What Eli Sees – Chapter 6
“The Dunmore Library”
The Dunmore Public Library was a Carnegie building from 1908, red brick and white trim, with a reading room that smelled of old paper and steam heat and the particular mustiness of a collection that had not been substantially weeded since 1955. Mrs. Pearce ran it. She had run it since 1961 and intended to run it until she died, which she privately hoped would happen at her desk, surrounded by books, with something good in her hand.
Eli started coming to the library on the last Saturday of October, alone, having told his mother he was going to Thomas Birch’s house and having told Thomas Birch he was going to the library so if his mother called, Thomas would know. Thomas, who understood instinctively that Eli was doing something he needed to do alone, had agreed without asking questions. This was why Eli liked Thomas.
He was looking for Edmund Harwick.
He found the Dunmore history section in a back alcove: three shelves of local history, town meeting minutes bound in green cloth, church records, the collected photographs of the Dunmore Historical Society. He found Dunmore: A History 1635-1935 by one Reginald Smoot, published 1936, and he found Edmund Harwick on page 214.
Edmund Harwick, born 1819 in Hartford, established the Harwick Wool Mill in 1848, served as church deacon 1851-1863. Notable civic donor. His house on Cemetery Road remains one of the finest examples of Colonial architecture in the county. Harwick died in December 1863, of causes the family preferred not to specify in the public record.
Eli stared at causes the family preferred not to specify.
He understood this kind of language. His father used it about Grandfather Crane, who had died of a cause nobody specified but which Eli had understood, from context and silence, was related to the bottle.
He went to the town records. The death records for 1863 took forty minutes to find and were written in a hand he could barely read, but he found it: Harwick, Edmund J., Dec. 14, 1863. Cause: Voluntary suspension. The clerk who had written this had used the clinical term, perhaps out of squeamishness, perhaps out of respect for the family. Eli had enough vocabulary to know what it meant.
He sat with this for a while.
Then he looked up the house itself — the deed records, the ownership history — and found something that made him sit very still in the warm library with the steam heat ticking in the pipes.
The Harwick house had been sold six times since 1900. In 1921. In 1938. In 1944. In 1952. In 1967. And now, in 1974, to Robert Crane. Every previous owner had left within two years. Several of the sales had been listed as distressed — prices below market, quick closings, the kind of paperwork that suggested someone who needed to leave quickly and did not care overmuch what they left behind.
He looked for newspaper accounts. He found three, in the bound volumes of the Dunmore Gazette:
1938: Colbrook Family Departs Harwick Property; Citing Irreconcilable Differences With the House.
1952: Mr. Arthur Peel, of Cemetery Road, Treated at Dunmore General Following Unexplained Episode; Home Subsequently Listed for Sale.
1967: Renshaw Family Relocates to Providence; Property Available; No Comment Given.
He was reaching for the 1944 volume when a hand came down on his shoulder. He spun around so fast the chair scraped back on the floor. Mrs. Pearce stood behind him, her reading glasses on their chain, holding a stack of returned books. She looked at what he was reading. Something moved in her face — quickly, there and gone. “That’s the Harwick house history,” she said. Not a question. Eli said yes. Mrs. Pearce looked at him for a long moment with an expression he couldn’t fully read. Then she said, very quietly: “Does anything happen at night?” Eli stared at her. “In the corner at the end of the hall?” she said. “The cold place?” Eli’s mouth went dry. “How do you know about that?” Mrs. Pearce put her books down. She pulled up a chair. “Because,” she said, “I lived in that house. In 1952. I was nine years old. And I need to know if it’s getting worse.”
Eli gripped the arms of his chair.
“Tell me everything,” he said.