Especially if he becomes an official suspect. Or is it when? Even though I can’t really imagine him killing anybody.
Which is why I’m here.
Refocusing, I find a helpful list of the library’s sections and services on one of those felt signage setups with the white letters you push into soft slats. The display is mounted on the wall by the elevator, but I take the stairs down into the basement. It’s a whole different world underground. The stacks here are gray metal and squeezed in tight, and the flooring is black and gray linoleum, like the gold and green up above is something that has risen to the top of a liquid suspension by virtue of its lesser, and therefore more buoyant, molecular weight.
Down here is the meat of the enterprise, home of reference volumes and the dusty, annotated scholarly stuff that I doubt gets much use. I find the microfiche stations straight ahead, and I am surprised that, again, no one is around making sure that things aren’t tampered with or stolen. But maybe the library knows its clientele can handle with competence and respect whatever is under its roof.
It takes me a while to understand the cataloging of the films, but soon enough, I make some choices from the archive of the New Haven Register. It’s a surprise that a small Massachusetts town like Greensboro stocks the paper’s past issues in its library, and I feel lucky at the show of New England solidarity.
With a flutter in my chest, I sit down at the farthest of the three microfiching machines. At first, it is exhilarating to whip through the columns and pictures of previous issues. Then the whirling makes me queasy—but that could also be because I feel like I’m doing something sneaky.
The article I’m searching for is from back in early September last year, and I have a thought that I am in a needle-in-a-haystack situation. Reversing the flow, I wonder whether I’ll have to consult the next reel and am frustrated that I’m going to have to wade through—
“—what Jerry said. Do you think he’d lie? And don’t tell anyone this, okay.”
I look up from the light box. Two women are emerging from a door marked Staff Only, the kitchenette behind them neat as the rest of the library. As my view of the pristine counter is closed off, I have a random thought that no one would ever reheat cod in that microwave or leave a mug in the sink.
“They got the autopsy results fast, then,” the other one says.
“It’s an Ambrose kid. Like they’d take their time?”
They’re about the same age, fortyish, and dressed in the same version of serviceable skirt and blouse. Their hair is even similar: one’s maybe a little darker, the other showing roots that need a touch-up, but both have shoulder-length blunt cuts. I think of the two cashiers at CVS. Does the town have a rule about coordinating employees? I wonder.
The two cluster together, heads tilted in, voices low.
“And they’re going to keep this quiet, right? Ambrose will never let it out that the dead girl was pregnant—”
Both of them turn to me, startled. Clearly, I’ve made a sound.
I go back to the microfiche, afraid they’ll kick me out for my black clothes. For my eavesdropping, even though they were in the library proper. For the fact that they’ve guessed I’m a bipolar Ambrose student on a mission—
Oh, God. Greta was pregnant?
I think of all the times she went into the bathroom after meals with that toothbrush in hand. Maybe she wasn’t using it the way Francesca showed me.
She was pregnant? Did Nick Hollis know? Was that why he…？
Without warning or preamble, I disassociate and float away from my own body—and in a rush of fear, I become convinced that this library trip is all an illusion in my mind. The real-reality is me back in my dorm room, sitting on my bed, my disease having created a new and different black hole for me to fall into, not a galaxy this time, but the local athenaeum.
Yes, this is all a hallucination. Mr. Pasture was right. None of this is real. Not the panties. Not the death. Not the police or Nick Hollis… or the two women I think I’m seeing now. After all, I am not actually in the Mercer Memorial Library, and I am not—
I snap back into focus and reach out to touch the microfiche machine. When my trembling fingers inform me that, yes, there is a three-dimensional, measurable mass in front of me, I take a deep breath and try to sort out my confusion about where I am.
In desperation, I start to move the image on the screen, and try to connect with—
And there it is. An article about a Yale University teaching assistant becoming embroiled in accusations of sexual impropriety. It’s blinded of Nick’s name, but I know it’s him. The date is right, it notes that he’s married and a master’s candidate in English, and it says he comes from a prominent family. Granted, there are probably a lot of people who fit that description at the school, but there’s a tell that strikes me to the core.
The girl’s name isn’t mentioned.
Because she’s fifteen, according to the article.
Mollyjansen was fifteen. According to Sandra Hollis.
I sit back in the seat and stare at the glowing print. I wonder how their paths crossed. Was she the daughter of a professor or an administrator? No, I decide that she was a townie, someone who didn’t matter, so it was easier to gloss over the whole problem, bury it in spite of this piece of nonreporting because the school worked with Nick Hollis’s dad and closed the case. Was the girl’s family paid off? There’s no mention of charges being filed, so I’m thinking they were.
I’ve read enough of my mother’s People magazine articles to know how rich people deal with things that take the shine off their reputations.
And for sure something happened with the girl. I heard an ugly truth in Sandra Hollis’s voice when she brought up the whole situation in the parking area, right before she took off with her Civic and her suitcase.
But the real news flash isn’t about Mollyjansen. Greta was pregnant? That certainly raises the stakes, especially as I consider payoffs to minors. Greta and the Stanhopes went bankrupt. So what if she got herself pregnant and tried to blackmail Nick Hollis? After his father had to buy silence from another girl the year before?
That might just get a guy who loves American Psycho to take a page out of Bret Easton Ellis’s book.
“May I help you?”
I brace myself before I look up—because I’m not entirely sure what I’m going to see. The article has kind of put me back on the planet, but who the hell knows what’s real.
I turn my head toward the disapproving female voice. It’s not the staffer who needs to go to the hairdresser for her roots.
“I’m almost done,” I say, assuming either one of us is actually here.
“Please do not try and reshelve the film,” she tells me. As if she’s a brain surgeon taking a scalpel out of the hands of a landscaper. “It goes in that basket.”
She points to a red plastic container that belongs at a burger joint full of fries fresh from the oil vats. Sure enough, there is a wrinkled, handmade sign taped to the front of its flimsy slats: Please Put Film Here.
Well. What do you know. This is exactly the kind of stupid minutia the real world drowns in. Maybe this is happening.
“Thank you,” I say. “I won’t reshelve.”