He turned the monitor slightly so she couldn’t see it. “Okay. Pop quiz. Tell me what you learned.”
“Oh, brother. Okay. He was born in, I think, 1915?”
“Wikipedia agrees.”
“You’re a librarian, and you use Wikipedia? What am I paying you for?”
“You’re not paying me anything, because you’re not a taxpaying resident of Whipwell County. Besides, Wikipedia is a perfectly good starting point as long as you look at the citations. Stop stalling.”
“Grew up in New York somewhere.” She impressed him with her recollection that Kittery got into duck hunting as a kid, near the Niagara River, and that he started carving ducks with his father, but didn’t start to sell his work much until about 1940. “Now help me look him up, Cooper, don’t be a tease.”
He turned the monitor back around. “All right. Let’s look at some things. This is one of my favorite databases for magazines and stuff.” As he logged himself in and started typing, Laurie saw a handful of saved searches drop down, and one of them said, “Laurie Sassalyn conservation.” She reached over and put her hand on his arm.
“Excuse me, what is that? Have you been googling me?”
He stopped and looked at her. “I read your stuff. I read about the alligators, and I read about the bees, and I even read that one about the Amazonian spider colony, although I have to say, I really regretted it.”
Without breaking eye contact, she scooted her chair a little bit closer. “Okay. Continue.”
“All right.” He could type much faster than she could, even though she spent so much of her life transcribing interviews. She watched his hands, how they had the same sun splotches as her cheeks, and it was the first time she could honestly say she’d been turned on by typing. “Now, don’t distract me while I’m working my magic. Not that I wouldn’t love to sit here while you slither over to me to breathe hotly on my neck.”
“I don’t slither,” she said. “I scooch.”
“Whatever. Just remember, librarians can sense fear.” He pointed at the screen. “They wrote about him in Niagara Nature Monthly in 1968.”
“Oh God.”
“What?”
She collapsed onto the desk with her forehead on her wrists. “I’m just realizing they can barely keep Rolling Stone in print and there used to be a magazine called Niagara Nature Monthly. Can you imagine how much work I would have gotten for Niagara Nature Monthly? I would have been out there stomping around in the river…now. That might not have meant spiders, but I bet I would have ended up partying with like thousands of crazy-ass fish.” She sat up. “Okay. I’m recovered.”
“So let’s keep reading before you get too depressed.” Almost right away, he whistled. “Wow, this auction site? It says they sold one of this guy’s ducks for 78,000 dollars last year.”
“I know. The Wybeck guy told me.” Just then, Laurie’s phone buzzed, and when she picked it up, she saw that it was June texting.
How’s the date?
She smiled and shook her head. You wouldn’t believe it. I’ll call you tomorrow. June texted back the eyes emoji, for obvious reasons.
When Laurie looked up, Nick had found Niagara Nature Monthly and a scan of the piece. As he scrolled, he came to a photo, and Laurie put her hand on his arm. “Look at this. There’s a picture,” she said. Dated 1964, the photo showed Kittery in a woodworking studio, surrounded by partially finished decoys, bending over a block that was just beginning to take on the character of a bird. His face was in profile, tense with concentration, a man who, at nearly fifty, wore his gray hair down to where it gently curled against his collar. “It says here that his work was just starting to be in demand at this point. And still by real hunters, mostly. There’s only one line in here about people collecting decoys as art. He says himself he thinks it’s silly.”
Nick nodded. “Must have seemed like it to him.”
The photo, scanned in black-and-white from the magazine archive, was ghostly and overexposed, but as Laurie stared at it, something about it seemed familiar. She’d seen this man, maybe. And maybe even this place where he was, with the window behind him and the wood-slat walls. “Nick, do you think this could be the room in that Polaroid? With the half a duck?” She nodded toward the screen.
Nick cocked his head to one side, then the other. “It could be. It’s not the best photo, obviously. But I agree, given everything else, it does make you wonder.”