The documents in the boxes are all in folders, and the folders all have labels that were labeled long ago, but those labels do not always tell me what is in the folders. Not labeling folders is very bad, but it is not as bad as labeling folders incorrectly or ambiguously.
One box has folders about fauna:
Brown Bear Sightings 1947–1967
4-H Fair Entry Forms: Livestock
Fishing License Applications
Dog Poo Removal Reminder Signs
One box has folders about flora:
Daffodil Bulb Order Forms
Mulching Sign-ups
Elm/Hickory Grove
Tree Doctor Contact Info (Greenborough)
One box has folders about the opposite of fauna or flora which is high school:
BMHS Field Trip Permission Slips
BMHS Parking Permits, Blank
Sheet Music: BMHS Graduation Ceremony
Reorder Form: Lord of the Flies (I consider throwing this entire folder away—even though it is more accurate to say it is already thrown away by being here with me, even though its being here with me has not prevented them reordering and us having to read this book in class—which, I would argue if pressed by a library disciplinary tribunal, demonstrates that I understood the book which is about anarchy, but I would never destroy library property, even ex–library property, because my duties as a librarian are sacred.)
Some of the folders contain nothing but paperwork related to ramps. Ramp designs, ramp repair, ramp refurbishment, ramp specs, site guidelines, handrail requisition forms, ramp signage. There is an entire box on nothing but ramps.
Then I find a box of folders, each of which has a single piece of paper in it. The folders are all labeled “Request for Aid,” and there are 117 of them. The first one is dated right after what happened happened. The last one is dated right before the library closed. The others are all in between. Inside each folder is a letter from Omar telling how hard things are in Bourne, how much we need help and also money and also compensation, addressed to “Representative” or “Congressperson” or “Senator” or “Your Honor.” Each one is stamped with the word “DENIED.”
None of it is anything I can imagine Duke Templeton or Nathan Templeton caring about never mind hiding from us never mind destroyed by. I do not know what we are looking for, but I can make an assumption it is not any of this.
Aside from the paperwork, the email gives two other hints. One is Duke Templeton has to do something you cannot do in winter. One is you used to be able to in the old days.
There are no files I can find specifically about seasonal activities in Bourne so I turn instead to my books and make a pile of all the ones in my library about things you cannot do after a freeze:
Surfing
Building a deck
Swimming laps for fun and exercise
Planting tomato starts
Planting really anything (so I put all the gardening books on the pile)
Spending a day at the beach (Technically, you could spend a day at the beach even if it was freezing, but the two books I have on the subject are both mystery romance novels marketed to teenage girls, and what their protagonists do at the beach is lie topless on towels to achieve a tan, run in the sand in bathing suits with boys, bounce in the waves with a beachball, build a bonfire after dark, canoodle in bikinis, and solve crimes. While you could solve crimes or build a bonfire—to be more accurate, you would have to—if it were extremely cold, you could not do those other things without freezing to death or losing all of your extremities to frostbite which these protagonists could not because that would not make them very attractive to the boys which is their principal goal. So I put these books in the maybe pile.)
In his email, Duke Templeton says you could do whatever he wants to do anytime “in the old days,” but he does not say how old the days in question are. I consider my pile of books to see if any of the activities you cannot do in winter now you could do in winter years ago, but the only one that seems possible to me is the one about swimming laps. You cannot swim laps for fun and exercise now between Thanksgiving and March, but maybe there used to be an indoor pool and then you could. So that is what I must find out. Did Bourne use to have an indoor pool?
Bourne does not have a newspaper anymore because Bourne is too small a town to need one because nothing ever happens here, and when something does happen here everyone knows about it right away because we are such a small town. But there used to be the Herald Bourne, back when even small towns had newspapers, back before we were even alive. In the old days. Back then, there was no internet, so the Herald Bourne is not saved online, and it is also not archived on microform or microfiche like a real newspaper in a real library, but Mrs. Atholton, who was the librarian before Mrs. Watson, who was the librarian before me, saved some of the Herald Bourne’s articles by pasting them into scrapbooks and saved some of the scrapbooks by shelving them in the library as if they were actual books. Where they are now is in the pantry underneath the cereal.
I have looked in the scrapbooks but not a lot because the paper is old and the paste is old, so they are hard to read and delicate and crumble into powder if you touch them or even just sneeze too hard while you are looking (which you do because they are dusty). So I look carefully. There are a lot of scrapbooks, but I am not worried because I can skim the headlines to see if there is anything about an indoor pool or some other unlikely-to-exist-in-the-future winter activity.
What I learn is there was never anything to do in Bourne, not even in the old days.
In the winter of 1958, there was a snowman-building contest.
In the winter of 1959, there was a sled race on Baker Hill.
In 1961, there were record warm temperatures and therefore no snow and therefore no snowman-building contests or sled races.
For Christmas 1962, Bourners decorated a big tree in the middle of downtown. There was a contest for best handmade ornament. The winner was a tiny model of the space capsule Friendship 7 with an even tinier John Glenn in a tiny space suit inside.
There is no mention of an indoor pool.
In 1963, three Santas stood shoulder to shoulder to shoulder and dangled fishing poles over the river. The bridge was draped in holly and pine branches. At first I think this is an activity you used to be able to do in winter but cannot do in winter anymore. No one fishes in Bourne in winter now. No one fishes in Bourne at all now, but even before what happened happened, it was too cold to fish in winter, and the kind of fish that live in our river are sleeping or frozen or dead between Thanksgiving and March. However, the caption says the Santas were only pretending to fish which you could do any time of the year.
Then I look at the picture more closely.
It is black and white. Or, more accurately, brown and white. Or, more accurately, brown and beige because it is both faded and dirty, and not dirty in a way you can clean, though I do try, dirty like time got on it and now you cannot get it off.
But there is something very strange about this picture, and it is this: there is an extra river in it.
This cannot be.
But I check. And it cannot not be either.
And those are opposites.
The picture is fifty-five years old so it makes sense that some things would have changed between then and now, but you can see my library. You can see our very same church with its too-short, left-of-center door. You can see the bridge in between, arcing from one bank to the other. And if you look, you can see a river rushing below it.