Page 21 of Finders Keepers

In the stacks, I immediately notice something I didn’t when I was younger, simply because I had nothing to compare this collection to: there is absolutely no system of organization here.

Some boxes have a word or two scribbled in faded pen on the side of the lid, but others are completely blank.

The accordion files interspersed don’t seem to be labeled at all.

How on earth does Mrs. MacDonald know what to pull?

What’s inside each? The only thing I can think of, which I’m pretty sure is accurate despite how horrifying it is to the part of me that appreciates order and best practices, is that all of the information about the Catoctin Library’s special collections is stored solely in Mrs. MacDonald’s brain.

I’m about to ask her about her organizational system to confirm my suspicions, but she speaks first. “Went to some fancy school to learn how to do this job, did ya? Where are you working now?”

“Um…” I consider lying and telling Mrs. MacDonald I’m still at Malbyrne College, the way I did when I ran into Hanako. Something—fear and awe, probably—keeps me honest, though. “I’m actually between jobs at the moment.”

“Oh, that’s good,” she says, which is a strange response. Was she maybe not listening? Is she hard of hearing? I don’t think so, considering how easily she made out Quentin’s whispering from across the room.

“Um. Is it?”

“Could be,” she responds cryptically, then points to a box on a high shelf. “That one.”

“Okay.” A step stool is already nearby, and I pull it over and climb up.

I pull the bankers box from its place while trying not to fall over.

I can’t believe Mrs. MacDonald—who must be in her eighties, at least—is still doing this.

Sure, I expected her to be here since that’s what I was used to, but I didn’t actually expect her to be here .

She’s an institution, I guess. And this place runs on pure institutional memory.

Which is impressive but also a big problem.

But not my problem. It can’t be. I don’t even live here. I’ll be gone as soon as I can catch a break and get things in order again.

Even if I did have more time, considering how challenging it was to convince Mrs. MacDonald to let me carry a box for her, I don’t think an offer to help her organize the special collections room would be well received.

She trails me to the table, as if, without an escort, I might inadvertently light the box on fire or something.

I set it down and she gives me a nod of approval.

Then she creakily ducks down and checks beneath the table where Quentin is sitting.

It’s clear, of course, but she still shoots him a warning look.

Then she shouts, “No pens!,” making us both jump an inch in our chairs, before heading back to her desk in the corner.

I slowly, carefully lift the lid on the first box, and the smell of old documents and dust increases tenfold.

“Hello, old friends,” I whisper to the contents before I remember I’m not alone. Quentin’s mouth quirks at the corner, but he thankfully doesn’t comment.

It’s what it feels like, though, being back in a library’s special collections room, digging around in a bankers box.

Like a reunion with someone I’ve missed maybe more than I ever realized.

The same way I felt with Quentin when we met on the porch that first night I was back in Catoctin, if I’m honest with myself (which I prefer not to be).

When I decided to continue in my PhD program instead of accepting the position I was offered at the historical society archives where I interned, I consoled myself with the fact that I would still be spending a ton of time working with primary sources.

But once I finished the archival research for my dissertation and it was just a matter of writing the dang thing, my funding dried up and I took the temporary teaching position at Malbyrne to support myself.

I finished my dissertation, but just barely.

Definitely no time or institutional support for jaunts to the National Archives.

My last few years have been so focused on new course proposals and serving on committees and advising while balancing a 4-4 course load that combing through a bankers box feels like a sort of homecoming.

One less imbued with the sense of failure than arriving at my parents’ house with all of my belongings, and more with the what-if-things-had-been-different wistful feeling of seeing an old lover after a long time.

I pull out the finding aid—the one that Mrs. MacDonald had me and Quentin put together “if we insisted on digging around in her things.” It was the first work of this sort I’d ever done, and looking at it now…

well, it’s far from perfect. It’s also handwritten, on notebook paper.

And why is it being kept inside the box?

At first I thought Mrs. MacDonald organized everything in a way that makes it unintelligible to pretty much anyone who isn’t her because she didn’t know better, but now I wonder if it’s because she wants to make life extremely difficult for anyone who might try to replace her. I highly suspect the latter.

“I assume this kind of thing is old hat for you nowadays?” Quentin asks, gesturing to the finding aid in my hand.

“I haven’t actually done any archival work in a while,” I say.

“But I did do a whole lot of it in grad school.” I pause, trying to decipher a spot where my description of the box’s contents smeared under my fist as I wrote.

“You know, I almost didn’t finish the PhD.

I fell in love with archival management while completing my coursework, and I had a great summer internship that turned into a job offer. ”

“What made you decide to turn it down?” he asks.

“Ah…” This is another one of those decisions that, at the time I made it, seemed extremely logical.

But now I’m not sure. It may be yet another instance of me making the wrong assumptions, focusing on the wrong things.

“My ex. Cole. He said I had too much promise as a scholar, that I wouldn’t have the resources to reach my full potential without the PhD.

My faculty adviser agreed that my work was strong enough to be competitive on the academic job market, and I, uh…

You may not realize this about me, but I enjoy a challenge. ”

“You don’t say?” Quentin grins back at me.

“I knew it would be difficult. There are way, way fewer tenure-track jobs than there are candidates for them. But I thought I could be the exception to the rule if I just worked hard enough. That I would be letting Cole down, letting myself down, if I didn’t try.”

And I did try. So, so hard, for so, so long.

But what I loved about academia was also the worst part of it: There’s no real end point.

You’re never finished. You published a paper?

Great, now get started on the next one. You won an award?

Nice, but there are still more out there to work toward.

Got a faculty position? Now you get to bust your ass until you have tenure.

Got tenure? Bust your ass a bit more and you get a promotion.

Or maybe a more prestigious university will come and scoop you up, make you an endowed chair or give you your own institute.

There is always more work you can be doing, new benchmarks to set, things to achieve.

It’s easy, I’m realizing, to fall into a trap where it feels like the work can counteract the aspects of it all that actually come down to luck or connections or institutional politics. To believe that, if you don’t succeed, it’s only because you didn’t do enough. Didn’t want it enough.

And maybe I didn’t.

“Anyway. Guess it didn’t work out exactly as I planned.”

Quentin nudges my arm very gently with his. “I’m sorry about your job.”

“It’s fine. I’ll find something new eventually, I’m sure.

It’ll all work out for the best.” If I say it often enough, maybe I’ll really start to believe it.

Right now, my best idea is to reach out to a bunch of different history department chairs across New England and hope they’re all in desperate need of an adjunct.

Even if they all came through, though, I’m pretty sure it would cost me more to commute to each university than I would be making.

At least I’m not the only one here with career problems. “What about you? Hear anything back from that firm in Chicago?” I ask.

“Yeah. They want me to do an in-person interview next week.”

“Oh. Congrats. That’s great.”

“Eh,” he says, tilting his head to the side.

“Eh?”

“I think I’m going to withdraw my application. I’m not sure I’m interested.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t think I want to do international business law anymore.

I didn’t really mean to land there in the first place.

It was just easiest to get into when I graduated, the area where I’d inadvertently made the most connections.

And I’m not going to lie and say the money wasn’t a factor.

I know my dad made peanuts working for the government.

” He stretches his arms behind him as he rocks his chair back again.

“Maybe it’s because I’m in my thirties now, and my priorities have shifted, but helping shitty rich people be shittier and get richer doesn’t feel like a good use of my time on earth anymore, you know?

” He brings his chair back down with a thud, and it makes him bite his tongue. “Ow.”

“Actions have consequences,” I sing softly, mimicking what Quentin’s mom used to say whenever he hurt himself doing something stupid. I’m surprised how quickly and easily it finds its way out of my mouth after all this time.

Quentin shoots me a look before deciding to ignore this taunt. “Besides, the partner I was talking to on the video call looked like a foot and it creeped me out.”

“He…looked like a foot? How?”

“I don’t know. His hair was all—” He gestures with his fingers upward, presumably to represent something toe-like. “It was something about the shape of his head.”

“I don’t think you should turn down a job opportunity just because a guy looks like a foot. I doubt he can help it.”

“Well, he also made a joke about a paralegal’s legs that made me feel pretty uncomfortable.”

“What the hell, Quentin. Why didn’t you lead with that?

That’s a way more legit reason than ‘he looks like a foot.’?” I nudge the toe of his sneaker with mine beneath the table.

We’re being inappropriately loud, but when I glance over at Mrs. MacDonald she’s once again staring into the distance.

Is she sleeping with her eyes open? Unnerving.

I thumb through the box and retrieve several envelopes filled with black-and-white photographs. “Well, if not Chicago with the creepy foot guy, where would you like to land next?” I ask.

“Good question,” he says, looking down at the pile of photos I place in front of him. “One I don’t have an answer for yet. I’m hoping that while I’m working on getting the house together it will magically come to me.”

Considering how lost I feel without Ambitious Nina at the helm, not knowing the exact steps ahead, it’s difficult for me to understand how he can choose to be so casual about his future, but I say, “As good a strategy as any, I guess.”

We fall into a mostly comfortable silence as we review the old pictures of Sprangbur.

These shots were taken for a feature in Life in the mid-1930s, and Fountain requested copies for his own personal collection.

They date to a few years before his death, so if we can find the portrait in one of these, that may be where it was located when his will was read.

If we don’t find Whale’s painting in any of the photos, then… Well, I don’t know what we do.

“What’s next if this doesn’t turn up anything?” I ask.

I fight off a smile as I notice Quentin sucking at the corner of his bottom lip, deep in concentration. He seems to notice he’s doing it at the same time he comprehends my question and stretches his neck instead. “I can’t believe you’re losing hope already.”

“What makes you think I had any to begin with? You know I doubt this thing even exists.”

“Don’t lie to me, Hunnicutt,” he says, finding his smile. “I saw the way your eyes lit up when Sharon said the artist’s name was Whale.” He leans in, close enough that his breath ruffles a few loose strands of hair by my ear, making me shiver. “I know you want this just as much as I do.”

“What I want is to be done with this,” I manage, only stumbling on two of the nine words in the sentence. Which isn’t bad considering the distracting heat pooled between my legs. Coping mechanism , I remind myself.

I wish someone would inform my body that this is all in my head, though, because right now it sure feels pretty much indistinguishable from being genuinely attracted to him. I squeeze my thighs together, trying to alleviate the incessant ache.

“Right.” The word—or rather, the way he says it—sounds off, but I can’t quite figure out how. It’s strangely clipped, tight. I turn my head to catch his expression, but find him staring back down at the dwindling stack of photos in front of him, once again sucking his lip.

“Quentin…”

But instead of responding he starts laughing, slowly, almost maniacally.

I’ve heard it before, and there it is, right under When he managed to extract DNA from a strawberry for the ninth-grade science fair after several failed attempts .

“Look,” he says, sliding a photo over to me.

“Nina, look. There. In the corner.” He points to the edge of the picture, where part of an ornate frame is visible.

It’s hard to tell for sure, but it looks very much like the one we saw yesterday around the portrait.

I take off my glasses and hold it closer to my face to inspect. “But where is—” I don’t need to finish the question. Because I’ve noticed the decoration on the walls.

Of course. The portrait used to hang in the freaking Star Parlor.