Daisy had been right to assume Brian would pay a visit to the offices of Global Human Rights before the week was out, but she was at the library when he arrived. She returned late that afternoon to find that he had been in to see Mark John right after school and that he hadn’t stayed long.
Mark John was in his office when she returned from the library. She knocked on his door just as Jude opened it and came out, smiling coyly.
“Don’t be long, Daisy,” she said. Daisy rolled her eyes. Had the woman no shame?
“Mark John, I just wanted to let you know that I will probably go straight to the library tomorrow and spend the day there,” Daisy said, walking into his office with a backward glance at Jude’s form disappearing down the hallway.
“All right. Call in so I know how the research is going, please,” he said.
“Okay. I’ll be able to start coming up with an outline for the three articles in a couple days.”
“Good.” He puffed out his cheeks and idly reached for an item on top of a stack of books on his desk.
“Daisy, I’d like you to do me a favor,” he said.
“Sure. What is it?”
“Brian dropped this off earlier this afternoon. He wants me to read it and tell him what I think of it. I just can’t. Not right now. But I didn’t have the nerve to tell him no.”
“And you want me to read it?” Daisy asked.
“Would you mind?” Mark John asked.
“First, what is it?” Daisy countered.
“It’s an old diary. At least, I think it’s a diary. Brian didn’t give me too much information. You’re the expert at looking at old things.”
“All right, I’ll take a look. I assume it’s written in English?”
Mark John shrugged. “Probably. Brian wouldn’t have asked me to look at it otherwise.”
“Why does Brian want you to read it?” Daisy asked.
“Why does Brian do anything? Because he’s weird. He thinks I’m fascinated by all these things he finds.”
Daisy felt a twinge of sadness for Brian. He probably missed his sister. He was probably just reaching out to Mark John in the spirit of friendship and Mark John was spurning him.
“Okay, I’ll take a crack at it,” she said. Mark John held out the diary to her. She could tell from a cursory visual examination that the diary was old and fragile.
“Wait,” she said. “Let me get a pair of gloves from my office. I don’t want the oils on my skin to degrade the paper.” She hurried to her office, grabbed a pair of white cotton gloves which she kept in a desk drawer, and returned to Mark John’s office. She accepted the book carefully.
“I’ll start looking at this tonight,” she promised.
Before finishing up some paperwork and leaving for the day, Daisy pulled the white gloves on again and placed the diary on her desk for a closer examination.
It was tattered and brown; it looked like it was made of some kind of animal hide. She picked it up and leafed carefully through the pages, which were yellowed and brittle. A quick glance at the faded and wispy writing revealed to her trained eye that the book was probably a diary, likely written by a woman, almost certainly in the nineteenth century.
She opened the front cover; it was, indeed, a diary. There was a name scrawled on the frontispiece: Trudy Hauchfen. German, Daisy surmised. Under the name was written “Nebraska Territory.” A familiar thrill passed through her, that same feeling she got whenever she held something that had belonged to someone else many years before. She had been privileged in her work to have held many such items, and she never tired of looking at old books, old clothing, old household goods, old tools, old anything. She turned the pages carefully, looking for a date. The first entry was dated 1865.
She looked up when Jude passed her office on the way to Mark John’s office, and Daisy sighed. She didn’t want to be around when Jude finally emerged from his office, so she decided to head home for the day.
Just a few minutes later Daisy was on the Metro headed to her apartment. Sitting down with her tote bag on her lap, she debated whether to take the diary out and read it on the ride home, but she decided against it because the diary was simply too fragile to handle in such a crush of people. She couldn’t wait to get home to start reading it.
She passed her favorite wine shop on the way home from the Metro station and bought a bottle of pinot gris. Her apartment was located on a leafy street of brownstones, the colors of their façades being the only difference among the houses. Her building was a bright, melon-coral color with white trim. The color of the building was the thing that had sold Daisy on renting in that building—she knew she would love coming home every day to such a cheerful place.
Once inside, she ran lightly up the three flights of stairs to her apartment and kicked off her shoes as soon as she was through the front door. Placing her tote bag on the table next to the door, she hung up her jacket and went straight to the kitchen carrying the bottle of wine. After pouring herself a small glass, she retrieved the tote bag, curled her legs up on the couch in the living room, and gingerly pulled the diary out of its protective sleeve. She reached for a pair of white gloves she always kept on the end table and slipped them on. She opened the diary carefully and traced her finger lightly across the ink on the frontispiece, wondering about the identity of Trudy. The entries began on the page facing the frontispiece. Paper would have been hard to come by in the American west during that time, Daisy knew, and people wasted no space when they wrote. She squinted and began to read.