Page 62 of Finders Keepers
Okay, best-case outcome: I go and I somehow find the treasure. Quentin’s excitement is enough to overpower any negative feelings he might have about me going rogue again. We have amazing sex to celebrate, and then the Conservancy tells us there was actually a misprint in the article about the reward all those years ago, and instead of ten thousand dollars it was for one million dollars, which they will happily honor because of that law Quentin mentioned. I buy a great condo with cash and become a freelance historian like that girl who starred inPenelope to the PastI met at the American Historical Association conference last year. Worst-case: I go, find nothing, someone calls the police again, Quentin comes to bail me out and represent me in court but is so angry with me that he does a bad job and then I wind up in jail forever because the judge, who takes a liking to Quentin, decides the usual trespassing punishment is too lenient for a repeat offender like me. Most likely: I go to Sprangbur alone, find nothing, and simply keep it to myself, with Quentin none the wiser, just like when I went to the library. And, I mean, that does seem the most realistic of the outcomes…
No. No, no, no. There’s no denying it’s the wrong thing to do. If I find it solo, I see now that it’s taking something away from him. Something he’s wanted for a long time. Something he’s wanted us to dotogether.
But finding a clue that might help us know where to search next…That would be all right. A small way I can help write our future in pen. Suck it, Bon Jovi.
While the special collections room has a great deal of Fountain’s original files, it’s not the only place that has primary sources related to his life. Nowadays, there are a few digitized materials through the National Archives, including the oral history interview he did with Albert Aaron in 1937. I pull it up on the website, looking around as it loads, making sure none of the patrons who have come into the bar are watching, as if they would even know or care. There are twenty pages of transcripts, and hopefully by the time I’m finished rereading them something will either have clicked or the worst of my overwhelming urge to make bad decisions (like going to Sprangbur on my own right now and digging a massive hole or something) will have at least passed.
Fountain sure does mention his secretary, Louisa Worman, often. Quentin and I never did do much research on her as a person, which now strikes me as a massive oversight. And I’m not just saying that as someone who’s spent the last four years incessantly thinking and teaching about all the ways women are often forgotten in the archive. I open a new window to search her name and find it mostly paired with Fountain’s or his company’s—in the newspaper article about his surprising will, as the originator of the meeting minutes cited as a primary source in an article about the beverage industry. Never married, no direct descendants. It’s depressing, seeing how little of a mark she left on the world. Too busy helping Fountain play around in his, I suppose.
There are so many casual mentions of how Louisa—Lou, as he called her—took care of him and his young niece, as if itwere simply another part of her job as Fountain’s secretary and not something very far outside her scope of work. So much on her shoulders, and no doubt assumed of her because she was a woman. A tiny, featherlight fleck of anger floats up inside me, burning out as it hits my heart. This poor lady.
Then again, she did choose to continue working for Fountain for several decades. Perhaps it wasn’t all bad. I think back to the informational tours we took of Sprangbur Castle, the stories Sharon and Gladys shared. Perhaps the salary made it worth it. However much it was, though, I bet it wasn’t enough recompense for everything she did for and gave to this man until she left around the time of this interview.
I continue in the transcripts, reading more about Edlo—the magical land Fountain liked to pretend he ruled over as monarch. From what I can tell, it was a game that he played with Isolde that kept growing and growing until it became something he continued enjoying on his own. He must have, since Isolde was in her twenties and married by the time Albert Aaron arrived at Sprangbur.
Isolde. We looked her up when we first started researching Fountain and learned she died in 2002. We never bothered to investigate further. I do so now and quickly discover that, though she married twice, she outlived both husbands and had no surviving children. One of the search results brings me to a page for a hospital to which she apparently left her entire fortune—a charitable streak she must’ve inherited from her uncle.
I turn my attention back to the transcripts and find a line that I suppose we must have read back in 2008 but didn’t strike me as particularly interesting then:Old as I am, Issy grown, I find myself visiting Edlo rather less frequently than before. Besides, I know the way by heart. So perhaps I should hand it over to you andyour boy, so that he may grow up knowing what it is to float above the trees in a perfect, iridescent bubble.Hand Edlo over to Albert Aaron? How does one hand over a place? Especially a make-believe one?
And Albert Aaron—there’s someone else we never bothered looking into very deeply. Which I don’t kick myself nearly as much over, since his only known interactions with Fountain happened over the course of these pages. They didn’t even particularly seem to get along (another reason why Fountain’s insistence on transferring Edlo to Aaron and his son sticks out to me upon this reread). Fifteen-year-old Nina, whose research skills came primarily from tightly structured, secondary source–heavy school assignments, didn’t think much about the man hired by the Works Progress Administration to travel from Baltimore to Catoctin to record what Fountain had to say. But thirty-two-year-old Nina, with two graduate degrees in this stuff, has a gigantic, intensely glowing lightbulb over her head.
Because depending on what became of Albert Aaron after he worked for the WPA, he might have papers of his own. Either in a collection somewhere official, or even passed down to his relatives. It’s a long shot, but it’sashot. And it’s definitely more than we had a few hours ago.
Another search doesn’t turn up any official archives that hold anything of Aaron’s beyond interview transcripts and a novella he wrote that’s now in the public domain. But the library’s database page allows me access to a genealogy site that helps me determine that, though Albert died in 1988, his son Eugene is apparently still alive and, according to the 2020 census, lives in Richmond, Virginia. I continue down the family line and find several adult grandchildren, including a granddaughter namedEmily who is a children’s book author and illustrator. And she has a website with a contact form.
My heart thuds with a combination of eagerness that this will result in something big and worry that it will be yet another dead end. Either way, I need to tell Quentin.
There’s a tiny part of me, the same one that desperately wanted to go to Sprangbur an hour ago, that whispers,What if you don’t? Not yet, at least. What if you just…contact the granddaughter and scope out how worthwhile it is ahead of time?
But I recognize the voice as the same one that convinced me to keep secrets from him before. The one that masquerades as something more innocuous than it is. Behind the competitiveness that always drew me to accept Quentin’s challenges, there was a desperate need for approval. His approval. For him to tell me I did a good job.
At what cost? It was high enough last time. I suspect it’s even higher now that the knowledge of how he kisses is one of the few good things I have going for me. As close as we were as children, it wasn’t anything like this. It wasn’t this feeling that we’re connected by something more than the history between us. There was only a vague notion of whatmorewould even mean then, and now I know it’s what I feel in every fiber of my being whenever his fingertips brush against my skin.
I can’t keep this from him. Can’t risk ruining whatever comes next for us before it even has a chance to start.
“Can I grab you anything else?” Kell asks as they pass me on their way back from delivering drinks to a table nearby.
“No, thanks. I actually…I have to go. Right now.” I hastily grab my things, throw a ten-dollar bill on the bar, and call out, “Bye! Thanks! Uh, bye!” as I rush out the door.
28
Thank god, Quentin’scar is parked out front when I arrive back on West Dill Street. I ring his doorbell, then ring it two more times.
“I’m coming, I’m coming,” I hear him call through the door. It swings open and his eyebrows come together. “Nina?” he says. “What…Are you okay? Did you…Have you been running?”
I gasp for air and hold up a finger. I didn’t run so much as speed walk all the way here, but running sounds more impressive, so I nod. “I found something,” I say. “Something that might lead us to the treasure. I don’t know yet for sure, because I wanted to wait to talk it through with you before I did anything, but I really think this could be it, Quentin.”
“When?” he asks.
“When what?”
“When did you figure this out?”
“Just now. Or, like, fifteen minutes ago.” My words slow as I realize I have made an error. That, in my excitement, I forgot thepart where he might actually be super mad at me for researching without him.
But his face isn’t angry. It’s just very…serious. “You figured it out, and you immediately came to tell me?”
I nod. “I mean, I was at Hanako’s bar, and I had to get back here. But yes, as immediately as possible.”
