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Joseph pauses, "This will sound crazy, but I've been having super vivid nightmares. They're making me reconsider everything I thought I knew about this house."
"You've been dreaming about Beatrix, too?"
"Not exactly. I-it's complicated. All I can say is, if you think you might have a solution for this, then I want to help you."
Joseph pinches the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. I can see that he's actually torn up about this.
“I’ll drive. You keep an eye on this thing.” He hands the diary back to me uneasily and shoots it a wary glance.
“I don’t think it bites,” I joke.
“Well, now I have no idea what to believe!” Joseph exclaims.
We grab our coats and keys. During the ride to the library, I grip the diary-like my life depended on it. I guess, technically, my professional life does.
Once Joseph parks, we rush into the library.
“Evan!” I bark.
Evan startles up from the cart of shelving he is working on.
“Eleanor, I thought you were working at the manor today!” He takes in my bewildered expression and Joseph standing at my side.
“Joseph?! Don’t you have some big-wig tech catastrophe to sort out?”
“This is much too important,” Joseph snaps.
Evan abandons the shelving cart and crosses the room over to us.
“Um, okay, wow. Well, where’s the fire?”
When neither of us laughs, Evan rubs his hand along the back of his neck. “C’mon guys, it’s been a solid century. I figured I could make fire jokes by now. No offense to your family, Joseph.”
“None taken,” Joseph says primly.
I hold the diary out in front of me, eager to change the subject.
Evan glances back and forth between the diary and me. “Is this …?”
“Yes! Not to say I told you so, but I told you so!” I flip open to the first page.
Evan leans over and reads it, letting out a low whistle.
“Well, would you look at that? Technically, Eleanor, I told you so. Now you know that Beatrix is a bit of a trickster. You found this in the house?” he prompts. He walks over to the desk and retrieves a pair of archivist gloves and a magnifying glass.
We lay the diary down on one of the open tables. Since it’s a weekday, the third floor is deserted except for us. Most of the armchair genealogists have day jobs.
I turn on a nearby lamp so we can get better light.
“It doesn’t look fake,” Evan starts.
“We can authenticate the paper this week if I take a sample. I can compare it to the paper quality of the other documents I’ve found.”
“Great idea,” Evan says.
He grabs an X-Acto knife and hands it to me. I carefully cut a small sample out of a blank page in the back of the book.
I placed the sample in a plastic sleeve and put it on my desk.
