The Lake of Dreams - Kim Edwards [39]
“It’s good to see you, Lucy. Really good. Let me know what you dig up, okay? And I’ll find out about access to the windows in the chapel. Good luck on the treasure hunt, meanwhile.”
The hallways were byzantine, one addition connected to another, but I made my way to the office without getting lost. Joanna, the secretary, was a short, stocky woman with shoulder-length hair full of streaky blond highlights. We’d been talking for several minutes before I realized she’d been a year ahead of me in school, a girl who sat next to me in Spanish class. Now she was married, with two children; her husband worked for the town. I told her the same story I’d told Suzi, about the border in the cloth and the windows, about the notes I’d found. She rummaged through a file cabinet for a few minutes but came up with nothing. “Let me check the archives,” she said, standing up and smoothing down her skirt. “That’s a fancy way of saying I need to go poke around the basement. It shouldn’t take too long.”
I waited in the office, gazing out the arched window where the branches of a gingko tree were swaying, their fan-shaped leaves rippling in the breeze, feeling restless and excited, stirred up in a way that made me think of my early days with Yoshi in Indonesia, when it was becoming clear that life was shifting, changing in some vital way. One discovery by itself—the cloth, the letters, the windows—would have been something to note and then forget, but together they raised questions about my past, which I’d always imagined to be written in stone. It was seismic, in its way, as jolting and unexpected as the trembling of the earth.
Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and then Joanna appeared, a little breathless.
“Well, there wasn’t much of a record,” she said. “At least, not that I could find right away, though I’ll try to look again if I have time. The chapel was built in the late 1930s as an extension of this church. It’s in the church history; ground was broken in April 1938. I have an idea, too, that it was funded by an anonymous donor, though I couldn’t find anything down there about that. All I found was this one receipt with the name of the artist who made the windows.”
She handed me a piece of paper with a formal heading and pale blue lines. The script was neat and careful, the prices logged in columns on the side. It made me think of bills of sale from my childhood at Dream Master, the gray steel case that held the invoice forms, the listing of purchases, all written carefully by hand, whisper-thin sheets of carbon paper layered between the invoice pages.
This invoice was dated October 6, 1938, and listed three items.
Across the bottom was written Gift, Anonymous Donor, and below that was a stamped notation of the artist:
FRANK WESTRUM, GLASS ARTISAN
ROCHESTER, NEW YORK
“Thanks,” I said. “This is really very helpful.”
“Good. I thought it might be. I’ll make you a copy. Also, I had a kind of brainstorm after you told me your story, so I figured while I was down there with the mice I’d pull the baptismal records from 1910 to 1920. Just to see, you know. We had a flood a few years ago, so there are some gaps in the records, but I thought you might want to take a look. Here.”
I thanked her and sat down on the overstuffed couch and opened the folder, inhaling its scents of dust and mildew, leafing through the ornately printed certificates, each one decorated with the delicately outlined image of a winged dove, haloed, descending toward what looked like a shell. Some certificates were water-stained, some yellowed. The old-fashioned names flashed by: Gloria, Herbert, Evan, Lloyd, Stuart, Susanna, Norman, Earl, Ivy, Bertha, Homer, Gladys, Oscar, Grace. There were no Jarretts, though I saw plenty of last names or middle names that I recognized from families who still lived in the town, or had when I was growing up—the ancestors of my classmates. I tried to imagine what it would have been like to