John turned and surveyed it for a moment. “Well, I think it was about 1990. It was the second or third owner that built it after your grandparents lived here. Why?”
“Just wondering,” Lance said, as he reached to remove his cell phone from his front pocket, where it buzzed like a trapped hornet. The number didn’t look familiar but he answered it anyway.
“Hello?”
“Lance? It’s Harold. You told me to call if I found anything. Well, I just remembered something that might interest you. Can you stop by sometime later today?”
“I’ll be there in half an hour,” Lance said.
“Great, I’ll see you then.”
Lance thumbed the phone off and brought his attention back to John. John’s eyes were locked on the house. Lance followed his gaze. The front face of the building wasn’t as oppressive or menacing in the morning light reflecting off its many windows and slanted surfaces, but it still made him want to avert his eyes.
“Looks like it’s waiting, doesn’t it?” John asked, his eyes glazed over.
Lance looked at him, finally realizing what else was missing from the old man: the smell of liquor. Lance turned his head and stared at the house for a long time.
“Yes, it does.”
The historical building had only one man perusing its glass cases and cluttered tables when Lance made his way through the door. The man, who could’ve passed for Walter Cronkite’s older brother, gave Lance a short look over one shoulder before returning his attention to a display regarding the Korean War and the veterans from the surrounding area who had fought in it. The rear door leading to the kitchen opened as Lance neared it, and Harold stepped out holding an armful of papers.
“Oh good, you’re here,” Harold said, turning in a few semicircles while searching for a sufficient place to set his armload. After resting the towering pile of documents on an unsteady three-legged stool, the older man turned and smiled at Lance the way an archeologist might after finding an undiscovered artifact buried beneath his porch. “Follow me.”
Harold led him through another doorway in the main display room. A narrow hallway followed, and then they twisted left and down a flight of steep carpeted stairs. The steps emptied out into a wide basement that spanned the entire area of the building above them. The ceiling felt low and was sparsely lit with random banks of fluorescents every few yards. Each wall was fronted with towering shelves that held box upon covered box. A few folding tables were set up here and there, their surfaces covered with books and photo albums. Several shrouded pieces of artwork were stacked against the far wall, and Lance could even make out a row of early-model bicycles leaning on their kickstands in a shadowy corner off to his right.
“This is our archival space. Any prior displays or information that isn’t pertinent to the public gets put here,” Harold said, walking to a shelf a few steps from the edge of the stairs. He hoisted a box from the bottommost shelf and hobbled over to a small table that had been cleaned.
Lance approached the table as Harold lifted the cover from the box. Inside were dozens of leather-bound ledgers and a separate box no larger than a dictionary. “We received this from Dominion Inc. about twenty years ago. Dominion was the company that bought your grandfather’s shipping line after he died,” Harold said, lifting a ledger out of the recesses of the box and handing it to Lance.