‘Kim’s office is down the hall and to the right,’ Fran told me once Sam indicated we were free to go.
Although the courthouse was not particularly large, our footsteps echoed along the marble corridor. We passed the courtroom on our left and a library on our right, both with double, elaborately carved wooden doors.
Kimberly Marquis’s office adjoined the library. Behind a door with a window labeled County Clerk in gold capital letters we found her sitting at her desk, an impressive affair of solid oak. She rose immediately when we entered. ‘Fran.’ She smiled.
‘This is the woman I’ve been telling you about, Kim. Hannah used to work for me in Washington, D.C. She and her husband have just bought the old Hazlett place.’
‘So I heard. I don’t usually dress like this for the office,’ Kim explained with a grin, indicating the T-shirt, jeans and jogging shoes she wore. ‘But court isn’t in session, and since we’ll be mucking around in the basement, I thought I’d better come prepared to get grubby.’
She retrieved a small ring of keys from the top drawer of the desk and led us back out into the hallway. ‘We have coffee here,’ she said with a grin, indicating the carryout cups we carried. ‘For future reference.’
Our first stop was a room labeled Staff Only. Inside were three bistro-style table and chair sets, a full-size refrigerator and a microwave. Two well-worn leather armchairs were angled into an alcove, both bathed in sunlight streaming in from lead-latticed casement windows. Kim punched a series of buttons on a state-of-the-art hot beverage machine which began to gurgle and hiss, eventually producing a puff of steam and a perfectly brewed cup of herbal tea. We sat at one of the tables discussing our plan of attack, then tossed our used cups into the trash.
Kim jangled the keys and asked, ‘Ready?’
‘I feel like we’re off on a secret mission,’ I said as Kim led us into the hallway. ‘Perhaps we should synchronize our watches?’
Kim turned to face me and chuckled. ‘You think you’re joking, but when you see what’s down in the basement you may be sorry you volunteered.’ She waggled her eyebrows. ‘Remember, if you are captured or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.’
Just past the restrooms, Kim paused at an unmarked door, unlocked it with one of the keys and motioned us through.
From a postage stamp landing a narrow stone staircase descended. Although she had flipped a switch at the head of the stairs, the staircase remained dark. Kim swore softly, then started down. ‘Where is Frau Blucher and her candelabra when you need her?’ she said.
‘Frau Blucher!’ I hooted, then whinnied like a horse.
Behind me, Fran mumbled, ‘I don’t get it.’
‘It’s from a movie,’ I explained while gripping the railing and trying not to stumble. ‘Young Frankenstein. It’s hysterical.’
‘Oh,’ she said, not sounding the least bit amused.
The further down the staircase we went, the cooler, damper and mustier the air became. At the foot of the stairs the room opened out, but it was hard to see what it contained as the only natural light came from narrow windows cut, slit-like, into the stone walls near the ceiling.
Kim felt around on the wall like a blind man, muttering about another switch. After a moment, two unshaded bulbs screwed into sockets in the ceiling sprang half-heartedly to life, only marginally improving the visibility. ‘Sorry,’ she said, squinting at us in the semi-darkness.
‘Can’t the town afford one-hundred-watt bulbs?’ I asked as I strained to see something – anything – in the shadowy corners.
‘You’d think,’ Kim replied. ‘Sadly, I brought these bulbs in myself.’ She leaned closer to me. ‘Hundred-watters, too.’
As my eyes grew accustomed to the dim light, I noticed that the stone walls had once been whitewashed but were now mottled, shedding paint like skin that’s been badly sunburnt. A row of steel shelving ranged along one wall. On closer inspection, I found they were covered with artifacts – pottery shards, glass bottles, coins, rough-cut nails – likely from an historical dig. A stack of poster boards leaned against the wall nearby. Stick-on letters, some of them peeling off, spelled out TOB CCO HO SHEAD A D PRISE. A shelf opposite held economy-sized packages of paper towels and toilet paper, and several boxes of heavy duty lawn and leaf bags. ‘The storeroom’s over here,’ Kim said, making a hard right turn around a tower of nested trash cans.
‘When I first came down here,’ she explained, ‘I couldn’t even get the door to the storeroom open. Had to get the custodian to remove the hinges.’
The door looked solid. Six wooden panels secured with an impressive padlock. Kim opened the lock with a key, hooked the hasp of the padlock onto a convenient nail then yanked the door open. ‘The custodian cleaned up the hinges, oiled ’em and so on, but they’re still a bit stiff.’
As the door swung open, I was hit by an unmistakable smell. Mold.
Like a mother protecting her child, Fran’s arm shot out, preventing me from entering the room. ‘Wait!’ She delved into her handbag and came up with a small box of latex-free vinyl gloves and a Ziploc bag containing surgical face masks. ‘Put these on,’ she instructed. ‘Kim, you, too.’
‘Where…?’ I began, accepting the mask. I positioned it over my nose and mouth and looped the strings over my ears.
‘Walgreens,’ she said, offering me the box of gloves.
Over Fran’s shoulder, Kim made a face but accepted the mask and gloves, as I did, with a tolerant grin.
We suited up and entered the room.
Just inside the door, Fran stopped so suddenly that I barged into her. I immediately saw why. The floor was littered with file folders, the papers they had once contained scattered over the floor. Boxes that had been stacked five high in one corner had collapsed, spilling their contents everywhere.
‘Is there no humidity control?’ I asked.
‘None,’ Kim admitted, sounding sheepish.
‘Jeesh!’ I said. ‘What moron thought it was a good idea to store documents in here?’ I stepped gingerly around a Seagrams 7 carton so damp that mold grew on it like a garden, fuzzy tendrils reaching out, swaying in the air as I passed. I lifted a corner of it gently with the toe of my shoe. ‘This box is from a liquor store. Haven’t they heard of archival boxes?’
‘Sad, isn’t it?’ Fran commented.
Kim pointed. ‘Over there. That’s the worst of it.’
Against the far wall, under a run of various-sized galvanized pipes, once-handsome wooden shelves sagged under the weight of several dozen leather-bound ledgers, quietly rotting.
‘Oh, no,’ I groaned.
‘That’s where the air conditioning leaked,’ she said. ‘The stuff over on this side isn’t so bad.’
I climbed over two broken desk chairs and circumnavigated a teetering pile of National Geographics in order to take a closer look. The volumes were in no particular order but the spines that remained were inscribed lien records and chattel mortgages. There was a book bound in red with no writing on the spine and several cloth-bound cross indexes of land transactions. One book of liens, I noticed, was shelved upside down.
‘They’ve shoved the books right up against the damp stone,’ I said in disbelief. ‘Lord, what a mess.’
I touched one of the ledgers, saddened that its once elegant leather binding had been reduced to red dust. ‘May I?’
Kim nodded. ‘Of course. Hard to see how you could mess it up any more than it already is.’
Without touching what little remained of the book’s spine, I carefully removed it from the shelf then cast around desperately for a place to lay the heavy volume while I examined it.