The leather felt cool and damp in his hand. Inlaid in gold lettering on the cover were the words Front Line Shipping Co. When he opened the large book, he saw that the thick pages had yellowed with time, but the writing and columns were crisp and clear, as if whoever had written in it was distinctly concerned with legibility and form.
“Most of these are work ledgers. They have the day-to-day information about the employees, the loads that were being shipped, and whatnot. Dominion didn’t feel the need to hold on to them after they acquired Front Line, so they brought them to us. We did a display on Front Line quite a few years back, since it was the first shipping company in this area and a majority of the people here had worked for your grandfather at one time or another.” Harold’s eyes had taken on a shine that Lance assumed came from the vast knowledge of history held within the vault of his mind.
Lance flipped through the pages, and then peered into the box. “How many are there?”
“There’s a ledger for every year the company was in business, twenty-five years in total. Back then computers were few and far between. Everything was handwritten.” Harold put his hands on the small of his back, stretching a knot there. “I figured you might want to see these, to give you a handle on the company your grandfather built.”
Lance stared down the dusty tomes before him. Perhaps something of importance lay there, nestled in the pages, written by an unknowing hand, that would shed some light on what was happening to him and why.
“Thank you, Harold. Do you mind?” Lance asked, gesturing to the table.
“Not at all. That’s why I cleared this one off. Take as much time as you need, I have urgent business to attend to upstairs.” Harold widened his eyes and poked a finger at the ceiling.
Lance listened to the older man’s receding footsteps as he disappeared up the stairway, and then looked around the basement again. The stacks of boxes and stoic objects stood motionless. He turned his attention to the first ledger he had pulled from the box. On the first page a date of June 13, 1955, was written in the upper left-hand corner. Lance breathed, turned the page, and began to read.
Lance looked up from the third ledger when he heard someone approaching down the stairs. Instead of Harold stepping in to the room as he expected, Mary’s face smiled brightly at him across the gloom of the basement.
“I didn’t expect to see you,” Lance said as she approached the table. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, which accentuated her cheekbones and thin eyebrows. He couldn’t help but look at her lips and wonder if she would lean close to him again to press them to his own.
“Harold stopped by the store a couple hours ago. Said you were down here poring over these,” she said, as she pulled a chair from a nearby table and sat down opposite him. A moment of disappointment ran through him at the lack of a kiss, but he pushed it aside, chiding himself for being immature. “Found anything so far?” she asked, peeking over the edge of the box.
Lance sighed. “Yeah. Basically the ledgers have a daily account of current employees and a lot of meaningless information like what type of shipments were on each load and departure times. So far I haven’t really been able to figure out what the abbreviations for each of the employees mean.”
Mary glanced at the ledger that lay open before Lance and flipped to the beginning, eyeing the page from where she sat. “You skipped ahead to Rhinelander’s time period, huh?”
Lance nodded. “Yeah. He was hired in 1967. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. He’s listed in the ledgers until October of 1968, just like Harold said. Other than that, I can’t see anything strange.”
Mary’s eyebrows scrunched together, and she inspected the box again. “What’s in the smaller box?” she asked, shifting her eyes back to Lance.