Three Green Notebooks Left in a Cedar Chest on Elm Street

of the basement archives hummed like a nest of wasps at ten o’clock the next morning.

The air down there always smelled of damp concrete and crumbling glue, a scent I had lived with for thirty years at the library, but the county archives had a heavier, colder quiet to them.

Frank, the retired archivist who still kept a small wooden continue reading …