Old World Murder - Kathleen Ernst [82]
“Name files are in those drawers,” the worker said, pointing. “I’ll have to pull the Dahl stuff for you.”
While the Dahl photographs were being fetched, Chloe thumbed through the “H” names file. Harrod … Hart … yes! She pulled the folder labeled “Haugen” and parked at a table.
“Hey!” The student worker’s voice over her shoulder was accusing. “You’ve got to wear gloves!”
“I haven’t touched any photos yet,” Chloe observed mildly, but she dutifully pulled on a pair of cotton gloves from the pile left out for patrons.
At first glance, the file appeared to contain only images of one Nils P. Haugen: a ferrotype of Nils as a young student, several carte de visites of Nils as a young man, a cabinet card of Nils in middle age, one black and white photograph taken in 1945 of Nils in his living room with his wife and two daughters, the latter in Norwegian folk dress. Chloe turned that one over and found an inscription: Nils P. Haugen, First Tax Commissioner of Wisconsin.
Chloe leaned back in her chair, considering. As she’d told Roelke, the elusive ale bowl might be especially valuable if it was known to be made or owned by someone famous. Did being the first tax commissioner of Wisconsin qualify as famous? Only to a very select minority, surely. “This is just too weird,” she muttered, earning another frown from the tattooed student.
At the bottom of the file she found the only Haugen image that did not belong to Nils P., a poor-quality photocopy of what might have originally been either a retouched daguerreotype or an oil painting. It showed the head and shoulders of a stern man dressed in a black coat and white shirt, with a long gray beard. Late 1890s, she guessed, although she was better at dating women’s clothing than men’s. Some helpful soul had blithely scrawled “Halvor Haugen” across one corner of the image.
Was Halvor Haugen an ancestor of Berget’s? Without full genealogical information, it was impossible to know.
This is a complete waste of time, Chloe thought. Still, she made photocopies of both Halvor and Nils P.’s likenesses before moving on. The girl had wheeled a cart stacked with gray file boxes from a back room … boxes and boxes and boxes.
“These are all Dahl photos?” Chloe asked.
“All Dahl photos.”
Geez Louise. Mindful of the ticking clock, Chloe began quickly scanning the photographs.
Soon her back and her eyes joined her head in aching solidarity. The curator part of her brain was impressed by the rich visual documentation of southern Wisconsin in the 1870s. The other part, the part that desperately wanted to understand Berget Haugen Lund-quist’s and Bill Solberg’s deaths, was completely frustrated. Andreas Dahl had photographed many Norwegian-American families in front of their homes, but the vast majority were posed only with mass-produced, American-made belongings. Women in bustle dresses sat at sewing machines, men stood proudly beside new-fangled reapers, children played croquet. We are American now.
Only a handful of images held any hint of the old country: a Norwegian flag flying over a house or excursion boat, a family that had posed for “before” and “after” photographs (one standing in front of a small log cabin, the other in front of a beautiful frame home), and several portraits of women wearing decorative, obviously old-country collars. Chloe photocopied these for Nika, so the afternoon wasn’t a total waste. But she’d seen nothing she could identify as an ale bowl, much less the ale bowl.
“Thank you,” she said to the student. “I’m through with these.”
“Be sure you sign out!” the girl called after her, vigilant to the end.
Chloe picked up the clipboard and wrote down the time she was leaving Iconography. It had been a quiet day in the photo archives, she noticed. Only one other person had used the collection, someone who’d marked their interest as “Iron Brigade.”
Then Chloe went very still as she registered