I drove the twenty-block width and the eighteen-block length in a grid pattern, taking in the whole of it. There was one Catholic church, St. Elizabeth’s, constructed in the style of an old California mission, which is to say, a number of rambling one-story stucco buildings connected under a zigzagging red tile roof. All of the other churches were outposts of off-brand religions. Apparently, the good citizens of Burning Oaks did not hold with the Baptists, the Methodists, or the Presbyterians.
The residential streets were five lanes wide, as generous as the commercial avenues that bisected the downtown. The homeowners seemed to favor raw board fences, picket fences, and tidy alleyways where trash cans had been set out waiting for the pickup. In addition to three mobile home parks, there were one-story frame and stucco houses of modest proportions. Neighborhoods were punctuated by tall palms, feathery pepper trees, paddle cactus, and telephone poles that listed to one side or the other, straining the overhead wires.
I stopped at the first service station I saw and picked up a local map, where points of interest had been flagged with small representative drawings. There was a library, a movie theater, and four elementary schools, a junior high school, a high school, and a community college. In addition to numerous supermarkets, I spotted a hospital, two hardware stores, a feed store, a boot museum, a dry goods emporium, coffee shops, drugstores, a retail tire business, three beauty shops, a fabric store, and a store selling Western attire. I couldn’t think why anyone would choose to live here. On the other hand, I couldn’t think why not. The town was clean and well-kept with more sky overhead than scenic wonders at ground level.
I was assuming that when Pete arrived in Burning Oaks the previous spring, he did so without the benefit of the mailing pouch. I couldn’t imagine how he might have acquired it unless he’d met with Father Xavier, who had delivered the items into his hands. Because of Pete’s preliminary work, I’d been provided with two critical points of reference: the name and address of the priest and the return address of the sender in the upper left-hand corner of the mailer.
I circled back to the library and pulled into an empty slot in the fifteen-space parking lot. I locked the car and went in, mailing pouch tucked under my arm. The one-story structure was of an uncertain architectural style that probably dated to the years just after World War II, when the country was recovering from steel shortages and throwing together new construction with whatever materials happened to be at hand.
I went into an interior made cozy with oversize paper tulips cut out of construction paper and mounted under a row of clerestory windows, like the flowers were yearning for the light. The space smelled of that brand of white library paste so many of us loved to eat in elementary school. Assorted preschoolers sat cross-legged on the floor while a young woman read aloud from a book about a bear who could roller-skate. To these tykes, the world was full of novelties and a skating bear was only one of many. Older adults, retired by the look of them, claimed the comfortable chairs along the far wall. Not surprisingly, much of the rest of the space was taken up by row after row of bookshelves, filled to capacity.
I approached the main desk, where a librarian was sorting and loading books onto a rolling cart for a return to the shelves. According to her name tag, she was Sandy Klemper, head librarian. She appeared to be fresh out of graduate school; a blonde in her early twenties, wearing a mint green sweater over a white blouse with a green-and-gray tweed skirt.
She looked up with a quick smile. “May I help you?”
“I’m hoping you have copies of the Haines and Poke Directories going back thirty years. I’m researching someone who lived here in the late fifties, early sixties.”
“We have directories starting in 1910. Genealogy?”
“Not quite. Something similar.”
“Telephone books should help,” she said. “We have newspapers on microfiche, and you might take a look at voter registration records, which are available at city hall.”
“Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind. This is my first run at the project, so we’ll see what kind of luck I have.”
She showed me to the reference section, where an entire wall of shelves was devoted to city directories, old phone books, and historical accounts of the settling of the area. “Let me know if I can be of any further assistance,” she said, and left me to my work.