“Keep a secret?”
A quick flashback to my time at the Department of Defense. “Always.”
She moved the chair from side to side with a sharp squeak. “I didn’t give a shit about the Declaration. I just liked the frame. It was old and ornate. So I picked it up and the sweet young man told me it was for sale at five dollars, and I said I’d give him two, and we settled on four dollars.”
“You bargained him down like that?”
“I’m an old Yankee trader, one of the oldest around,” she said with satisfaction. “Then, a couple of months later, I needed the frame, and I took it apart and then, well, I held the damn thing in my hand. Hard to explain, but the texture of the parchment, the scent, looking at the printing … it just … it just whispered to me. That it was much more than a later reproduction. After a couple of appraisals and a visit to a rare bookstore owner in Boston, I knew what I had.”
“And you didn’t want to keep it?”
“Hell, no,” she said.
She moved her chair over and gave a healthy kick to the wooden filing cabinets. “See that? Chock-full of papers from the Tyler family, going way back to some of the original documents from the Reverend Bonus Tyler hisself, one of the founders of our fair community. There’s also lots of other historical papers in here about almost everything to do with Tyler. Do you think it’s fun having the responsibility for holding onto something valuable like that? Christ, no. The same with the Declaration. If I had held on to it, I’d have tourists and noisy bastards—not like you, no offense—lined up all the way to the road to take a look at it.”
Maggie took a deep drag of her cigarette, dropped the butt on the wooden floor, ground it out with her heel. “This way, I could sell it, use the money for good—like local animal rescue agencies—and people could go away.”
“But what about those papers?” I asked, pointing to the filing cabinets. “Are you looking to sell those?”
“Nope,” she said. “I wanna donate them to a place that makes sense, like the historical society or the Tyler library. But those folks, they can’t promise me that they’ll be taken care of. They say they don’t have the space or resources to accept such a gift right now. Maybe one of these days.”
“Maybe.”
One of the cats suddenly jumped up on my lap and scared the wits out of me. Maggie laughed again and I stroked his back as he rotated three times before plopping himself down. I scratched his ears and cheeks and he rubbed up against me and purred and purred.
Maggie looked around her place with a mix of satisfaction and exasperation. “All this … stuff.”
I lifted my head as well. “Lots of it.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Funny … I know the attraction that comes from stuff like this. You can read history books and old newspapers, and get a feel of what might have happened in the past. But when you pick up an object, like a hat pin, or a pair of lace gloves, or an inkwell, you can hold it in your hands, you can touch it and smell it, and you realize that it’s the things that have changed. The people … not so much. Except for the loonies you get in every society, most people want to live, love, eat, and be happy.”
“Good point.”
“Even twenty years ago, or a hundred years ago, or—” She laughed again.
“What’s so funny?”
“Oh, people. Let’s say you could go back in time, say, the 1930s, and talk to a kid. Could you convince him or her that their Little Orphan Annie doll or book, that they shouldn’t open it, they should put it away for decades, because at some point it would be worth a lot of money? The kids would laugh at you. It would sound crazy. And even now, we can’t predict what will be worth something, what will be of value. For a while baseball cards were the rage, until that market collapsed. Then Beanie Babies. And metal lunchboxes. Who the hell knows what’s next.”
I looked again to the wooden filing cabinets. “But the papers in there, they must be worth something, to someone.”
“Hah,” Maggie said, reaching out to kick the cabinets again. “Sure. In there are old documents, papers, invoices, receipts, and such, concerning the history of the Tyler family, the history of the town and its historic and famous buildings, and a lot of other horseshit. You ever see horseshit?”
“Not lately,” I admitted.
“Well, when they put down those mounds of turds, sometimes you see these little birds diving in, picking out little seeds of grain. That’s what I got in these cabinets. A humongous pile of turds, and I don’t have the time or inclination to go through and pick out the seeds of information that might be useful. Shit, I have eighty years’ worth of invoices from the Tyler General Store, back when it existed and was run by my great-granddad. Who the hell wants to go through those? But buried in those invoices might be receipts for back when the place got expanded, and some historian somewhere might want to know that.”
“And they don’t?”
“The historical society has no room, the town of Tyler has no room. I’ve tried donating all this crap to various colleges and universities, and there’s no interest.”
Maybe it was the history geek in me, or my past life as an intelligence research analyst, but part of me wanted to slide by Maggie and just dive right into the files.
But I resisted the urge. “What’s it like, being a Tyler, living in a town named after your famous ancestor?”
Maggie patted her jeans pockets and whispered to herself, “Damn it, must’ve left them in the basement.” She looked up at me. “Huh? My famous relatives? Well, when they landed here in 1638, at
