I let the initial media buzz lighten up and then I made an appointment to see Maggie, on a pleasant early July day that was unexpectedly cool for the season. I parked my Ford Explorer in a dirt patch in front of her large barn, next to a wooden sign painted white and black that read, BORDER ANTIQUES, and swung gently in the breeze.
As I got out of the car, three black-and-white cats came trotting out. I stood still as they sniffed my feet and lower legs, and then flopped over for a belly rub. I bent down, let them sniff my hands, and I scratched their heads and rubbed their bellies.
“Hey!”
I looked up and Maggie Branch was there, smoking a cigarette, a glass of amber-colored fluid in her other hand. She was wearing shapeless blue dungaree pants and a gray sweatshirt. Her hair was white, short and styled, and her hazel eyes had a sweet tingle about them, like she couldn’t believe the life she was now leading.
I introduced myself and she led me into her barn. The cats followed us in. The floor was made up of wide wooden planks, uneven and gapped, with lots of knotholes. There was a short wide area near the entrance, and around us were shelves upon shelves upon shelves. Up overhead there were rafters and a second floor, also jammed with shelves upon shelves.
The shelves were crowded with a mass of chaos, and you had to stare at just one at a time to bring everything into focus. That shelf with leather-bound books, that shelf with radio parts and speakers, and another shelf with shoes, and glassware, and Hummel figurines, and so forth and so on into the gloom.
Maggie stopped when she couldn’t walk anymore. We stood in the middle of four wooden chairs in various stages of repair, an old-fashioned rolltop desk, and a collection of wooden filing cabinets. Another desk was covered with papers, file folders, bowls of cat food, and dishes of water.
She sat down in a wooden swivel chair, turned around to me, and flicked some ash on the floor. “You’re probably the seventh or eighth reporter I’ve talked to,” she said. “I imagine me finding that damn Declaration will be the first line in my obit, though for Christ’s sake, I hope it’s not for a while.”
“Absolutely,” I said. “But I hope you’re not offended, your obit won’t run in Shoreline.”
Maggie cackled. “I like Shoreline. I got it for my two grandkids. One lives in Oklahoma, another in Idaho. I don’t want them or their young’uns to forget where we all came from, about their history and such.”
“Thanks for being so supportive.”
“What, you think those three subscriptions make a difference?”
“It all makes a difference,” I said, taking out my notebook and pen.
“You gonna do a story about me?”
“That’s why I’m here.”
She took another drag off her cigarette, flicked some more ash. A cat jumped up on the desk and started eating from its food bowl. Maggie leaned forward, grinned, and said, “I like Shoreline, so I’ll tell you a story. You can use it if you want. But I think it’s funnier than hell.”
I opened the notebook’s cover. “I’m always open for a funny story. Hit me.”
I had confused her. “What?”
“Sorry, tell me your funny story.”
Maggie nodded with satisfaction. “Okay, then,” she said. “I like to drive around and scour yard sales, or garage sales, or tag sales, or whatever it is that they’re calling them nowadays. Lots of time you get junk, and overpriced junk at that. Shit on a shingle, I’ll see some old G.I. Joe dolls from—”
“Action figures,” I interrupted.
“Huh?”
“The G.I. Joes, they weren’t dolls. They were action figures. Trust me, I know from personal experience.”
That made her laugh, and her laugh was so loud it made the three black-and-white cats hide for cover. When she was done she said, “Whatever you want to call ’em, I don’t mind, but you’d see these G.I. Joes from the 1960s for sale, and sure, they’re valuable, but they gotta be in good shape. And what can you say to someone who wants to sell a G.I. Joe with a missing arm for a hundred bucks?”
“But you must find some good things here and there. The Declaration, for example.”
“Yeah, and that’s the fun of it, though not as much anymore,” she said. “I used to be able to go on these long road trips, just me, a road map, and some Dunkin’ Donuts, and go out to Maine or to upstate New York, but after a while, it just got too hard. My ass and my back couldn’t handle it. That’s why I try to stick around here and there, not too far from Tyler.”
“What happened in Porter?”
“Funny thing, purely by accident. I was just puttering around, Saturday morning, just enjoying the sunshine after a nice heavy breakfast. Was feeling drowsy so I thought I’d go home, but in one of the older neighborhoods up in Porter, somebody was having a yard sale. So I stopped right away.”
“What made you stop?”
She smiled. “Didn’t you hear me the first time? It was a house in an old neighborhood. You get out to some of the newer homes, when they have yard sales, it’s mostly crap. Stuff from the 1970s—God, what a ghastly decade for fashion and collectables and politics. Anyway, at these older houses, you got nitwits who live there who either moved in, or who took the place over after grandma died. And when they try to clean out, they don’t know what they have.”
“Did you know it was the Declaration of Independence when you saw it?”
“Hard not to, with all those big letters at the top.”
I smiled back at her. “Okay, how did you know it was one of
