A saying when something is hard to find is that it is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
This is a stupid saying.
It would be easy to find a needle in a haystack because it would be the thing that is not a piece of hay. It would be the thing that is short, shiny, and stiff instead of long, tan, and bendy. Even in the dark, a needle would be easy to find in a haystack because the needle would be the thing that stuck you in the finger.
A better saying for something that is hard to find would be that it is like looking for an important piece of paper in many stacks of unimportant pieces of paper. This is because all pieces of paper are pieces of paper, and none of them are needles, and all of them look the same until you read them, but there are too many to read them all, and none of them will announce themselves by sticking you in the finger. And even if I did read them all, it would not help because I do not know what I am looking for so even if I found it I would not know that I had because I do not know what it is.
Mirabel thinks River getting us the emails was heroic. Mab thinks River getting us the emails was kind. But I think River getting us the emails was pointless because the emails do not say anything useful or, to be more accurate, the emails do not say anything useful we can understand.
What they say that we can understand is something is scheduled for November 22, which is thirty days from today. They also say River’s father and grandfather do not want us to find some paperwork. We do not know if the paperwork is related to November 22, but since River’s father and grandfather do not want us to find it, Mab and Mirabel do. Fortunately there is a lot of paperwork in our house. Unfortunately Duke Templeton did not specify what paperwork so finding it is like looking for an important piece of paper in many stacks of unimportant pieces of paper. Exactly like that, in fact.
The auction house that came to sell our books went into the library and made two piles: what they wanted to buy and what no one did. I got what no one did, but it was a big pile, and some of it was stuff no one did including me (because boxes of documents and papers and forms are boring) so those boxes could stay in the library attic “till kingdom come” said the man from the auction house which Pastor Jeff said meant until Bourne became heaven on earth which Mama said meant forever. The boxes-no-one-wanted could stay in the library attic forever.
All of which means I might not have the paperwork Duke Templeton does not want us to find because it might be at Omar’s or it might be in the library attic or it might be lost, but it also means I might have it because I did choose many boxes from the kingdom-come pile, and I could look for it if I knew what it was or who wrote it or why or when or on what grounds, literal or metaphorical. But when a random email warns that it is very important no one finds the damn paperwork, it could be cursing about anything.
The documents in the boxes are all in folders, and the folders all have labels that were labeled long ago, but those labels do not always tell me what is in the folders. Not labeling folders is very bad, but it is not as bad as labeling folders incorrectly or ambiguously.
One box has folders about fauna:
Brown Bear Sightings 1947–1967
4-H Fair Entry Forms: Livestock
Fishing License Applications
Dog Poo Removal Reminder Signs
One box has folders about flora:
Daffodil Bulb Order Forms
Mulching Sign-ups
Elm/Hickory Grove
Tree Doctor Contact Info (Greenborough)
One box has folders about the opposite of fauna or flora which is high school:
BMHS Field Trip Permission Slips
BMHS Parking Permits, Blank
Sheet Music: BMHS Graduation Ceremony
Reorder Form: Lord of the Flies (I consider throwing this entire folder away—even though it is more accurate to say it is already thrown away by being here with me, even though its being here with me has not prevented them reordering and us having to read this book in class—which, I would argue if pressed by a library disciplinary tribunal, demonstrates that I understood the book which is about anarchy, but I would never destroy library property, even ex–library property, because my duties as a librarian are sacred.)
Some of the folders contain nothing but paperwork related to ramps. Ramp designs, ramp repair, ramp refurbishment, ramp specs, site guidelines, handrail requisition forms, ramp signage. There is an entire box on nothing but ramps.
Then I find a box of folders, each of which has a single piece of paper in it. The folders are all labeled “Request for Aid,” and there are 117 of them. The first one is dated right after what happened happened. The last one is dated right before the library closed. The others are all in between. Inside each folder is a letter from Omar telling how hard things are in Bourne, how much we need help and also money and also compensation, addressed to “Representative” or “Congressperson” or “Senator” or “Your Honor.” Each one is stamped with the word “DENIED.”
None of it is anything I can imagine Duke Templeton or Nathan Templeton caring about never mind hiding from us never mind destroyed by. I do not know what we are looking for, but I can make an assumption it is not any of this.
Aside from the paperwork, the email gives two other hints. One is Duke Templeton has to do something you cannot do in winter. One is you used to be able to in the old days.
There are no files I can find specifically about seasonal activities in Bourne so I turn instead to my books and make a pile of all the ones in my library about things you cannot do after a freeze:
Surfing
Building a deck
Swimming laps for fun and exercise
Planting tomato starts
Planting really anything (so I put all the gardening books on the pile)
Spending a day at the beach (Technically, you could spend a day at the beach even if it was freezing, but the two books I have on the subject are both mystery romance novels marketed to teenage girls, and what their protagonists do at the beach is lie topless on towels to achieve a tan, run in the sand in bathing suits with boys, bounce in the waves with a beachball, build a bonfire after dark, canoodle in bikinis, and solve crimes. While you could solve crimes or build a bonfire—to be more accurate, you would have to—if it were extremely cold, you could not do those other things without freezing to death or losing all of your extremities to frostbite which these protagonists could not because that would not make them very attractive to the boys which is their principal goal. So I put these books in the maybe pile.)
In his email, Duke Templeton says you could do whatever he wants to do anytime “in the old days,” but he does not say how old the days in question are. I consider my pile of books to see if any of the activities you cannot do in winter now you could do in winter years ago, but the only one that seems possible to me is the one about swimming laps. You cannot swim laps for fun and exercise now between Thanksgiving and March, but maybe there used to be an indoor pool and then you could. So that is what I must find out. Did Bourne use to have an indoor pool?
Bourne does not have a newspaper anymore because Bourne is too small a town to need one because nothing ever happens here, and when something does happen here everyone knows about it right away because we are such a small town. But there used to be the Herald Bourne, back when even small towns had newspapers, back before we were even alive. In the old days. Back then, there was no internet, so the Herald Bourne is not saved online, and it is also not archived on microform or microfiche like a real newspaper in a real library, but Mrs. Atholton, who was the librarian before Mrs. Watson, who was the librarian before me, saved some of the Herald Bourne’s articles by pasting them into scrapbooks and saved some of the scrapbooks by shelving them in the library as if they were actual books. Where they are now is in the pantry underneath the cereal.
I have looked in the scrapbooks but not a lot because the paper is old and the paste is old, so they are hard to read and delicate and crumble into powder if you touch them or even just sneeze too hard while you are looking (which you do because they are dusty). So I look carefully. There are a lot of scrapbooks, but I am not worried because I can skim the headlines to see if there is anything about an indoor pool or some other unlikely-to-exist-in-the-future winter activity.
What I learn is there was never anything to do in Bourne, not even in the old days.
In the winter of 1958, there was a snowman-building contest.
In the winter of 1959, there was a sled race on Baker Hill.
In 1961, there were record warm temperatures and therefore no snow and therefore no snowman-building contests or sled races.
For Christmas 1962, Bourners decorated a big tree in the middle of downtown. There was a contest for best handmade ornament. The winner was a tiny model of the space capsule Friendship 7 with an even tinier John Glenn in a tiny space suit inside.
There is no mention of an indoor pool.
In 1963, three Santas stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder and dangled fishing poles over the river. The bridge was draped in holly and pine branches. At first I think this is an activity you used to be able to do in winter but cannot do in winter anymore. No one fishes in Bourne in winter now. No one fishes in Bourne at all now, but even before what happened happened, it was too cold to fish in winter, and the kind of fish that live in our river are sleeping or frozen or dead between Thanksgiving and March. However, the caption says the Santas were only pretending to fish which you could do any time of the year.
Then I look at the picture more closely.
It is black and white. Or, more accurately, brown and white. Or, more accurately, brown and beige because it is both faded and dirty, and not dirty in a way you can clean, though I do try, dirty like time got on it and now you cannot get it off.
But there is something very strange about this picture, and it is this: there is an extra river in it.
This cannot be.
But I check. And it cannot not be either.
And those are opposites.
The picture is fifty-five years old so it makes sense that some things would have changed between then and now, but you can see my library. You can see our very same church with its too-short, left-of-center door. You can see the bridge in between, arcing from one bank to the other. And if you look, you can see a river rushing below it.
Which is very, very wrong because there is no river there. The bridge with the river rushing under it is the bridge near the plant. The bridge between the church and the library, which is the bridge covered in Santas in this picture, is the bridge over the ravine.
I think about it for a long time, and here is what I think: Maybe there used to be many rivers in Bourne but most of them died or left or dried up, just like there used to be many people in Bourne but most of them died or left or dried up too. Maybe the river we know now is a twin of this old one, or maybe even there used to be more, triplet rivers, but the other ones did not survive. A lot of times when there is more than one baby in one womb only one of them lives long enough to be born, and even though I do not like to think about it, it is true anyway.
But this Santa river did not die in the womb. It lived for at least a while. Because here it is, alive and well, in 1963, but now, fifty-five years later, it is nowhere to be seen.