She scooched again, so close she could almost feel the heat from his cheek. “The caption says it was taken in his studio in Bar Harbor. I’m telling you, I think this is the room in that picture. Maybe the guy with his back to the camera was this guy. Maybe they knew each other.” She leaned back in the seat. “You really did find the right date.”
He smiled out of the side of his mouth. “Well, good.”
He was still so close. He smelled like shampoo, maybe. Or detergent. When he was sixteen, he’d worn some kind of spicy cologne that she could sometimes detect on the shoulder of her shirt when she got home. More than once, she’d curled up on her side and twisted around in bed until she could breathe it in while she fell asleep. He left a hoodie in her car after the junior year bonfire, and she wore it to breakfast every morning for two weeks, telling her parents she’d stolen it from Nick, but not telling them how the best part of some of those mornings was the moment when she pulled it over her head.
“Okay, I’m going to print off some auction updates for your file, because I don’t think they have that much heft to them.” They sat at the monitor in the pool of light, taking notes from little pieces here and there, filling in gaps about Kittery—his wife, his kids and grandkids, the growth in the value of his work throughout the ’80s and ’90s.
“What else have we got?” Laurie asked.
“Well, there are a couple of what look like little pieces from the Niagara County Historical Society. Which, by the way, also had a magazine, in case you want to get depressed again because you can’t write about the long history of people going over the falls in barrels.”
“Did people actually do that, do you think?”
“Let’s see,” he said. She wanted to ask him questions all night. Push on his curiosity, exploit his absolute allergy to saying Who cares? Chris had been big on that reaction when she was diving down deep rabbit holes. “Yes, it looks like they did. Annie Edson Taylor in 1901. She was sixty-three. She hoped to make money. Apparently, she did not make the big bucks, although she did survive.”
“Wait, she went over the falls in a barrel when she was sixty-three? Because she wanted to make money?”
“A one-woman argument for Social Security,” he said. “Apparently, the last person who went over and survived did it in 2019. Wait, what were we talking about again?”
“The Niagara County Historical Society, Carl Kittery, my duck.”
“Right.” He leaned over toward her until she could feel him brushing against her hair. “I have one more trick that is harder to use than it should be in a lot of cases, and that’s public records.” He went back to typing.
“Oh hey, look,” Laurie said, tapping her finger on a listing that said Property record, Hancock County. “Isn’t that where Bar Harbor is?”
“It is,” he said. “Hey, get your smudgy finger off my screen.”
She removed her hand but scooted over even more, until their shoulders were fully touching. “I want to look at that one.” When he pulled it up, she sucked in her breath. Carl Kittery, born June 1915, had owned a house in Hancock County from 1960 until 1982. “So he could have been selling down here in Calcasset,” she said. “Right? I mean, he could have been at a fair or a boutique or something. It’s, what, two hours away?”
Nick nodded slowly. “It’s interesting, that’s for sure. Is all this enough for you to start with if I print it up and you take it with you?”
“Absolutely,” she said. “And I couldn’t have asked for a better date.”
“Well,” he said, “it’s not over yet. You haven’t seen the view at night from the reading room. It used to be kind of musty and full of books nobody checked out, but now it’s a very nice place to relax.”
“I saw it the first time I came in, when I was walking all around looking for you.”
He turned to look at her. “You were?”
She nodded. “I was. But you weren’t here.”
“Mm, my loss. Let’s go up.” He took the papers from the printer and led the way up the wide carpeted steps, and at the top, he flipped on a single light way over in the corner. The reading room had six round wooden tables with chairs arranged around them, and newspaper racks lined up against one wall. All four sides had huge, nearly floor-to-ceiling windows, with rolling shades that mostly served to keep the room from getting too hot in the summer.