Parts 18-20

     “At the meeting I crashed awhile ago---”
     “Oh hush, you're more than welcome anytime!”
     I grin and continue. “Thanks. But, you guys mentioned there were a few photos of the Masons and their house?”
     “Oh! Of course! You were doing drawings, and wanted to take a look. Well, the first one is easy to find, I had a student in here a few weeks ago doing research on local architecture, so I have a folder of old building photographs handy.”
     “Susan, that was at the end of last semester – a little more than a few weeks ago, and you haven't put those away yet?!”
     “Well, it's a good thing I didn't, because Kimber wants them. Don't you go second-guessing my subconscious intuition.” Susan grins at me, and continues in a stage-whisper. “Claire thinks I'm disorganized.”
     “Because you are.” I note that Claire is still engrossed with whatever cabinet she's organizing things in. Looking around the uncluttered, neatly-labeled office, I suspect anyone would seen disorganized to her eyes.
     “I'm perfectly organized, to my mind. If I hid everything away in drawers and files like you, I'd never know where a thing was.”
     “...and exactly how is that different from the current state of things?”
     Susan has been gathering up some loose papers from the desk she was sitting at, and now stands, clutching the papers to her chest. “We're leaving now! You just enjoy your little bubble of negativity.”
     Claire waves, nothing but her hand visible from behind the cabinet. Susan giggles, and ushers me out into the hallway. “As you can probably tell, she and I have worked together far too long. There's rarely anything that needs done with any urgency around here, so we've had plenty of time to hone our bickering abilities. Passes the time, especially on these long summer days. Here we are! Someone really should have known better than to put me into an office this close to Claire's. Actually, maybe somebody did – the bulk of the archival stores used to be in the basement, until I saw what horrors the damp was doing to the old paper, and brought them up here for safekeeping. So when they hired me, I was usually digging around in the basement, until I invaded the land of the living up here.”
     “It kind of does look like an invasion,” I reply, looking around the jam-packed little office. “An attack of some kind anyway. Like the room got t.p.'d, only with precious old documents instead of toilet paper?”
     She giggles at this, cheerfully dropping her new pile of papers on top of the current piles on the desk. She leans closer to the new pile, frowns, and shuffles through the top few pages. Picks them up, and drops them onto a different pile on the floor. “That is the 'totally not important but I'll be in trouble if I don't keep' pile,” she explains. “But here, let me hand you the folder with the old house photos, and I'll go digging for the next ones you'll want to see. There's the photo of the daughter I think I mentioned to you – that'll be in the Derick Reese collection, that's in here as well. And then there are some others of the house, I think they may be in the main dated files – that will take me a little longer, since we didn't have exact dates for them, they're filed in by approximate decade I think. There may be some others of the Masons in with the people photos, I'll check there too, in case there are some that are slipping my mind just now.”
     As she's telling me all this, I stand clear as a miniature whirlwind forms in front of me. Susan lifts one stack and sets it on another, balances a third and fourth in one hand as she lifts a fifth from below them, which she maneuvers open only to frown and close back up again, putting everything back in the completely arcane positions they were in at the start. But by the time she's finished outlining her plan of attack, she's found the first of her targets. “Ah-ha!” She holds a manila file folder aloft triumphantly, then spins around to grin at me as she reaches over a particularly precarious pile to hand me the folder. “You just... well, here, you can move the pile on that chair onto the floor next to it, there's nothing fragile in there. And then you just sit down and look through there while I continue the hunt. If you find anything you'd like copied, just pull it out and set it aside. We'll just keep the individual folders out until we've made the copies, and re-filing will be no trouble.”
     “Thank you – I really appreciate all the effort.”
     “Oh please! I've been dying for a project all week. It's my pleasure.”
     I lay the folder on my lap, and open it. Inside is a large stack of photographs, some new, some old, of most of the notable landmarks around town, as well as a large number of really pretty houses. Some of them I recognize, since they're on the main streets of the town and I've walked by them a hundred times, but others I don't – I suppose they're either on side streets, or, like the Mason place, are no longer here. Some of them have been changed quite a bit as well it seems: I pause to look at one house I recognize, it's right near the college, but it looks like the house was originally only about half the size it is now. A wide, sweeping porch originally wrapped around the front and one side of the house, with a really pretty ironwork fence running along it. But that's all enclosed now, and the back of the house has been added onto, and that little balcony upstairs isn't there anymore either... It used to be so pretty, and now it's just another generic house that's rented out to students. Fortunately, most of the houses in here have suffered only slight changes – different railings and trim, different colors, porches added or removed. It's a town with a good amount of pride in its own history, and I think most of the nicer houses have all been bought up by people wealthy enough to keep them maintained. While part of me is always slightly frustrated by this – seeing perfectly manicured lawns around glorious old brick houses with turrets always makes me realize just how hopeless it is for me to want to live in one – at the end of the day, I'm still glad the houses are being taken care of. A few photos farther in, and I pause again, not recognizing it at first. Checking for information on the back, my eyes widen. No wonder I didn't recognize it! The brownish black-and-white photo shows a somewhat large house, wood-paneled, lace curtains just visible behind eight-paned windows. A man and woman stand on the front porch, which has a peaked roof above it, held up by slim but elegant pillars. Not the most extravagant building, but pretty and neat. Written in light pencil on the back of the photo are a few dates with questions marks – mostly in the early 1900s. “Clarkson Hotel, Milltown. John and Mable Clarkson?” And when I flip back to look at the photo again, a sudden flash of recognition and dismay hits me.
     I was riding my bike around one day, out exploring the edges of town. I went out farther than usual, and only realized later that I'd ended up in Milltown, the next town over. If you can call it a town anymore. I don't think there was even a stoplight, just a crossroads and maybe a dozen buildings clustered around it, every one of them in really heartbreaking disrepair. A few buildings had signs on them indicating there were businesses inside, but the paint was so faded and the windows in such rough shape, I couldn't be sure they were really still in existence. It was such a haunted and sad little town. I wanted to think of it as a ghost town, but it didn't even have that romantic distinction – there were still people living in it, too old and attached to their birthplace to leave, or too poor to be able to afford to move away.
     I stopped to look around one of the buildings a little ways out from the center of town – it stood largely on its own, probably a quarter-mile away from anything but a tiny half-collapsed shack on the other side of the street. It looked like it had been painted white originally, though it was hard to tell: Virginia creeper and kudzu were doing battle on the peeling paint of its decaying wooden walls. Though the windows were mostly boarded up, even the boards were falling off now, and I could see most of the windows were shattered. It looked like there had been a porch, I could see a few bits of wood vaguely attached to the main house, but most of it had been torn away. As I walked around the lonely old house, picking my way through the tall field grass and scrub weeds, I kept checking to see if there were any windows I'd be able to look through, to get a glimpse of what remnants might be left inside. (I'm always tempted to sneak into houses like this, but I always chicken out. Admittedly, a big part of it is just that I'm afraid of getting in trouble for it. But common sense also raises its obnoxious head; if the outside is so run-down, the floors inside are likely to be just as rotted, and even more full of snakes and God-knows-what else.)
     Though I couldn't get near enough to any of the windows to look in, there was one on the upper floor that some of the boards had fallen away from. And there was a wispy ragged bit of a curtain that had worked its way free from behind the broken glass, which caught on a breeze as it came into my view. That tiny little moment, with the ghost-like curtain waving in seeming slow-motion on the summer breeze, has always stayed with me, and the melancholy of the air around that house still makes me shiver a little.
     ...and that house was once the Clarkson Hotel, a perfectly respectable little establishment. I can see, so clearly, the woman in the picture leaning over a washboard, smiling as she hangs the crisp white curtains to dry before hanging them in the windows of the newly-opened business, just waiting for the first guests to arrive.
     I am such a goddamned sucker for melancholy history. No wonder I can't leave the Masons alone!
     I shake my head to clear it, and look up and around the office, trying to bring myself back to the present. Susan catches my eye, and smiles sympathetically at me, knowing without a word how far away I'd just been. “You should be careful with those old photos, honey. They're worse than quicksand, sucking you right down into the past without warning, and without much hope of coming up for air anytime soon!”
     “Man, you're not kidding... I'd be in so much trouble, working in a place like this.”
     “And so you see why I go down the hall and harass Claire all the time! If I didn't go and do that, I'd have long ago become one with this old desk chair – and I don't mean that in a Zen kind of way, I mean literally.” We both chuckle at this, and she points viciously at the filing cabinet she's plunged into. “I'll have the next ones for you soon, I promise. But someone put the Reese photos away, and I've had them on my desk for so long – because it seems someone is always dropping by to see them – that I'm not entirely sure where they're actually supposed to be filed. But I think I'm close now!”
     I can't help but giggle at her extreme enthusiasm over file-drawing-digging. “Not a problem – I haven't even gotten to the photo of the Mason house yet!”
     I continue on through the pile, trying to keep myself from thinking too hard about the images I'm looking at. I don't want to get sucked in again on any of these, not when the Mason place is---
     The Mason place. There it is. And though I've seen it probably a dozen times now, my heart still thumps a few loud beats as my fingers tenderly trace the edge of the photo. It's real... It was really there, and what I saw was really it. The photo was taken almost directly center in front of the house, probably in early spring, as there are no leaves on the trees, but I can faintly make out some plants just starting to sprout from the ground along the pathway. The tower on the left, the stained glass windows evident though the details aren't visible here. The pretty little arch over the front entryway. The crisp white outline of the trim against the rich brick of the walls, the geometric pattern in the bricks near the ground just discernible where the light hits it right. The apple tree in the very corner of the image – smaller than I've seen it yet – just putting out its first leaves of the season. The larger trees only just creep into the edges of the photo, their branches lacing lightly over the bolder lines of the ironwork of the front gate.
     And I can see what I couldn't make out, the night of the fire. The ironwork is indeed similar to the pattern of the fence outlining the property – with one addition. In the center, near the peak of the gate, is the outline of a fleur-de-lis, enclosing letters. It's hard to make them out, the light isn't quite right, there's a glare on part of them, but I think...
     “Longa est vita, amor aeternus est.”
     That's my best guess, anyway – I can't actually make out one group of letters, but we sang enough things in Latin in my high school choir that I can piece together the “amor” and guess at the “aeternus”. I'm not sure what the rest means. Is vita like vida, which is “life” in Spanish?
     “You don't happen to know any Latin, do you?”
     Susan pauses in her rifling, and looks over at me, puzzled. “Does Pig Latin count?”
     I hold up the photo of the Mason place, and point at the gate. “There's something in Latin. Something is eternal, that's all I can figure.”
     She comes around the desk, and gently takes the photo from me, squinting down at the letters. Then she holds the photo at a distance, and squints again. “You kids and your young eyes – I can't make out more than a few letters!”
     “I think it's something like “Longa est vita, amor aeternus est”, though I'm sure I'm butchering the pronunciation.”
     “I'd never know if you were! But we'll see if the lettering comes out when we run a copy of this for you – if not, you just write it down, and you can go look it up in those Internets you kids are so fond of.” She gives me a sly grin, and I know she says this facetiously – I'm sure she's played her fair share of Bejeweled and...whatever that Mayan-themed game is, I can't remember the name.