“I give everything I have because I’m not built to do less. I tend to overwhelm people with my enthusiasm, and that’s what I’m bringing to this, but I’m tempering it with the feedback I got while working at the Sutton.”
“I’ve seen that,” he says. “It’s obvious you care about getting this right.”
“Iama professional. It bothers me that Catherine is starting on this board already doubting me.” I tap the almost-forgotten letter. “She takes me about as seriously as Dear Heart is taking Smitten Kitten. He talks like he thinks marrying him and getting a nice house and a nanny should be the height of her ambitions.”
It bothers me because it echoes Catherine’s ugly insinuation about “connections” last night. It’s the reason the heat and noise have all gotten to me. They mirror how her words make me feel, a hot, buzzing swarm of shame agitating inside me. It’s unfair, but when I feel the pressure of it building inside my sinus cavity, I refuse to let it progress to tears.
“I don’t get her,” I say. “Weren’t boomers supposed to crawl so our parents could walk and our generation could run? Catherine keeps tripping me instead of helping me.”
“I don’t have any answers for you, but I promise not to let her opinions affect my own.”
I sigh. “Sorry. I’m getting whiny.”
“You’re not whining. Thank you for telling me all that.”
“I hope you believe that it’s only fuel for me to work harder. I’m giving Foster my best.”
His eyes soften. “I know.”
“Can we change the subject? Like to the fat stack of clues in this new letter?”
He jumps up. “Yeah, there were. Let me grab my laptop. I might have an idea. MIT.”
“MIT?” I twist to watch him as he grabs his laptop and vaults over the back of the sofa to land in his spot again. I really have to learn that trick.
“Yeah, you were mentioning the gender ratio. But it made me think.” He starts typing. “MIT aeronautics … what was the name of the professor he mentioned?”
I grab the letter and scan it. “Bryson.”
“Bryson. Enter.” His eyes scan the screen for a couple of seconds and then he grins. “We got him. We’ve been assuming Dear Heart was at Harvard, but Arthur Bryson was a visiting professor of aeronautics at MIT in 1966, and just to make sure”—he types and scans—“he was not teaching at Harvard at the same time.”
I like that he sayswe. Only history nerds get as invested in another historian’s puzzles as they do their own. “The Back Bay address still makes sense.” Rich kids who attend any one of several different Boston colleges still like to live there. I pull out my laptop and open my own search. “He mentions the Miss Serendipity pageant, which doesn’t appear to run anymore. Oh, I got a link to a news article saying the pageant is closing down after fifty years.” I skim it. “That was 1998, but it does mention that it happened annually in March, which means we could look up the?—”
“Miss Serendipity pageant in a March 1966 newspaper. On it.” After a couple of minutes, he says, “No dice. The current paper is theSerendipity Star, but it wasn’t around back then, and they only started putting articles online in the mid-nineties. The major city newspaper before that was theSprings Gazette, but it closed in 1982, and its issues aren’t digitized.”
“I bet they’ll still have been archived. I’ll stop at the library and ask Sissy if they indexed issues of theGazettewhen it ran.”
“Good call. If we luck out, we might get a list of every contestant in that year’s pageant.”
“I also looked up the schools where Smitten Kitten might have taught. Six are still open now. I wonder if elementary schools had yearbooks, and if these schools would have kept them.”
“Even if they didn’t have yearbooks, I bet they have classphotos. You know the ones with the teacher’s name, the grade, and the year of the photo?”
“Oh, yeah. That would make sense. I’ll ask Sissy if she knows of an easy way to find those because otherwise, schools are closed for the summer, so I don’t know if anyone is staffing the offices right now.”
“I love this part of researching.” Jay closes his laptop and smiles. “It’s like when you hear dripping from somewhere, and you’re looking, but you can’t find it. And then it increases to a trickle, and you can kind of tell where the sound is coming from. And then you realize it’s a faucet and it starts running full blast, and …” He trails off and pinches his bottom lip. “Wait, that’s not a good analogy because you’d fix the leak.”
I know exactly the feeling he’s talking about though. “Or maybe you’re like, yes, I am so thirsty, and you open up that faucet full blast.”
He snaps and points at me. “That. That’s what I love.”
“We’re still at a trickle here, but it feels like we’re getting close to the faucet.”
“I agree. Will you read the letter one more time? I want to make sure we aren’t missing any other clues.”
I do, and when I finish, I look up. “I think we’ve got them all so far.”
“I agree.” He looks over at the table and back to me. “If you want to hang out here to work, I don’t mind. The sofa can be your office.”
