Sharyn McCrumb - Foggy Mountain Breakdown and Other Stories

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: If I can just word the question right, maybe Mr. L. can help me .

“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 Britannica .”

“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.

Mom was delighted to take me to the library for a change, instead of to the video store, which is my usual Sunday afternoon destination. I told her I’d be a couple of hours getting material for my report, and she gave me a dollar’s worth of change for the photocopy machine and went off to the grocery store, happy in the knowledge that her kid had suddenly become so studious. I hated to disappoint her. I’d try to score a few A’s on the old report card to bolster her faith in the new me. Meanwhile, I had to find someone named Alva.

While I was waiting for Sunday to roll around so that I could check the microfilm newspapers, I had tried to figure out a way to narrow down the search time to the smallest possible number of years. I looked up Mr. Pierce’s age in his record file. He was seventy-five. That meant that he was born in 1920. But Mrs. Graham remembered the case, and she was only seventy-one. I figured that she had to have been at least seven years old to remember a local tragedy-which meant that 1931 was the first year I planned to search. Mr. Pierce would have been eleven years old. I didn’t know if Alva was his younger sister or an older one.

The librarian was very helpful. She showed me how to use the microfilm machines, and she showed me where the reels were kept, all carefully labeled by month and year. I started with January 1931 and flipped through day by day, reading the headlines of each front-page story. An hour and a half later I was in June of 1932, and there it was: LOCAL GIRL MISSING: BELIEVED LOST IN WOODS. There was a drawing of a pretty girl who looked about eight years old. The story said that Alva Pierce had followed her big brother Francis into the woods, where he was playing with two other boys. They ran off and left the little girl, telling her to go back home. When they came out of the woods at suppertime, they discovered that little Alva had not returned home. The boys, their parents, and the whole neighborhood searched the woods, calling for the little girl, but she was not found. I kept checking the newspapers, day after day, to see what happened to Alva Pierce. One day they brought in dogs. Another day they questioned everybody who had used the nearby road that day. After a week, the stories got smaller and smaller, and they were no longer on the front page. Finally the stories stopped altogether. Alva Pierce had never been found.