X (Kinsey Millhone 24)

I stopped at the first service station I saw and picked up a local map, where points of interest had been flagged with small representative drawings. There was a library, a movie theater, and four elementary schools, a junior high school, a high school, and a community college. In addition to numerous supermarkets, I spotted a hospital, two hardware stores, a feed store, a boot museum, a dry goods emporium, coffee shops, drugstores, a retail tire business, three beauty shops, a fabric store, and a store selling Western attire. I couldn’t think why anyone would choose to live here. On the other hand, I couldn’t think why not. The town was clean and well-kept with more sky overhead than scenic wonders at ground level.

I was assuming that when Pete arrived in Burning Oaks the previous spring, he did so without the benefit of the mailing pouch. I couldn’t imagine how he might have acquired it unless he’d met with Father Xavier, who had delivered the items into his hands. Because of Pete’s preliminary work, I’d been provided with two critical points of reference: the name and address of the priest and the return address of the sender in the upper left-hand corner of the mailer.

I circled back to the library and pulled into an empty slot in the fifteen-space parking lot. I locked the car and went in, mailing pouch tucked under my arm. The one-story structure was of an uncertain architectural style that probably dated to the years just after World War II, when the country was recovering from steel shortages and throwing together new construction with whatever materials happened to be at hand.

I went into an interior made cozy with oversize paper tulips cut out of construction paper and mounted under a row of clerestory windows, like the flowers were yearning for the light. The space smelled of that brand of white library paste so many of us loved to eat in elementary school. Assorted preschoolers sat cross-legged on the floor while a young woman read aloud from a book about a bear who could roller-skate. To these tykes, the world was full of novelties and a skating bear was only one of many. Older adults, retired by the look of them, claimed the comfortable chairs along the far wall. Not surprisingly, much of the rest of the space was taken up by row after row of bookshelves, filled to capacity.

I approached the main desk, where a librarian was sorting and loading books onto a rolling cart for a return to the shelves. According to her name tag, she was Sandy Klemper, head librarian. She appeared to be fresh out of graduate school; a blonde in her early twenties, wearing a mint green sweater over a white blouse with a green-and-gray tweed skirt.

She looked up with a quick smile. “May I help you?”

“I’m hoping you have copies of the Haines and Poke Directories going back thirty years. I’m researching someone who lived here in the late fifties, early sixties.”

“We have directories starting in 1910. Genealogy?”

“Not quite. Something similar.”

“Telephone books should help,” she said. “We have newspapers on microfiche, and you might take a look at voter registration records, which are available at city hall.”

“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. This is my first run at the project, so we’ll see what kind of luck I have.”

She showed me to the reference section, where an entire wall of shelves was devoted to city directories, old phone books, and historical accounts of the settling of the area. “Let me know if I can be of any further assistance,” she said, and left me to my work.

I found both the Haines and the Polk from the years that interested me—1959, 1960, and 1961—along with the telephone books for those same years. I also picked up the current year’s editions of the Haines and Polk so that I could trace information forward. I was hoping to find someone who’d been acquainted with Ned and Lenore during the period before her death. For sleuthing purposes, gossip is like freshly minted coin. If I could find someone at a given address who’d been in residence in 1961, I might strike it rich.

I sat down at an empty table and spread my books across the surface. I started with the 1961 Haines and worked my way through the alphabetical street listings until I reached Glenrock Road. Then I followed the house numbers from 101 as far as the 400s. The occupants at 461 were Elmer and Clara Doyle. Elmer owned a carpet-cleaning business. Clara was a homemaker. I flipped over to the 1961 Polk Directory and found the Doyles listed by last name, with the same address and a telephone number, which I made note of. I turned back to the Haines and jotted down the names of the neighbors on either side of the Doyles, Troy and Ruth Salem at 459 and John and Tivoli Lafayette at 465. I tried those same names in the current telephone book and found Clara Doyle, a widow, listed, still at 461. There was no sign of the Salems or the Lafayettes.