In the house, there was plenty of evidence of their lives. She now knew that the dusty copies of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Ethan Frome had been Lenore’s and then Beth’s. But there was no sign of how things had ended for them. And Adri was so methodical, so thorough, she knew that if anything had been left behind, a few hours would have been enough to find it.
She tried to shake the dead people out of her mind, but she couldn’t shake the mystery of them. She couldn’t help seeing them layered on the landscape around her—in the decaying bunkhouse, in the view of the abandoned farm that had once belonged to the Chiltons.
Finally one morning, Lily—seeing her thumbing through the bookshelves for more letters that might have fallen between the volumes—shuffled up behind her. “You’re like a dog with a bone,” she said.
Adri looked up at her. “I just hate loose ends. They annoy me.” There was more to it than that, but it embarrassed her to say so. And she didn’t understand herself why it mattered.
“You should try the library,” Lily said. “They have some local records that probably wouldn’t make it online.”
“This podunk town has a library?” Adri asked, disbelieving.
“Yeah, the Podunk Regional Library,” Lily offered blandly. “Off Main Street.”
The following morning, a Saturday, she followed Lily’s directions. She found her way to the library on her run, her breath puffing out behind her in the cold. It was down a street off Main that said No Outlet, its windows brightly lit in the gray morning air. She slowed and walked back and forth past the front door a few times, hands on her hips to catch her breath, and then walked inside.
Most libraries were sleek and bookless information hubs, good places to search for archived content that wasn’t online. The Huygens Library on Mars looked out of enormous windows onto a canyon, and there you could print 3D replicas of almost any landscape or house or cell structure you could find online or in the data archives, you could check out soils, or skeletons, or fossils, or Pixos that projected old concerts all around you. This place smelled like paper.
A young man came walking out from behind a desk to the right. “Can I help you with something?”
“I’m looking for information about someone who used to live in town. Catherine Godspeed. Or her mother, Beth.”
The man studied her for a second, then smiled. “You’re Lily’s cousin. The famous one.”
Adri blinked at him, surprised.
“You’re in the local paper, didn’t you know? Do you want to see it?”
“Um . . .” Adri shook her head. “No.”
The man looked slightly disappointed. He introduced himself as Steven, pulled out two chairs that stood in front of an archaic-looking machine. “I may be able to help. We have some really old microfiche that were supposed to go online but never did. Clippings from the Canaan Sentinel, local stuff. If they’re not online, they may be there. Birth announcements and public records and things like that. It’s such a small town almost everyone’s made it into the paper at some point.”
Adri sat down as Steven powered up the old machine. They scrolled back to the years that she wanted and began scanning the headlines.
As promised, there were front page articles about people’s blue ribbon pumpkins and a collision between a car and a beloved turkey. Still, most of the headlines were about the Dust Bowl:
Violent Storms Dim Capitol for Five Hours
Mayor Pleads for Government Aid
Roosevelt Blames Farmers for Dust
“Poor people,” Steven said, scrolling through one article after another. “All these investors give them incentives to move to ‘the breadbasket’ and farm the land. But the farmers don’t know that the bluestem and buffalo grass they’re tearing up is what holds the soil in such a windy place. Then comes a drought, and up goes the dirt.”
“They should have known better,” Adri said. She leaned her chin on her hand and stared at the headlines: more bad news as the years stretched on.
Dust Reaches Statue of Liberty
Roosevelt Urges Federal Relief
She relaxed into her chair, the warmth of the room making her drowsy. Then a headline blinked onto the screen, and Steven let out a pleased “huh.”
November 15, 1935: Government Offers Resettlements
The point of interest was not the headline but the caption, which lay beneath a grainy photograph of a skinny severe-looking woman standing on the front porch of the house where Adri now lived.
Mrs. Beth Godspeed is one of the many local farmers who’ve sold part of her land for government resettlement, following the deaths of her husband and daughters.
Adri sat for a few minutes in silence, feeling Steven’s eyes on her. So it was true, they had both died the year that Catherine had written in her journal, though it didn’t make any sense. Catherine had never been sick. Her heart sank.
“Would you be able to find out where they’re buried?” she asked.
“There’s nothing,” Steven said after ten more minutes of searching. “A lot of the cemeteries were private back then . . . family plots, stuff like that—nothing official.” He thought for a second. “You could put in a request at the archives in Wichita. They carry records on so many of those families—death certificates, things like that. If you wanted a death record.”
Adri didn’t think she wanted a death record.
She thanked Steven and, her chest aching, walked out into the cold, zipping her fleece over her chin.
All the way home she practiced the positive visualization techniques she’d learned in school growing up. She tried to visualize herself on Mars, doing her work, looking down on the landscape from her apartment in the dome. She wanted to be practical.
She couldn’t explain how her heart felt like rocks in her feet, weighing her down. It shouldn’t matter whether Catherine and Beezie died in the dust or fifty years later of natural causes. They’d all been dead for so long that even their grandchildren were dead.
Why should she grieve for people she never even knew?
CHAPTER 5
The sky was slate gray for the first half of November. Adri’s trips to Wichita began to feel routine, and she got more and more nervous about her one-on-one meeting with Lamont. She wanted the certainty of him signing his name to the contract and her signing her own.
In those weeks, Kansas was more bone-chillingly cold and wind-whipped than she could have imagined, but she tried to appreciate it while it lasted. There would be no seasons in the Bubble; it was always a perfect seventy-two degrees. At noon every day she started mixing an Optimal Protein shake and took the new supplement that had been prescribed for the forty-five days leading up to launch.
She drove past the Wichita Archives each time she headed in and out of the city, but never stopped.