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quiet here, boring, but so far I’m pleased by it—it gives me a chance to forget some things which are best forgotten. This job came from the state historical society. A friend of Mother’s knew I was coming back and I think they set out to find me a useful, non-traumatic, worthwhile job and there hadn’t been a librarian here for years, not since old Mrs. Darrow, you remember her, died. So, here I am, up to my ass in books and dust, cataloguing the whole thing.” She blew smoke at the stacks. “It hasn’t been catalogued since 1925! Christ.” She laughed. “I get the feeling it’s my life’s work, penance for my sins, of which there are far too many.” She grinned again, a tense little flicker at the corners of her wide pale mouth.
    She was wearing a blackwatch skirt, a kilt actually, with a big gold safety pin, and a blue button-down oxford-cloth shirt, polished penny loafers, blue knee-socks. It was a Wellesley outfit from the late fifties, when she’d gone to college. Somehow, in the Cooper’s Falls library, it didn’t seem out of date: time had a tendency to stand still in Cooper’s Falls. That thought surfaced as I watched her and I realized it had been in my mind ever since I arrived at the great house the night before. Time was standing still and as we chatted the morning away I also realized that Paula Smithies was a very attractive woman. I could see what it had been that had drawn Cyril to her: I hadn’t even been mildly attracted to a woman in a long time and it was nice to feel it happening, however gently. There was something very pleasant about the fact that she was wearing a Peck and Peck outfit from another decade.
    After I’d finished a pipe and the coffeepot was empty, I said that I’d come back to see Cyril. I told her about the telegram.
    “I know why you’ve come back.” She had turned serious. I didn’t quite understand at first.
    “You knew I was coming back?”
    “Yes, actually I knew before you did. Cyril told me he was going to contact you, that he wanted you to come back and meet him here.” She spoke matter-of-factly, but the hints of nervousness had flowered. She stood up, lit a cigarette, and threw the matches back onto her cluttered desk top.
    “You’ve been in touch with Cyril?”
    “Oh, yes, I’ve always been in touch with Cyril, even when I was married. And after my husband’s death, Cyril was … very good to me, visited me in Los Angeles.” She stood with her back to me as if she were studying the titles on the shelves. “And last week I came across some material here at the library, stuff that had been delivered to the library in boxes when your grandfather died. Books, old things that might fill gaps in our collection of town records, Cooper memorabilia, harmless old stuff that no one had even unpacked until I got into it last week.” Finally she turned to look at me.
    “I went through those papers very carefully, not at first, but once I realized there was something … peculiar about them, something I couldn’t quite figure out.” She paced past me, around behind her desk.
    There was a vague queasiness in my stomach. I scraped ash out of the pipe’s bowl with a pipe nail, packed it again from my leather pouch. “What did you find, Paula?”
    “Well, there were some diaries your grandfather had kept, and you can imagine what they were like. Full of day-by-day comments as he traveled through Europe hobnobbing with a lot of men who have passed into history. There were comments on the Nazis, some Italians—Count Ciano, who apparently amused your grandfather, some Englishmen. There were also some letters written in German.” She looked back at me: “I don’t read German. Do you?”
    “No,” I said lighting my pipe. “I never had the proper motivation to devote much time to a study of the Germans.”
    “Well, there were what seemed to be documents, bureaucratic directives, with broken seals, and so far as I could tell they had originated in