” Andy tapped his cheek with his forefinger. “If it was intentional, either someone wanted them both dead, or one of them was collateral damage. If it was supposed to be both of them, why? There shouldn’t have been any connection beyond Larry working for Oliver.”
“Yeah.” But Larry had “made the family look bad.” Weston doubted the only reason was a lowly worker talking to one of the factory owners. He couldn’t guess what else Larry might have done to make his own brother glad he was dead.
Andy sighed. “Okay. I don’t know why I care. I mean, our ancestors died in a fire that might have been intentional, but it was a long time ago.”
“You enjoy solving mysteries?” Weston went back to the folders. “Sorry. I have to get this finished.”
“Yeah. No problem. Sorry I interrupted.” Andy grinned. “Got your brain working, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did,” Weston said. “So now stop it and read the book until whoever’s coming to inspect the place shows up. I need to make a good impression on them if I hope to keep this job.”
Andy looked down at the book and turned the page.
Despite the work Weston had done in the historical society room over the past several years, the place was still far less organized than he would have liked. He didn’t have enough shelf space for all the books. The folders should have been in a filing cabinet in some kind of logical order, rather than piled up here and there. He’d given up on some of the documents because he hadn’t been able to figure out what they were, let alone why someone had considered them important enough to donate.
Every time he figured out a system for the loose documents, someone brought in more. He’d resorted in some cases to shoving things into random folders, which meant now he found articles about the regional high school’s sports teams mixed in with several clippings about Vardon Chaffee’s car accident. Because of either the gore of the scene or the Chaffee name, the story had appeared in papers in Boston and New York, among others.
He glanced at Andy, who was now over halfway through the factory book. “Do you want to read more about Vardon’s wreck?”
“Is there anything more to say besides he died when a tree jumped in front of his car?” Andy closed the book, using one finger to keep his place. “You have other articles?”
“Yeah.” Weston held up the folder, then set it on the table. “There you go.”
“Thanks.” Andy opened the book again.
A man and woman walked through the doorway from the main room of the library. The man, stoop-shouldered and gray-haired, nodded to Weston. “Morning.”
“Morning, Ed.” Weston managed to keep his tone pleasant, though Ed Farley was the last person he wanted to deal with. The chair of the board of selectmen, more because no one dared to challenge him than because he did a good job, Ed was tight-fisted and closed-minded. He’d argued against paying Weston anything at all when Weston had first taken the job, and Weston suspected Ed had been trying ever since to find a reason to take away the paycheck.
Not to mention Ed’s son Jeremy had been one of Weston’s primary tormentors in school, and the one time Weston’s father had tried to intervene, he and Ed had almost come to blows.
“How are your parents, Weston?” the woman asked.
“Fine, thank you, Mrs. Huff.” Weston had never managed to bring himself to call Mrs. Huff by her first name. She’d been his third grade teacher, and calling her “Rebecca” would have felt wrong. “And you and Mr. Huff?”
“We’re well, thanks.” She glanced around the room and frowned. “I didn’t realize you had company.”
“Just someone interested in the history of the town,” Weston said smoothly. “I told him you’d be here. Feel free to look around and ask any questions you have about what I do.”
“My only question is why we’re paying you fifteen thousand a year to take care of something that doesn’t look taken care of.” Ed walked over to one of the bookcases. “How are these organized?”
My question is why you’re only paying me fifteen thousand a year when you’re well aware it’s below poverty wages. Weston bit his tongue and joined Ed to explain the shelving of the books.
Unfortunately, Mrs. Huff seemed more interested in Andy than the books or folders. She walked away from Weston and Ed and asked, “How did you even hear about Dayfield, young man? We aren’t exactly a hot spot.”
“Researching my family tree,” Andy said. “It has a branch or two here.”
“Why aren’t these in alphabetical order?” Ed demanded.
Weston sighed and tried to focus. He suspected Mrs. Huff had accompanied Ed because she liked Weston rather than out of any interest in the historical society. She probably intended to give Weston some moral support. Ed was the one he had to impress.
It wasn’t easy to answer Ed’s questions—or even listen to them—when he was trying to hear Mrs. Huff and Andy. Mrs. Huff wasn’t antifactory or anti-Chaffee as far as Weston knew, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t react if she found out who Andy was. He could only hope Andy wouldn’t get into the whole story.
Apparently Ed found the books and documents too boring to waste much time on. After only a few minutes of interrogating Weston about where things were placed and why, he cleared his throat and said, “It’s better than it used to be, but you have a long way to go.”
“Doing all this takes a lot of time,” Weston said. “First of all, I need to develop a workable system and stick with it, which isn’t easy when people come in, take things off shelves, and put them back in the wrong places. I also have a ton of documents to sort through, and people bring in more at least once a week.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier if some of these things were on the computer?” Mrs. Huff asked.
Surprised, Weston looked at her. Mrs. Huff wasn’t ancient, but she predated current technology by a few decades. Several years earlier, she’d argued against the school district’s plan to have computers in each elementary school classroom and provide tablets for middle school and high school students to lease or borrow. If Weston remembered correctly, Mrs. Huff had said people spent too much time online, and she didn’t want to encourage it.
She gave him a small smile. “I’ve learned a few things lately. My students teach me. Some of them know more about computers at eight years old than I’ll probably ever learn. Would your job be easier if these resources were on the computer?”
“Not at first.” Weston considered how to phrase his reply so it wouldn’t sound as if he were asking for more hours and therefore more money. “Even if the documents were digitized, I would still have to keep the hard copies. Some of these things are too valuable to be thrown away, and some of the people who come in here probably wouldn’t want to deal with computers. Not to mention I might not be able to scan or type everything. So I would still have the time and effort of putting away books and papers. It would also take a long time to get everything online.”
“Why?” Ed folded his arms.
Weston fought not to roll his eyes. Ed clearly intended to challenge anything Weston said. “To start with, I’d have to build a web site. The town site wouldn’t support something this massive. Even if it would, searching for a link on the town’s web site would be too inconvenient for some people. It’s a lot easier to have a dedicated site for the historical society.”
That wasn’t entirely true. People who went online to find out more about the history of Dayfield would probably use a search engine, which would bring them directly to the historical records regardless of whether the records were on the Dayfield town site or a separate one. But the town web site crashed on a regular basis, and Weston doubted whoever was in charge of the site would give him access to add to it.
“How long would all that take?” Mrs. Huff asked.
“How much would it cost?” Ed said.
“Web sites don’t have to be expensive.” Andy stood.
Weston opened his mouth to tell Andy to be quiet, then stopped himself. If someone who actually used the historical society vouched for the need to make changes, Ed might be more inclined to listen. Especially when the person wasn’t a town resident, which would reinforce Weston’s claim that people from out of town would benefit from having some of the historical records online.
And it didn’t hurt that the person speaking resembled the most prominent family in town. People might hate the Chaffees, but the name still had power.
Ed cleared his throat again. “You are?”
“Andy Forrest.” Andy extended his hand, which Ed didn’t shake. Andy kept his hand out and gave Ed a pleasant look. “It’s nice to meet you.”
“You know about web sites?” Ed asked.
“I build them for a living.” Andy put his hands in his pockets. “This type of project would require more than a simple, free, low-bandwidth site. You’d need dedicated hosting and a server and your own domain name, either with subdomains for each individual era or divided by topic.”
Ed blinked a few times, and Weston stifled a laugh. He was pretty sure Andy had lost Ed at “bandwidth.” From the gleam in Andy’s eyes, Weston guessed he was deliberately throwing out some random terms to yank Ed’s chain.
“If you used a WYSIWYG platform, building the site would be easy,” Andy continued. “You’d only have to type things in. Or upload them. Of course, to upload the documents, Weston would have to scan them into a computer first.”
“What are we talking about here?” Ed snapped.
“We’re talking about the amount of work and time involved in putting all these things online,” Andy said. “The web site itself doesn’t have to cost much. You’d have to pay for a domain name, and you’d have an ongoing fee for web hosting, but if you shop around you can get those things pretty inexpensively. But Weston would end up spending most of his time scanning documents and uploading them.”
He gestured at the piles on the table. “Just the things in these folders would take well over a week, and that’s if Weston didn’t work on anything else. Some of the documents probably can’t be scanned, either. I’d bet some of these things are so fragile they can’t even be touched.”
“I keep the fragile ones locked up, but yeah.” Weston smiled at Ed. “Being online nowadays is pretty much a necessity, but you’d be more than doubling my workload. As it is, I need more hours in my workdays to have a chance in—any chance of getting caught up with what I have here. That’s assuming no one else cleans out Grandma’s attic and brings everything here.”
“So you’re asking for more hours.” Ed frowned. “And more money, I would assume. How much do you think we have in the budget?”
“I wouldn’t even try to guess. That isn’t my department.” Weston barely managed to keep his frustration out of his tone. No matter what anyone said to Ed, the subject of expenses would always come up again. Money was Ed’s bottom line. He didn’t really care what was needed or why. He only cared about cost.
“On the other hand, once the site’s done and everything’s typed or uploaded, Weston might not even need as many hours as he works now.” Andy shot Weston an apologetic look. “If most things were online, people would be able to browse from the privacy of their homes instead of having to come in here, which means the room wouldn’t have to be open as many hours as now. And people wouldn’t be pulling out books and documents all the time, so things wouldn’t have to be organized or refiled as often.”
Ed opened his mouth, but Mrs. Huff held her hand in front of his face. “We came here to find out what Weston’s doing with the place and whether keeping him on here is warranted. Not to debate about web sites and such. I would say it’s definitely warranted. He’s improved the organization of the room vastly over what it used to be. But there is more to do.”
She turned to Weston, who kept his mouth shut. The way she was talking gave him no clue as to whether she was on his side or Ed’s, and he didn’t dare speak in case he said something to push her into Ed’s court.
“As Weston said, some of the items in this room are valuable,” Mrs. Huff said. “I would hate to see things get lost or damaged because no one’s taking care of them. I say we keep him on, and I intend to recommend to the board that they increase Weston’s work hours and salary.”
Weston slowly exhaled. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome.” She smiled. “You’ve always been a hard worker. I don’t see any reason to believe you aren’t one here.”
“We don’t have the budget!” Ed said.
“That’s up to the board to determine,” Mrs. Huff said. “You might be the chairperson, but that doesn’t give you unilateral control. We’ll bring it up at the next meeting. Have a nice day, Weston. My best wishes to your parents. Andy, it was nice meeting you.”
“You too,” Andy said.
Ed opened and closed his mouth a few times. Mrs. Huff strode out of the room. After a moment, Ed followed, and the library door banged shut.
Laughing, Andy sat down. “Damn. I didn’t think people like him existed in real life.”
“You had him completely boggled with all the computer talk.” Weston perched on the edge of the table. “I didn’t know you build web sites.”
“We haven’t talked a whole lot about our lives,” Andy said. “And I admit to some bullshitting in what I told him. By the way, I’m sorry about saying they’d be able to cut your hours eventually. I know you need the job. I was trying to shut up Mr. Bluster there.”
“It’s fine,” Weston said. “It isn’t as if I plan to spend the rest of my life working here. I’m in town as long as my parents need me. Sooner or later, they’ll realize the house is too much for them even with my help and will probably go to assisted living or something. And then I can get out.”
His words echoed in his mind. He sounded like he wanted his parents to move into assisted living for the sole reason of freeing him from Dayfield, which wasn’t the case at all. He hoped Andy didn’t take it that way. But he couldn’t deny that would be one hell of a benefit. He didn’t resent his parents, nor did he mind taking care of them, but he couldn’t spend the rest of his life living with Mom and Dad in Dayfield.
“I’m not really a selfish bastard,” he said. “I just play one on TV.”
Andy snorted. “Yeah, well, you don’t do a good job of it. I understand, believe me. If you love your parents, helping them out is a no-brainer, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.”
Relieved that Andy understood, Weston nodded. “Exactly. So anyway, it won’t matter a huge amount if they cut my hours months from now. I’ll find work somewhere else. Hell, I’ll do fast food or retail if I have to, until I find another job useless degrees are useful for. With a history degree, about all I’m qualified for is running the historical society. I wouldn’t mind teaching or working as a librarian, but I’d have to go back to school for either of those. Which would still mean finding some other way to earn money until I had the right degree and credentials.”
“So you’re kind of stuck,” Andy said.
“Only for the moment.” Weston shrugged. “The point is, from what you were saying, building the web site and scanning things in, on top of having to sort out all this stuff, would take months at least.”
“Yeah. Definitely.”
Weston looked around. The shuffling he’d done so far that morning had improved the space. He’d found homes for some of the folders and several books, which left fewer piles on the floor. He still had a lot to do, and he would have to take out the folders he’d put away to make sure each one contained related information, but it was progress.
He didn’t feel like doing anything more that day.
“Do you want to go to the factory?” he asked.
Andy looked confused. “Um, sure? What about you having to work?”
“I can take a lunch break.” Weston glanced at his watch. “It’s almost noon. Close enough. I’ll take you out there, and then we can do lunch.”
Although he tried to sound casual, he intended the suggestion as anything but. In the amount of time he’d spent with Andy, he’d become intrigued. If nothing else, Andy was someone Weston hadn’t known all his life, and that alone was rare.
He wanted to get to know Andy better. There was no way he would say so, but any amount of time with him was better than the usual work-and-home routine.
“Sounds good.” Andy held up the book about the factory. “Where can I leave this? I want to finish reading it. I still think there’s something wrong with the details of how Oliver and Larry died.”
“Hardy Boy?” Weston teased.
“Hard, anyway.” Andy’s face reddened. “Sorry. Reflex innuendo.”
“Not so much an innuendo. More of a blatant sexual reference.” Weston grinned. Maybe time with Andy would be even more worthwhile than he’d believed. He hadn’t stopped to wonder whether Andy was straight, gay, or something else, but it was a pretty safe bet Andy wouldn’t have made a comment like that if he didn’t have some interest in Weston.
“Yeah, I guess it kind of was.” Andy glanced away. “Anyway. So yeah. Book?”
“You can bring it with you.” Weston went to his desk and rummaged in the top drawer for a pen. On a piece of scrap paper, he scribbled Andy’s name and the book title. “There. You’re checked out. Let’s go. Even if I am entitled to a break, I don’t want to be gone too long. I’m sure Ed will be looking over my shoulder for a while.”
“He seems the type.” Andy stood. “Okay. Let’s go.”