so he’s working for tuition and car insurance money. Plus, of course, the experience he can get in the health care field, which does not seem to excite him too much most of the time. He talks about changing his career to TV anchorman, but as far as I know he’s still in health care.
Northfield has its share of oddities, from ghosts to dotty old folks, but the patient that really got to me was the white-haired guy in 226. He was weirder than all the others put together. Kenny calls him Typewriter Man. The name on his door is
Only there’s no paper in the typewriter. Ever.
And he just keeps typing away.
“What do you think Mr. Pierce is writing that’s so important?” I asked Kenny one evening, when I had delivered the supper tray through another burst of paperless typing in 226.
Kenny shrugged. “Beats me,” he said. “Why don’t you ask him?”
“He never looks up. He never stops typing, or even notices that I’m there.”
“Guess you’ll never know then, kid,” said Kenny, wheeling the laundry cart toward the elevator.
But I wasn’t willing to give up. And I had just come up with an idea that might work.
The next afternoon when I showed up for work, I dropped by my mom’s office and took about twenty sheets of typing paper from the bottom drawer of her desk. She wasn’t there at the time, and I knew she’d never miss it. Then I went upstairs to room 226, and tapped on the door before I let myself in. Mr. Pierce was asleep in front of his television, snoring gently, which didn’t surprise me, because not even weird people can type twenty-four hours a day. I tiptoed up to his desk, and stuck a sheet of paper in the empty typewriter.
“Pleasant dreams, Mr. Pierce,” I whispered as I crept away. “I’ll be back to check on you at mealtime.”
Two hours later, I was pushing the dinner trolley from room to room, tingling with excitement. I told the grandmotherly types about my history project, and I asked Mrs. Graham how her invisible husband was doing, but all the time my mind was on Mr. Pierce and his typewriter.
Finally, I reached room 226. I heard the familiar tapping sounds through the door, and I knocked once, and let myself in, calling out, “Suppertime, Mr. Pierce!” just like I always did, despite the fact that Mr. Pierce never, ever answered back.
I set the tray on the empty desk space beside the typewriter, moving as slowly as I could, so that I could see what he was typing. The paper was still in place, and it was covered with words. I didn’t have to take the paper, because I could memorize the whole thing in thirty seconds. It was the same line over and over:
I looked over at Mr. Pierce, but he was hunched over his plate, shoveling in food and ignoring me, the way he always did. I wished him a good evening, and went to find Kenny.
“He just keeps typing the same sentence,” I told him. “He’s telling someone named Alva to please come back, and he says he’s sorry.”
“Maybe it’s his wife,” said Kenny. “I wonder if she knows where he is.”
“Somebody had to sign him in here,” I pointed out.
“Maybe it wasn’t her, though. Maybe they got divorced, and his kids put him here. Maybe she misses him now. A list of his relatives would probably be entered on his records folder.” Kenny reads a lot of paperback mysteries while he’s doing the laundry in the basement. He says it keeps his mind off the ghosts. He looked at me slyly. “Of course, I couldn’t look in those folders, but since they’re in your mom’s office…”
“I’ll see what I can do,” I muttered. I felt sorry for Mr. Pierce, typing that same sad sentence day after day with no hope of getting an answer. Maybe there was hope, though.
The next evening I pushed my meal cart up close to Kenny’s trolley full of towels. “So much for your theories, Sherlock,” I told him. “I read Mr. Pierce’s folder while Mom was at the photocopy machine. She almost caught me, too! Anyhow, his wife’s name was Rosalie, and she died the year he was admitted to Northfield. They didn’t have any children, which is probably why he is here. There was no mention of anyone named Alva in his folder.”
“Has he always lived around here?”
“I think so. Why?”
“You could ask one of the local old ladies if she knew Mr. Pierce before he came here, and if there was ever anyone named Alva in his life. It’s not a very common name. Sounds old-fashioned to me.”
I couldn’t think of any better idea, and Mr. Pierce certainly wasn’t talking, so the next evening when I delivered the meals I got into a conversation with all the residents who weren’t gaga. I asked if they’d always lived around here, and then asked about Mr. Pierce. It was Mrs. Graham who knew him from the old days.
“Francis Pierce!” she said, smiling. “Yes, we’ve known him forever, haven’t we, dear?” That last remark was addressed to the invisible (deceased) Mr. Graham, and I am happy to say that he did not reply.
“Well, do you know of anyone called Alva that he once knew?”
“Alva Pierce. I hadn’t thought about her in years. It was front-page news at the time, though.”
She knew! I almost dropped the tray, which wouldn’t have mattered, because it was Mr. Graham’s and he still hadn’t come back from the Hereafter for spaghetti and Jell-O, but still it would have been a mess to clean up, and suddenly I felt I needed every minute of extra time I could manage. “Was Alva his wife, then?” I asked, trying to sound polite and casual about it.
“No, dear, his sister. Such a sad thing. People did wonder if it was murder-” She looked up at me then (or maybe Mr. Graham tipped her off) and she realized that she was about to talk scandal to a twelve-year-old kid. She smiled at me and said, “Well, never mind, dear. It was a long time ago, and I expect you have a good many meals to deliver.”
I could see that I wasn’t going to be able to talk her into finishing the story, so I went back to delivering dinners, but my mind was going ninety miles an hour, trying to figure out another way to find out about Alva.
“You seem preoccupied tonight, young man.” It was Mr. Lagerveld, who was a really nice guy, even if he didn’t care too much for the food. I could tell he was in no hurry to get to his spaghetti. He had been a college professor years ago, and I liked to talk to him anyhow. I was thinking:
“I have to do some research,” I told him, as I set his tray down on the table, and rustled up his silverware. “It’s for school. It’s about something that happened around here about sixty years ago, and I don’t know how to go about finding the information.”
“Sixty years ago? The Great Depression?”
I shook my head. “A local thing-like a person got kidnapped, or something.” I was guessing about the time and the event, but I thought I had the general idea anyhow.
“Have you tried looking in the newspapers?”
“How would I find a sixty-year-old newspaper? They’d fall apart, wouldn’t they?”
He sighed. “No wonder my students couldn’t do research. What do they teach you these days? How to feed your hamster?”
“We use encyclopedias to look up stuff, but there wouldn’t be anything local in the
“That is correct. So you need newspapers. So you go to a library, and you ask the nice librarian for the microfilm. You see, they put old newspapers on microfilm, so they won’t fall apart when grubby-handed kids use them to do history reports.” He sounded gruff, but he was grinning at me, and I think he suspected that what I wanted to find wasn’t an assignment for school.
“Microfilm. The public library will have papers from sixty years ago?”
“I hope so. Our tax dollars at work, young man. Good luck with your investigation. And if you ever have a question about geology-that I can help with.”
I had to wait until Sunday afternoon to see if Mr. Lagerveld was right about the microfilm. Since I didn’t have a date to go by, I knew I was going to have to scroll through about ten years’ worth of newspapers to see what happened to Alva. I just hoped Mrs. Graham was right about the story being front-page news.
