Just Like Writing A Paper

Who: Amy
Where: Marquette Public Library
When: Opening Time

When Amy had a serious question about something she either went to her parents or the library. And right now she had some serious questions. But libraries were her friends, she did, after all, get her major in the study of dead languages and romantic poetry. She even had her own set of white archival gloves to study old documents with. Most libraries had sets in a shoebox under the check out desk, but her hands were kinda smallish and all the gloves at the University library had longer fingers than her fingers she couldn’t keep hold of anything. This was the least likely thing she had ever considered going to a library for (her college days were filled with setting up camp in libraries, but it had always been for things like dialects, migrations and population shifts), but easily the most important.

She limped along politely to the special documents room of the Marquette Public Library behind the mousey librarian, a new girl, who had checked out Amy’s new library card, and quietly led the way. The old librarian had finally retired at the age of seventy-four while Amy was off at school. It had been kind of sad for Amy. She had been a special kind of librarian; flirty, loud with an old beehive sort of helmet that was lavender colored, the kind that a lot of old ladies had. But then this was a special library, most small towns didn’t have a special documents room, but when the last of one of the few influential families in Marquette had died all the books and things that family had acquired over the years had been boxed up and sent to the library as well as some spending cash to build an extension. The town council even built a media room with the leftover money.

Amy waited patiently for the new librarian; she had some brownish name to go with her brownish everything else, to open the back room and turn on the special lights. “I’ll be fine from here,” Amy said with a smile, pulling on her soft white gloves and setting down her big purse. Not big enough to get attention (attention was the last thing she needed), but with plenty of room for one of the yellow lined notepads she had in stacks (they were great for translating with in her University days) and the careful photocopies of the old Marquette newspaper. The trick to finding what she needed was using what she already knew about research. Start with secondary sources, find your primaries, technically the mountains of microfilm Amy had rolled through were plenty primary (and oddly over descriptive), but she was trying to use the Gazette as a sort of table of contents to the town’s history.

And this was the town history right here, everything that wasn’t in town hall (Amy didn’t know who to do research in town halls though, so she was putting it off) or in private hands. She moved along the shelves, skipping past the first edition Twains and Alcotts to the back glass case where the really old books, one of a kind books were kept. She couldn’t believe she was being left alone with them, but she wasn’t complaining. Looking down at the pink post-it note where she had written down in big loopy scrolls the titles of books which might be helpful.

Carefully Amy slid out Practical Uses of Herbs by Michael Nesbit, The Grave-Digger’s Guide to North American Climes 1874 edition once owned by Josiah Fassbender, and the thin journal of Josiah Fassbender himself, from March 1863. According to her primary research these three sources would do her the most good, at least at this portion of her process. The key to this was a level head and common sense. Everything had rules and laws, every action has an equal and opposite reaction. She’d be able to figure this out, she had to.

It was just like writing a paper, she had written plenty of papers before. It was a process she was intimately aware of. She had a purpose to her ‘paper’: Protect Baby Robby. She had assumptions to form her thesis off of, first: that there were no new problems, only degrees of the same problem, therefore someone somewhere had to have had the same ghost problem. Second: that where there’s a problem people come up with a solution, therefore someone somewhere must have found a way to fix the ghost problem. Assumption three, and here was the important one: that regular, non-magic sorts of people must of figured out a way to fix this.

All she needed was to form a strong and concise thesis.
If all went well her primary research into the tomes of the Marquette Gazette (was sold in the 1940s when their editor was killed on the beaches of Normandy and thus really, really hard to find. No one kept their old newspapers it seemed. Plus terribly irritating to read with tiny little print approximately a size that Buster would have difficulty reading) was correct Mr. Fassbender may be her regular, non-magic man. She flipped open The Grave-Digger’s Guide to the on preventing grave robberies referenced it neatly on her yellow notepad to Fassbender’s journal. It was important to reference.

Apparently people in the days of old school medicine were seriously worried about folks making off with their loved ones remains, which was kinda close to what she was trying to prevent. Since Mr. Fassbender was the lone name in funerals, burials and cemetery groundskeeping-ials she hoped he would have something to say on the subject. And although the Gazette for once was eerily silent concerning what they deemed “Our Current Problems” in March of 1863 they had lauded, briefly, but nearly zealously “Mr. Fassbender’s Solution (with help from the good Iron Company).” Amy scanned the journal’s tiny scrawling script if she was lucky, she’d find what she’d need right here in Marquette. If not, well, her old Linguistics professor had some decent contacts when it came to locating old books. If Mr. Fassbender’s Solution couldn’t solve her problem, she would find someone else’s.

She had to, she was all Baby Robbie had.