Spirits

By Michael Jesse

Chapter 33

Jack dropped off the package first thing Monday morning, but he didn't see Millie in the library. He asked one of the other librarians to show him the photo files on the Pembroke Theatre, especially any showing the performers from the 1920s.

He sat at a table going through the photos, and then he stopped at a group photo showing several women. The original published caption was pasted to the back of the photo, and he saw the name Louise Mayfair. He had brought with him the 1931 photo of his grandmother, and he compared the two. He would not have guessed it was the same person, less than ten years apart, but the shape of the eyes and facial features were close. Most importantly, both women had a mole in the middle of her left cheek.

He looked through all of the other photos, and found one other with her in it – and this one showed her with her Bertie Blaine. He wore a straw hat, and had a waxed mustache. Jack had already checked the index files for Blaine's name, but found nothing beyond what he had already found under his grandmother's name. There was no way to know whether it was just a stage name.

He filled out a library research form listing all of the names of the dancers in the first photo, plus Blaine‘s name. He was requesting a people-finder search on each of the names. He knew it was likely that most were now deceased, since they would all be in their 90s, and some of the names could just be stage names or maiden names. Still, it was worth a try. Plus, he knew all these requests went through Millie, and he hoped she would see it and decide to do the research herself.

At lunchtime, Jack got a sandwich out of one of the vending machines and walked across the street to the park and sat at their usual bench. He knew if she looked out the window from her office, she could see him, and he hoped she would come out. But she didn't.

After a lonely lunch hour, he stopped at the library again but still did not see her. His research request had been completed by someone else, and, as expected, most of the people were either dead or not findable. But, there was one hit — Evangeline Catherwood -- "Evie" in the photo caption -- now age 94 and living in a nearby town a short drive away. Back at his desk, he called the current phone number, and it was answered by a younger-sounding woman. He identified himself and explained that he was working on a historical story about the Pembroke Theatre and was trying to track down people who used to work there back in the day. He was cautious about saying the person he was looking for had been a dancer, just in case she had not shared that information with her children.

"Oh, Granny talks about that place all the time," the woman said excitedly. "I swear she remembers those days better than she remembers anything that happened yesterday. I'm sure she would love to talk to you."

That was encouraging, Jack thought. After some further conversation, plans were made for Jack and a staff photographer to visit Mrs. Catherwood the following morning. He had other work he needed to do, and stayed busy at his desk the rest of the day — though he intended to find some excuse to walk through the library before 5 o'clock.

It was getting near that time when he looked up to see Millie coming toward him through the newsroom. His instinct was to assume she was coming to see someone else and would walk right past him. But she stopped in front of him, and said quietly, "Jack, could I talk to you a minute in private?"

Hoping that his letter had had a positive effect on her, Jack followed her to an alcove at the back of the big room. "Thank you for dropping off that package this morning," she said. "I haven't had a chance to open it yet because it's been such a busy day. I wanted to talk to you about something else."

She had a piece of paper in her hand. "One of the things we routinely do in the library is to check the clip files for the names of anyone who died that day in case there's something notable in their past that should be in the story."

Millie handed him the paper, and he looked at it. It was a printout of a traffic accident story about a pedestrian who had been struck and killed while walking across the street on the near east side. The name of the deceased was John Goddard.

"I'm sorry," Millie said, her eyes brimming. "I know you weren't close to him, but still."

"Thank you," Jack said, suddenly feeling weary, and handed the paper back to her. He felt angry at her, not for delivering this news but because it apparently took something like this for her to be willing to speak to him again. He could have repeated to her what he'd said before — that this man with the same name and DNA was a stranger who meant nothing to him — but he decided not to give her anything, and just stared back at her without showing a hint of emotion.

She looked back at him for a few seconds, and he tried to see in her expression what she might still feel for him, but he could not tell. Then she looked down and said, "I just thought you should know." She turned and left.

After waiting several seconds, Jack left also, and he managed not to look at her as she walked away through the newsroom. At his desk, he quickly completed what he needed to finish, then grabbed his jacket and briefcase and left the building.

Although he had a lot to drink the first part of the weekend after things fell apart with Millie, by Sunday night, Jack had cut back, and on Monday morning had decided he was going to drink much more moderately going forward — regardless of what happened with Millie.

At this moment, however, he wasn't thinking like that anymore. He was angry and confused and sad, so he walked straight to one of his favorite bars. After two double vodka tonics, he paid up and walked to a second favorite bar and did the same. Then he went home to drink his own alcohol and sit on his chair, looking out at the city. The chair made him sad too, and he decided he would get rid of it if he and Millie did not get back together.

As for the news of his father's death, Jack wasn't sure what he felt, or should feel. He had only met the man once, and that didn't exactly go well. He had not bothered to even think about whether or not he might want to see him again, because he assumed there was plenty of time for that. Now there wasn't. But so what? If that name had not shown up on the people-finder report, he never would've known his father was in the city, and he might not have noticed some little accident story in the paper about a pedestrian getting hit. Of course, they did have the same name, so chances are someone would've mentioned it to him. Would he have felt differently then, if he had never seen the name, never gone to that apartment, never met him at all?

He remembered what Millie said about God perhaps being like that — having the knowledge and the power and caring about us at some level, and yet being himself flawed or damaged in some way that prevented him from helping us the way he otherwise might. It was hard to think of God being that way, but obviously anything was possible. He knew people sometimes imagined God as some kind of cosmic scientist who created humans in his lab as an experiment. And maybe that scientist had his own problems interacting with the other god-scientists who had their own projects. Maybe our god-scientist was bad at his job and was about to be fired from the prestigious God-Scientist Institute because all he did was wait for his Creation to track him down and knock on his door. Or maybe the beautiful red-haired god-scientist in the lab next door had recently broken up with him, and he had just been too distracted to do his job very well for the past millennium or two.

Jack made a fresh drink and found an old movie on TV, but he didn't see much of it. He woke on the couch at 10 PM, the apartment nearly dark because he had not turned on any lights. He went to the bathroom and came back, noticing that his laptop was open on the desk. He didn't remember using it and went over to see what was on the screen. It was Molly's site, and he could see that "Molly" had replied to the string of comments about the most recent chapter.

Jack couldn't be sure if he'd written that himself. Molly had, after all, surprised him a few times before when he drank too much. Yet, he couldn't have because Millie changed the password, or had she? He had never actually tried it since he'd given it to her. Maybe the typing he heard was just her writing it down. There was only one way to test it. He tried logging in, but as he expected, his old password was rejected. That must mean Millie wrote the post, and therefore what she said about Jaye was really about him -- that she had broken up with him because of his dishonesty.

Jack's login attempt caused the site to reload on his browser screen, and as it did so, he saw that Millie had just made another reply. The question was "How are things between you and Jack? Have you become a couple?" Uh-oh. Jack had tried to bury that topic, but readers kept bringing it up now and then. He wished he had somehow installed a breathalyzer on his computer so he could not post as Molly when he had too much to drink. It was one of several posts he had no memory of making, but he had been stuck with it ever since. He dreaded what Millie would say about this.