in the restaurant’s parking lot and did just what the waitress suggested. She walked to the library. It was a beautiful spring day, but she barely noticed.
By the time she got to the library, she had hashed over in her mind multiple scenarios about what she would find, or not find. In her imagination, she walked in, asked the librarian for the perfect place to look for someone who may or may not have lived in Pittsfield, and found Paul and his story within an hour.
By the time she had reached the library, Marsha had almost convinced herself that it was true.
It was only when she tried to explain what she was looking for that she realized how impossible this task would be. The librarian smiled and said they had several resources that she could look through to see if she could find the man she was looking for.
“Have you looked online?” was the librarian’s first question after first introducing herself as Kathy. Marsha told Kathy her name and then answered that she hadn’t, but her friend had, and there was nothing.
Kathy paused and then asked, “Have you thought that perhaps he wasn’t using the name you knew him by?”
Marsha rocked back on her heels as all her hopes of finding Paul vanished. It was a complete waste of time. But because it was Paul who had sent them on this trip and they had to find out why, she asked the next question, when what she really wanted to do was go back to the hotel and maybe even back to bed.
“Well, if that was true, how can I ever find him?”
“How important is this?” Kathy asked.
“Very,” Marsha answered, and then gave Kathy a brief scenario of why they were looking.
After hearing the story, Kathy said, “It’s essential then, so let’s assume he knew you’d come here, and look for what he meant by the statement, ‘this is where it started.’
“If, as you say, he kept this secret for a long time and only after his death was willing for his wife to find out about it, then it might have been something that happened that got written up in the newspaper.
“You could go through old newspapers looking for a story that might have caused someone to run away and maybe even change their name.”
Marsha now envisioned herself locked into an endless and perhaps fruitless search instead of getting an immediate answer. She would need the help of Cindy and Bree to do this, but at least she could get started.
Kathy and Marsha talked about possible scenarios and decided that Paul must have been at least a teenager when whatever happened, happened.
And because Paul had been teaching at Spring Falls Community College for two years before Bree had claimed him for her husband, they could narrow the timeframe. Having reduced the search down to only fifteen years, Marsha settled in front of the microfiche machine and began the search.
“Let me know if you need more,” Kathy said. “I have a few other ideas about places where you can look.”
Marsha nodded and began the task of reading old newspapers, searching for any story that might have triggered someone to hide from it for their entire life. Within a few hours, she was both depressed and frustrated.
Focusing on bad news, she had found so much of it she had to keep reminding herself that life was good because there were enough fires, accidents, murders, abductions, and other assorted tragedies it could destroy anyone’s belief in the quality of God’s grace.
Even though Marsha never thought of herself as a religious person, she kept herself sane most of the time by believing that grace existed and she could find it if she looked for it hard enough.
But after four hours of searching through tragedies, she questioned if that was true. Where was a god in all of that?
Time to get out of here, she told herself.
She was depressed and uncomfortable. Her hair was sticking to the back of her neck—she hated hair on her neck. She either needed to keep it up in the dancer’s bun or get it cut.
Plus, the waistband of her pants was digging into her sides. Either stop eating so much or go to elastic waistbands, she told herself. It would probably be elastic waistbands because she was hungry again.
Besides, she needed to get ready to surprise Cindy and Bree. She had written a list of likely events that might have been Paul’s trigger for running away.
Of course, there was no boy, or young man, named Paul in any of the stories. That would have been too easy. But Marsha had decided that it was possible—probable—that he had changed his name.
Marsha stopped by the front desk on her way out of the library and thanked Kathy for her help.
“Did you find anything?”
Gesturing to the notes in her hand, Marsha answered, “Yes. Lots of terrible things that happened, but nothing specific for the man I’m looking for.”
“Well, when I get depressed over all the bad stuff in the world, I remind myself of two things.”
“What are they?”
“That they are far outweighed by the good things that I take for granted, and to look for God’s grace in the helpers, as Mr. Rogers said.”
Tears popped up in Marsha’s eyes, surprising her. “Thank you for the reminder. I’ll be back tomorrow with a few friends to look again.”
“I’ll be here, and I have some ideas of other places to look. Didn’t you say that this man meant this search and what you find to be a gift to his widow?”
Marsha nodded, brushing away a tear that had escaped. “But I’m afraid we are going to find some terrible things that will be painful for her.”
Kathy came around from the back of the desk where she had been standing and reached out to hold both of Marsha’s hands.
“But the secret has been painful all along, don’t you think? Yes, you and your friends might have to face some terrible truths, but then the healing can begin.”
Marsha and Kathy exchanged a brief hug as Marsha whispered, “Thank you.”
As Kathy watched Marsha walk away, she reached into her desk drawer, pulled out a letter, and then made a phone call to the number listed there. She had not understood the letter when she first received it and had almost forgotten about it, thinking it might be a prank.
But when she heard Marsha’s story that morning, she remembered it and wondered if this woman was the one the letter mentioned would show up one day. At first, she hadn’t thought so but then realized that Marsha wasn’t the woman the letter referred to, but that woman would be in town soon.
As Kathy made the phone call, she wondered who the lawyer would be contacting. All she knew was that someone would come to help the searchers, and she got to be part of the solution.
God’s grace,” she said to herself. Look for it in the helpers.