The thread along the inner margin was loose and white.
I pulled the cover back further to inspect the binding.
Several sheets had been cleanly sliced away near the spine.
I stared at the jagged edges where the notebook pages had been cleanly sliced away.
The county archive basement smelled of damp concrete and vinegar from old microfilm.
Evelyn, my friend who retired from the records department, adjusted her tortoiseshell glasses as she laid the sixteen hundred five Latin volume on the metal table.
The leather cover was cracked like dried mud, and the heavy brass clasps scraped against the gray steel.
“Your husband spent months with this book, Clara,” Evelyn said, her voice carrying that quiet, careful precision from her university days.
“But Donald always used a fountain pen with blue-black ink.”
I leaned over the table, my silver bee pendant swinging forward against the old parchment.
Evelyn pointed to a faint pencil note in the wide margin of page forty-two.
“Look at the letters,” she said, pushing her glasses up her nose again.
“Donald had a very neat, rounded cursive, but these letters are sharp, almost aggressive.”
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I looked closer at the dark gray graphite.
“And there is something else,” Evelyn said, sliding a magnifying glass across the yellowed page.
I bent down until my forehead almost touched the paper.
Under the glass, the pencil strokes looked thick, almost heavy enough to indent the ancient rag paper.
“The ink is far too dark to have sat in a drawer for thirty years,” Evelyn said.
The letters seemed to sit on top of the page rather than pressed into it.
I touched the paper with the tip of my index finger, feeling the slight ridge of the writing.
It was raised, like fresh paint that had only just dried.
“We should compare this with his other notes,” I said.
Evelyn nodded, her face softening with that quiet loneliness that had settled over her since her sister moved to Illinois.
“Bring me the red ledger he kept for the apiary,” she said.
By two in the afternoon, the sun had cleared the top of the big barn, and Marcus was waiting on my front porch.
Marcus, my estranged nephew, had a manila envelope in his hand and was pacing the boards with a quick, restless stride.
