Page 63 of To the Grave

I gave him my name and my dad’s address and a few minutes later we were being ushered into the basement.

“The building is too small to house the microfiche upstairs,” the librarian said. He hadn’t introduced himself and he wasn’t wearing a name tag.

“This is fine.” What I didn’t say was that it was probably better. I’d become more than a little paranoid over the past few months. Someone in Blackwell Falls had sent the letter to my office (now you will learn) even after the Beasts had killed Calvin, and someone (the same person?) had set fire to the building on the Blades compound.

Other than the Beasts and Cassie and Sarai, I didn’t know who I could trust, so it seemed best to trust no one at all.

The librarian led us to a bank of machines that looked like desktop computers except they were a lot smaller and a lot older than any computer I’d ever seen up close.

“Take a seat,” he said. “I’ll get the microfilm. You said you were looking for archived copies of theBulletin?”

“Yep,” I said. “Maybe five years’ worth starting in 1990?”

I was just guessing, but we could always expand our search later.

“Let’s see…” The librarian made his way to the shelves that lined one side of the room. These ones weren’t made of wood like the ones housing the books upstairs. They were metal, utilitarian.

He returned a couple minutes later and set down a box, then reached inside and started threading something that looked like old camera film into the machine. He turned it on and a black-and-white image filled the display: the front page of theBlackwell Bulletindated January 1st, 1994.

“Just move the knob here to see the next page,” he said, demonstrating. “When you get to the end of this film, you can load another one by threading it in here.”

He popped open a little door and showed us where the film was loaded.

“Can we use two machines at once?” Wolf asked. “Get through them faster?”

“Sure.” The librarian turned on the machine next to the one I’d be using and handed Wolf a roll of microfilm. “Let me know if you have any questions.”

He headed for the stairs and I turned back to the microfiche machine and started scrolling as Wolf fed the first roll of film into his machine. A couple minutes later we were both engrossed in the images flashing in front of us, a sea of black-and-white headlines.

It was slow going. We were looking for a mention of June Meynard or the Blackwell Home for Boys, the foster home where Arlo Kane and Michael White had been raised. We didn’t know if that mention would be in a small article or a big one or if it even existed at all. We’d looked it up online and had come up empty. We didn’t even know the address, which meant it could have been any of the old homes in Blackwell Falls.

“I wish we had more,” Wolf said.

“Same,” I said. “This feels like a needle in a haystack.”

I passed articles about local elections and fundraisers, small-business closings and manufacturing layoffs. There was an article about the last showing at the Orpheum (The Freshmanat 9:45 p.m.) and one about the Blackwell High football team placing third in the state finals.

I finished my first roll of film and dug through the box for the next chronological roll. Feeding it into the machine was oddly satisfying and I got a hint of why Otis liked working with his hands. Everything we did in the modern era happened with thetouch of a button or screen. There was something tactile about the old-school microfiche machine, the threading of the film, the turning of the knob.

I started to see Blackwell Falls’ renaissance in the third roll of film. Now there were new businesses coming to town and an infrastructure project to repave Main Street. There was an announcement about a grant to install matching green awnings to the storefronts and replace the rusted street signs with new ones made to look old-fashioned along with matching streetlamps that would mimic the ones that had lined the streets in the 1800s.

And then, on the front page of an issue from March 1992, a picture of a Victorian house in flames along with the headline: BLACKWELL HOME FOR BOYS GUTTED BY FIRE.

“I’ve got something,” I said, already scanning the article.

Wolf stopped scrolling and leaned over to look at my screen. “Is that it?”

A fire broke out at 34 North Elm Street at the Blackwell Home for Boys at 1:02 a.m. Friday morning. Fire services were called to the scene by a neighbor who spotted flames in the ground-floor windows.

The fire spread quickly and neighboring fire services were called to assist, but the fire accelerated quickly, leaving the building a total loss.

The foster children housed in the building escaped harm but the owner and guardian of the boys, June Meynard, perished in the fire.

An investigation is ongoing.

“This is it,” I said, my pulse racing as I tried to take it all in.

“An investigation?” Wolf, still reading, had scooted his chair closer to mine. “They thought it was arson?”

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