Chapter 8: Old Betty's Notebooks

The census record was on a microfiche spool labeled CRAWFORD COUNTY RESIDENTIAL INDEX 1962, and Curtis found it at 7:43 Thursday morning, which Mara knew because she had been sitting across from him at the library's back table for two hours already and she'd checked her watch when she heard him say, very quietly and with no preamble: "Huh."

Mara looked up from the newspaper she was not reading.

Curtis had his magnifying loupe pressed against the microfiche reader's output screen, which he'd printed on the library's temperamental Xerox machine — the one that always left a ghost stripe across the left margin, so that every document they produced looked like it was being partially obscured by something invisible. He was squinting at a column of names.