Welcome back to Glass Half Full and thanks for reading! It’s another short one today.
WHEN I arrived at the library, my thoughts were no clearer. The librarian having the lamp changed everything, but I couldn’t think how right yet. How could the lamp bring some people good luck, and nothing but misfortune to others? Or maybe the librarian had experienced a tragedy she hadn’t told anyone about?
The library was another imposing stone edifice, a product of the largesse of men like Anne’s great-grandfather. Inside, it was showing its age, with worn woodwork and light fixtures that had needed replacing several decades back. A computer station near the entrance was the only thing that seemed up-to-date. But it had that unmistakable library smell of old books.
The place was deserted except for the librarian herself. She wore a short-sleeve white blouse and black slacks, graying hair in a tight bun. One thing seemed out of the ordinary for my picture of a librarian, or then again, maybe not: a tattoo of Jane Austen on her inner forearm. I only knew it was Jane Austen because the name was printed below the ink of a woman’s face.
She didn’t blink an eye when I introduced myself, so word of my informal investigation must not have gotten around to her. “Oh yes, that old thing,” she said when I mentioned my interest in the lamp. “It’s made the rounds. I believe Mayor Sharp had it in his logging display that same year. It wasn’t quite right for my talk, actually. More likely late 19th century and never burned whale oil. But it was the best I could find.”
“You got it at Amos’s Antiques?”
“That’s right. Amos had acquired it a couple of months before, although you could hardly tell with the amount of dust it had collected. He said it had been sitting in an antiques warehouse in the Soo for decades. A lot of that stock was salvage from shipwrecks, so who knows where it came from before that.”
“Amos didn’t remember any of that when I asked him about it.”
“No, he wouldn’t, his memory isn’t what it used to be. There was a time when he could have told you the provenance of every piece in his store.”
“And sometime later you won the lottery?”
Her eyebrows went up. “Yes, that’s common knowledge around town. Who did you hear it from?”
“The mayor.”
“You’re a visitor and you’re talking with the mayor? What did you need from him?”
I explained my curiosity about the factory fire and Mayor Sharp’s idea about the town’s misfortunes. “You might think it’s crazy — I think it sounds crazy myself — but the lamp seems involved somehow with a lot of this bad luck. But here you had the lamp and you had a stroke of good luck. I can’t figure it out.”
She gave me a wry smile. “You should save your pareidolia for looking at the clouds.”
“Pareidolia?”
“Greek for seeing shapes that aren’t there. Jesus’s face in a grilled cheese sandwich, that kind of thing. The human brain is a pattern-recognition engine. The problem being that it’s wrong half the time. A situation that warrants constant skepticism. As someone in your profession should know.”
I felt a bit chastised — what she was saying was enough like everything Frank had trained me not to do — but I was like a dog with a bone. I smelled a lead, and I was going to follow where it took me.
“Sure, but let me just ask, how often do you play the lottery?”
“Never. It’s a waste of money, and besides, what would I do with a million dollars?”
“But you found out anyway.”
“Yes. A friend bought me tickets for my birthday.”
“Which is?”
“October eighteenth.”
“Right after your history presentation.”
She narrowed her eyes at me. “That’s right. Then I let them sit in a drawer for a month or two. My friend had to remind me to scratch them.”
“And now you know what you’d do with that money. The mayor said you’ve been very generous.”
“My brother and his financial advisor insisted I put enough away for my old age. I bought a recent model used sedan because my old one was a web of rust held together with more rust. The rest I’ve been giving away as fast as I can.”
“It sounds like you believe money is the root of all evil.”
“In some ways, yes. Oh, who doesn’t dream once in a while about striking a goldmine? Life would be easy, or so most people imagine. But in the end, how fulfilling is that kind of life? It’s in every tabloid and gossip site. No, I’m happy serving my community.”
“Thank you, you’ve given me a lot to think about.”
“Don’t think too hard. There are no patterns, no larger forces at work. Just a random series of events, some unfortunate, some not.”
I wanted to believe her. It was how I used to view the world. Seeing patterns everywhere, with mysterious forces behind them — that was for the conspiracy nuts. But the series of events connected with the lamp couldn’t be coincidental, could it? I just had to figure out how they fit together.
I took a long walk on the bike path, nearly to the bridge where Lost Lake emptied into the big one, mulling things over the whole way. By the time I got back to town, I thought I had it figured out. Marjorie had said, “Who doesn’t dream about striking a goldmine?” That was the key. Only, I didn’t like what that told me about Anne Clark.
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