The drug Lotty had given me knocked me out for over ten hours. I’d finally forced myself out of bed, bullied my sore muscles into bending, stretching and lifting. Even with a second espresso, I was still dopey when Alison and I got under way, nowhere near ready to fling myself in front of a herd of raging elephants.
Once we’d off-loaded the trackers, we headed for the westbound interstate. I should do all my driving errands at the crack of dawn. Traffic was starting to build, but we were all going well above the speed limit. Alison covered the fifty miles to the far reaches of the suburbs in under an hour.
As soon as we were clear of Chicago, the traffic thinned and we could check for tails. When I saw we were clean, I leaned back in the passenger seat and slept until Alison slowed for the Tinney exits some three hours later.
“Which exit?” she asked.
“Let’s start with the college,” I said. “But first, food and more caffeine.”
A billboard at the entrance to the town gave us Tinney’s population: twelve thousand and counting; told us it was home of the Alexandrine Explorers Division III hockey champs in 2003 and 2010; gave us meeting times for the local Rotary, Kiwanis and Lions clubs; listed a number of houses of worship; and extolled the beauty of nearby state parks. The sign didn’t mention Ada Byron.
Tinney lay like a long snake on a high ridge over the Illinois River. Alexandrine College, where Byron had been a library clerk, was a bulge about halfway along the snake’s middle. It was built from limestone, with the campus laid out around a square, New England style.
Alison followed signs to “Visitor Parking.” One hour for fifty cents. If the company that gouges Chicago over street parking saw this, they’d have massive coronaries when they learned that someone somewhere could park without getting fleeced.
As Alison stretched out the muscles in her neck, I watched the students—couples walking hand in hand along the edge of the bluffs, others playing Ultimate Frisbee in a nearby field. I even saw one who was reading. With the buildings glowing soft gold in the autumn sun, the place looked like a Hollywood set for a college.
I stopped a Frisbee player to get directions to the campus library. We couldn’t miss it, he assured us; it and Admin were the two oldest buildings on campus and they faced each other across the main quad. The youth gestured vaguely to the highest spot on the bluff, so we walked along the path above the river to the entrance to the quads.
The drought had turned the river into a sluggish stream. Sandbars stretched long fingers down the middle. Tree branches that had started upriver had halted in the shallows here. The banks on either side were filled with brown grass and dying bushes.
The path divided at the edge of campus, one fork following the river behind the school, the other leading into the quadrangles. Inside the quads, the grass was green. Parents pay a lot of money to send their kids to schools like this; it takes a lot of water to create a good impression.
As the Frisbee player had said, the library was easy to find. That was the first and last easy part of the day. No one in the library had heard of Ada Byron, which I ought to have realized—even if she’d worked until she was ninety she would have retired decades ago.
If I could find her home address, maybe the current owners would know something—we all leave detritus in our passing. New owners might have found diaries or a cache of nuclear secrets. The college didn’t keep old phone books, but the reference librarian said the town library might. She also said the college’s benefits office might have Byron’s address in their pension payment records.
To summarize the fruitless hour we spent being shunted from one clerk to another: as far as Alexandrine College was concerned, Ada Byron had never existed.
I pulled out Martin Binder’s photo and showed it to everyone we talked to. Had he been here, asking questions about Ms. Byron? The reaction was instructive: an imperceptible drawing back, a withholding of reaction. Martin had been here. They were protecting him.
On our way to the town library, we finally stopped for food. Alison had been too tense to eat before we left Chicago, but the long drive and the dispiriting search had given her an appetite. We found an indie coffee bar that served sandwiches and continued our quest.
It didn’t surprise me to learn that the town library had gotten rid of all their old phone books. When? Oh, the librarian said vaguely, recently, when they were debating their storage needs, what needed to go into remote storage, what needed to be kept.
“After Martin Binder came here asking for them?” I suggested, holding out his photo.
The librarian flushed and looked away, but she wouldn’t budge: she’d never seen Martin, all libraries were making difficult decisions these days.