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Alana’s throat tightened.Would she never prepare for a high-end cocktail party ever again?Would she never go through the long and beautiful process of finding the perfect dress, discussing with her makeup artist which direction to take her face, dying her hair just so, and drinking mimosas as she prepared? Would she never again drink champagne that came at one thousand dollars per bottle, sipping it nonchalantly as though it didn’t matter at all?
They stood outside the Nantucket Courthouse. It was a simple, red-bricked building that was built in the sixties to replace the Old County Courthouse over on Main Street. The older one had been built in 1775— a full year before the United States had even been founded. Alana shook her head to clear her anxious thoughts about “no more cocktail parties.”Boo hoo, she chided herself. There was so much more to live for.
“I’m weirdly nervous,” Julia whispered as they stepped inside. “There’s no way to know if they have the records from the trial or not.”
“It doesn’t hurt to ask,” Alana said.
Julia’s eyes flashed. “You just sounded like Mom.”
At the front desk, a pretty woman in her early thirties sat in front of a computer, her fingers clacking quickly over the keys. When Alana and Julia stood before her, the woman finished with a flourish and lifted her head knowingly as though she’d wanted to show off her typing skills. Along the desk, a gold-plated name tag read: JANE.
“Good afternoon! Welcome to the Nantucket Courthouse. How can I help you?”
“Hi, Jane,” Julia began, her voice wavering. “We’d like to see court records from a case that finished about twenty-five years ago.”
Jane’s eyes were enormous and seemed to swallow both Alana and Julia whole. “Twenty-five years! Wow. We get plenty of inquiries about birth records and wedding certificates and death records. But court files! Wow.”
“That’s right,” Julia said, clearly uninterested in getting into it. “What’s the process to see something like that?”
Jane shoved her tongue against the inside of her cheek. “You’ll have to take that up with our records collector. He normally works in the basement, filing everything and revamping our online database.”
“I see.” Julia seemed impatient.
Alana scanned the large room in which they now stood, eyeing the photographs of recent mayors, of sailboats and whalers, of Nantucket parades. Most of the photographs were black and white, heavy with nostalgia. They could have been from Greta’s own youth.
“I’ll bring him up here for you,” Jane said, her voice simmering with excitement. It seemed clear that the courthouse didn’t get much action during the day. This was Nantucket, after all.
“Hi, there,” Jane said into the phone. “We have two women here eager to chat with you about all things records. Do you think you could come up?”
Julia sidled up to Alana and whispered, “I hope this works. They don’t seem very organized.”
Alana puffed out her cheeks. “We’ll see.”
“He’ll be up in a jiffy,” Jane said as she hung up the phone. “Can I get you two some coffee? We just got a new automatic coffee machine. It also makes cappuccinos.”
“That would be great,” Julia replied, just as Alana shook her head almost too quickly. After Parisian coffeeshops and Italian espressos, she couldn’t possibly demean her palate with an automatic coffee machine.Could she?
Then again, Julia cast her a sharp look that told her she basically had to, if only to get on the good side of the Nantucket Courthouse employees.
“Okay. That sounds delicious.” Alana plastered on a wide grin.
What would Asher think of me if he saw me drink this? He’d be disgusted.
Julia and Alana sipped their cappuccinos and waited for the records employee to emerge from his basement. The smell of the bad milk made them scrunch their noses. Meanwhile, Jane typed angrily at the keyboard.
“What do you think she’s writing?” Alana whispered.
“Maybe she’s writing her first novel,” Julia muttered back, “About a woman who works at a courthouse.”
“Who has big dreams of becoming mayor one day,” Alana teased.
“Not just mayor,” Julia countered, her eyebrows high. “President.”
“Of the United States?”
Julia shook her head. “Of her local book club.”
Alana and Julia tittered. Jane cast her eyes toward them and blinked twice. “You two seem just like sisters,” she called over from the desk. “Are you?”
