The moment I stepped into the basement of the Courier Press where the archives were stored, I wished I hadn’t come alone. The lights were bare bulbs surrounded by caging, and they gave off a dim yellow glow that cast sketchy shadows across Coleen’s face.
It was the kind of location where, had it appeared in a horror movie, I would have been shouting at the characters not to go in.
But this wasn’t a horror movie. Jordan hadn’t been killed here. And Coleen was the exact opposite of a threat. She stood five feet tall, with a waist as thin as my arms. The wrinkles covering her face suggested she was nearing retirement age. She might have already passed it. She struck me as the kind of person who wanted to die at their desk.
She stood on her tiptoes and pulled on the string of a hanging lamp. It burst into light. I squinted against it.
It illuminated a desk with a machine on it that looked like a computer that would have been around before I was born. Why would they make people come down here to access the archives when they had much newer computers upstairs? For that matter, why not just upload them all so they were accessible online?
The dinosaur computer didn’t seem to have a keyboard.
Wait a second… “Is this a microfiche machine?”
“Microfilm actually,” Collen said. “Let me grab you the reel Jordan looked at when she was here.”
She went over to a tall filing cabinet with narrow drawers and pulled out a box. She dumped a round object that looked like a hand-sized version of an old film reel into her palm.
She came back to my side. “Do you know how to work one of these?”
I shook my head. If I was being honest, I didn’t even know anyone used them anymore. I thought most things had been digitized by this point. Maybe that showed my age.
“Jordan didn’t, either. What’s the world coming to?” She slid the reel onto a metal rod and snapped the end of the film into a holder. She pressed a button, and the screen came to life, displaying the first issue of that year. She pointed at a blue knob. “Right is forward. Left is back. The farther you turn it, the faster it goes.” She poked a thumb back over her shoulder. “I’ll be upstairs if you need me.”
And with that, she left me alone in the creepy lair that seemed like it should have belonged to Victor Frankenstein’s literary cousin.
It’s a basement in a business, I reminded myself. It’s not a haunted house.
I glanced at the date on the issue again. It was from over thirty-five years ago.
This might turn out to be a complete waste of time. Jordan wasn’t a reporter. She was a pharmaceutical rep. Unless she suspected her company was founded by a Nazi or that they’d been secretly making people sick only to cure them for three decades, this seemed like it wouldn’t have much to do with her death.
But she had come here and spent a whole day, the same as I was, reading through old newspapers.
The first issue of that year didn’t have anything more interesting than that the New Year’s baby was the second of twins. The first baby was born one minute before midnight, giving them different birthdays.
I moved on to the next issue and then the next. Maybe because it was a smaller paper, they seemed to cover more quirky items—like the theft of a newly planted peach tree from a woman’s front yard and the newest kids’ toys that were equally fun for adults. They also seemed to cover bigger stories in more depth, sometimes following them for weeks or months at a time, chasing theories. They followed up on stories long after the bigger papers had moved on to more current events. By the end of the year, they’d even created a recurring section for it where they specifically revisited an old news story and updated readers on where things stood.
The overarching stories that took up the most pages were about a Jane Doe’s body that washed up from the Grand River next to Riverside Park, an armored car robbery of Ironclad Armored Car Services, and a series of joyrides taking place across the city. The joyrider only stole pickup trucks and returned them covered in mud.
I checked the byline. Most of them were written by Coleen. Apparently, she’d risen to her place as editor-in-chief through finding a niche for the Courier Press that was different from what the other newspapers were doing. That might even be why such a small paper had managed to last so long in an ever-shrinking market. Most people I knew got their news from online sources.
The Jane Doe articles were actually really interesting. Coleen had followed up with the police as to whether it was a murder or a suicide—they suspected suicide but couldn’t be certain. From there, she personally dug into missing persons’ reports, trying to identify the Jane Doe herself.
In November of that year, she succeeded. Jane Doe turned out to be a woman named Anna. She was a schizophrenic who had a history of going on and off her meds. When she was off, she lived on the streets. Her pattern of disappearing was why her family didn’t report her missing immediately. They assumed she’d turn up the way she always had before.
None of that had any connection to Jordan that I could see.
Nor did anything else in the papers.
I even went back and read the classifieds and obituaries. I took a picture of any that included a person with the last name Williams. Since most of them were people selling furniture and renting apartments, the chances that they’d somehow resulted in Jordan’s death didn’t seem high. But at least I’d have the images on my phone in case.
I scrolled back and snapped pictures of the quirkier articles and follow-ups that I thought the larger papers wouldn’t have run as well. Jordan had specifically come here. The only reason I could see for that was that the Courier Press had covered something that the larger papers ignored.
I just had to figure out what it was.