Witness in Stone | Chapter 5

As Thanksgiving approached Kate yielded to her promise, grabbing a pair of white cotton gloves from her desk drawer and heading over to town records on an early lunch break. The cramped office was more dimly lit than expected; the tiny foyer illuminated only by dust-dappled sunlight streaming in through a transom above the entrance doors. Walls covered with vintage maps and photographs stretched back to a vanishing point somewhere beyond the far wall, obscured by shadow, and giving the space the feel of a narrow tunnel. A long reception counter was manned by a stern-faced clerk; her jet black beehive hairdo and orangey-red lipstick reminiscent of a badly weathered Halloween decoration.

An oak desk, too large for the space, sat in the back of the room and was occupied by an older, long-faced man huddled under an ancient desk lamp. He did not look up as she entered, instead burying his face further into a large book laid out before him. There were no computer terminals or modern phones in sight. Kate felt as if she had stumbled into a museum diorama: American Business Office circa 1930.

Her inquisitive look drew the ire of the old woman, “Yes, what is it!? What do you want?!”

“I’d…I’d like to get some information, if I could, about the cemetery, please.”

“Which one?” barked the clerk, “There are two in town; the old one up on the hill, and the new one out on Route 30,” she said, deftly morphing her tone from annoyed to mocking in a single sentence. It was a stunning feat of linguistic acrobatics.

“The older one in town,” squeaked Kate, embarrassed now by her mere existence.

“Exactly what kind of information are you looking for?”

Kate was taken aback by the attitude, forgetting momentarily why she was even there. “Umm…I…I was hoping…I mean…are there by chance any maps or charts of the gravesites? A list of the people buried there maybe? I had some questions about the monuments,” she managed to say while flipping through her notebook for the maps Becca had drawn during her visit.

“What kind of questions?” growled a gruff voice. Kate looked up startled to see the old man now scowling at her from across the counter next to the deflated Halloween decoration lady; the two of them a ghoulish take on American Gothic. 

“Just some questions. I don’t understand. They are public records, aren’t they?”

The man’s stare bore holes in Kate for several seconds before he silently nodded his permission to the clerk. He returned to his desk with a huff, picking up the phone as he plopped himself down in the squeaky office chair. The clerk appeared back at the counter with a large ledger telling Kate she could use the table nearby but the ledger could not leave the office and no photocopies were allowed. “The light from the machine damages the pages over time,” she added in response to Kate’s obvious follow-up question.

Kate situated herself at the too-small table pulling out her notebook and phone.

“And no flash pictures! Those pages are brittle!”

Kate stared back at the clerk, wordlessly maintaining eye contact as she made a show of slowly pulling on the pair of white cotton gloves she routinely used for handling historical documents. Stretching them to fit, she wiggled her fingers in a little wave to accentuate the point, but in her heart of hearts, it was the middle one she really wanted to use.