The Angel

“Oh my, what has you working so late, dear boy?” Mrs. Delacroix leaned down to peer over Jackson’s shoulder, the peppermint on her breath contrasting with the slightly musty smell of her clothes. The table was piled high with books, old town ledgers mostly, along with a scattering of copies of newspaper articles taken from blown-up microfilm. Brightly colored adhesive notes flagged important passages, looking like the recovery flags planted by investigators gathering evidence at a crime scene. Which wasn’t too far off, truth be told. “I told you, I could have gotten those ledgers for you! You didn’t need to trouble yourself!”

“Oh, it’s no trouble! I’ve been following some leads,” Jackson said, not looking up from his work as one finger traced a line of figures while the other jotted it in a notebook. Lines of custom printing at the top of each page read: JACKSON CASTLE / EDITOR, NEST HILL GAZETTE. It had been a gift from Shirley to celebrate his promotion two years ago, though to be honest he still felt a little foolish calling it a “promotion” when only two other people even worked at the paper.

His glasses slid slowly down his nose as he worked, but he waited until he was finished with the transcription before taking them off and cleaning them with a cloth from his breast pocket. “Just looking up some background for a story I’m going to run on the mines, really. I thought that after the accident, a little history might help people, I don’t know,

“Isn’t that sweet of you!” Mrs. Delacroix exclaimed, patting him on the shoulder approvingly. “When you came to town, oh, what was it, four years ago?”

“Seven and a half, actually,” Jackson corrected her gently, turning in his seat to face her. Around them, the stacks of the Nest Hill Public Library were dark, with just the lamp at his table and the fluorescent bar over the circulation desk still burning. Like the town it serviced, the library was plenty quaint and cozy but also more than a little outdated; he’d attended enough town council meetings to know that it was difficult to pry enough funds out of the public coffer to keep it operating, much less update it for the twenty-first century.

One computer in Mrs. Delacroix’s office – barely touched, judging from the amount of knickknacks on it – and two out on the floor were about the only signs of progress. On the wall above the computers, a neatly hand-lettered sign sternly proclaimed “PLEASE SHARE TIME! COMPUTERS ARE FOR DECENT USE ONLY! NO FUNNY BUSINESS!” in bold red ink. Sometimes there were still days when he expected a curtain to fall and Garrison Keillor to walk out and announce that the town was simply some kind of elaborate set-up.

Still, the library actually smelled like old books, and Jackson found that an accurate summary of local living: It might be a bit dated, but at least it was stuck in some of the better bits of history. To be honest, he never thought he’d live in a town like this, but Shirley had missed her parents, and so after his last newspaper folded, the victim of yet another round of downsizings as print media circled ever closet to the drain, they’d moved to Nest Hill. She taught kindergarten; he clerked at the Post Office. When his supervisor Mr. Graves heard he’d been a reporter, he suggested Jackson give them a ring. At first he resisted, dreading how it would feel to go from covering municipal corruption and power politics to quilting bees and yard sales, but once he actually tried it, it was surprisingly fulfilling.

“That long? Goodness! Where does the time go? It’s like my Louis always said, you never notice until it’s gone, isn’t that right?” She giggled, covering her mouth with her hand. “As I was saying, when Shirley first brought you back, Tessie Hutchinson thought you’d just about burst, you seemed to impatient with the way things work around here!” She angled her chin proudly. “But I told them, I said, just you wait, he’ll turn out fine. He’s got a good head on his shoulders, he’ll find his way. And look how you have! Running the paper, now!”

“Thank you, Mrs. Delacroix.” Jackson replied politely. He often thought Mrs. Delacroix resembled some sort of lost Agatha Christie character, with her sensible sweaters, prim skirts and horn-rimmed glasses. Well, that, and her penchant for nosiness, which she displayed as she leaned over to examine his materials more closely.

“You’ve pulled out quite a lot of old things, haven’t you?” Mrs. Delacroix regarded him slyly over the top of her glasses. “Do you really need all of this for a little history?”

“Well, at first I was just going to talk about the mine collapse in ’82, and how the town bounced back from that,” Jackson said, shuffling papers and bringing some of the older material up for her to look at, “but then I read about the chuch fire in ’48, and the train crash of 1915. And that’s just the last century, there’s more before that.”

“I remember the fire,” Mrs. Delacroix said absently, one hand going to the little gold cross she wore around her neck. “I was a little girl then, but I remember the night sky glowing red, like embers. And the smoke …” She shook herself out of her reverie, gave him a rather remonstrative look. “Heavens! Why would you want to bring up all those old tragedies! It’s hard enough for all those parents now, knowing what they do about that bus driver and all.”

“I wasn’t going to, but I found something,” Jackson insisted. He put his glasses back on, grabbed a handful of pictures stacked neatly to one side. The ones on top were bright, with crisp colors, but both color and quality faded as you got closer to the bottom of the pile, until they were little more than blotchy sepia tintypes. “Look at these, and tell me what you see.”

Mrs. Delacroix squinted as she slowly picked through them. “I don’t see anything but funerals, pictures that ran in the paper.” She waved one of the newer ones at him. “That’s Horace Dunbar’s funeral. Are you going to shock his poor mother again?”

“Just look,” Jackson said, taking it away and pointing to a highlighted corner. “There. Right there. What is that, in the background?”

“Why, it’s just the old angel statue, the one on the Warner family plot,” Mrs. Delacroix scoffed. “It’s been there almost since town founding, why shouldn’t it be there now?”

“Fair enough, but what about here? And here? And here?” Jackson said, pointing to other pictures in succession, the familiar excitement he felt when he was breaking a story banishing some of his weariness. Sure enough, in each funeral shot the angel was clearly visible, a dark but distinct shape in the background. “I went to the cemetery this afternoon and checked, just to make sure. There’s no way it could be in all of these shots, from all of these angles. And yet there it is. I’ve checked the newer pictures for tampering, no sign of it.”

“What are you saying?” Mrs. Delacroix asked, and in his excitement, Jackson missed the overly calm delivery. “That these are pictures of, oh, I don’t know, some sort of ghost?”

“I’m not sure, exactly,” Jackson said, pulling out another stack of pictures. “But I found other funeral shots, and it’s not there. It only seems to show up when there are real tragedies, serious disasters, that kind of thing. And those seem to happen roughly every thirty years or so, give or take, going all the back as far as the founding.”

“We have seen our share of loss,” said Mrs. Delacroix distantly, her eyes looking in the direction of her office, where even in the dark she knew Louis was looking back at her. “But then I suppose any old town has its share of heartache in its bones, just like its people do.”

“Maybe, but, well … this looks like a pattern.” He rubbed his temples with his fingers. “I mean, that’s crazy, but once I saw it, the others fell into place. It’s different every time, but the result is the same – every thirty years this town loses a lot of people all at once.” Jackson pulled one of the ledgers over, opened to a marked page. “Every time someone in town is responsible, even accidentally, but what doesn’t make sense is that I can’t seem to find any real connection between the people responsible. If it’s a conspiracy, it’s spread out over the whole damn town.” He looked up at her guiltily. “Sorry. Besides, who would commit all these random acts? There’s no sense in it.”

“You’d be surprised,” murmured Mrs. Delacroix darkly. More loudly she coughed and adjusted her glasses. “Well, this is exciting, but I hope you don’t mind if I finish closing up?

“I was hoping to stay a little longer,” Jackson asked hopefully, though his tired eyes protested.

“Certainly, sweetheart!” Mrs. Delacroix beamed at him. “I’ll leave you the key, if you promise to lock up as you go.” She patted him on the cheek. “Just try not to be too late. I know Shirley would just be worried sick.” Jackson nodded. “Let me just get my purse from my office, and I’ll leave you to your work.”

“Take your time!” Jackson said, turning back to his books. “And thank you! I know it sounds crazy, but I really think I have something here. Guess we’ll just have to see, right?”

“I suppose we will,” Mrs. Delacroix said, stepping into her darkened office. She didn’t turn on the light, but walked straight to her desk and picked up the picture of Louis. “Oh, I wish he’d waited for me to get those ledgers,” she told his smiling face. “I could’ve left out the really important ones.” She ran her fingers down the frame, remembered running them across his cheek just last night, in her dream. He’d asked her to do something then, if Jackson found out. She didn’t know how he knew that, and didn’t want to do what he asked, but when she told him that, Louis looked so pained that she just couldn’t bear it.

With just a hint of hesitation, she picked up the phone and dialed Mr. Graves. “Tom? Betsy. I tried to keep him away, but he found it.” A paused while she listened. “Yes, he did. No, there’s no way around it. I’m sure of it.” Another pause. “You call the Summers’, then, and I’ll call Baxter Martin. We’ll have to put the books in the box with him, this time.”

She listened, then her voice turned to an angry hiss. “I don’t care. I’ll say I lost them, or that they were in the basement when it flooded.” She glanced out at the figure of Jackson, hunched over his notes, scribbling excitedly. “I just can’t stand the thought of this happening again.” One last pause. “I’ll leave it open. Tell them to come soon. And tell your wife Shirley is going to need her.”

Mrs. Delacroix put the phone back in its cradle and stood in the dark for a minute, then another, slowly pulling herself together. When she could feel the smile almost natural across her face, she walked back out into the library and wished a cheerful goodnight to the young man about to die. She hardly even wavered as she got to her car, and when she got home she thought she would be restless, but she slept as naturally as a child. Louis was waiting for her.

Shirley was young, she was pretty, she could find another man in time; maybe even the Jones boy. They’d circled each other in high school, everyone said so. But all Mrs. Delacroix had was Louis, and she wasn’t going to lose him again. Not ever.