The Last Vintage

Lorraine parked her sedan in the gravel lot behind the mill at 11:40. The building had been a textile mill once, then a feed store, and now it was the Lazarus Archive, which most people in town had never heard of. She had heard of it because Austin Bannister had written her back in October, two sentences, saying he worked there and that she should look him up if she ever needed a book. She had not answered until last week, when she needed a book very badly.

The side door was unlocked as promised. Inside, the air smelled of old paper and iron, the way an old mill does when nobody has bothered to cover the smell up. It was 11:40 and dark except for one light at the far end of the room, a green glass reading lamp glowing over a table. She walked toward it between two rows of oak shelves, past a wall of county ledgers and past a shelf of agricultural pamphlets from the 1890s that she would have loved to browse under better circumstances.

Austin was standing by the table with his coat still on. He looked older, obviously, but recognizable, the same long face, the same glasses now with thicker frames. He was sixty-two. He held a thermos and two paper cups.

"Lorraine Merrick," he said. "Forty-one years."

"Give or take," she said. She set her bag on the table. "You got tall."

"You got the same haircut."

"It's the only one that works on me." She took one of the paper cups. He poured from the thermos. It was coffee, mediocre and hot, and she was grateful for it. "Thanks for doing this. I know it's strange, calling a man at ten at night and asking him to open a building for me."

"It's strange, but it's also the most interesting thing that's happened here since the roof leaked in August. Sit down. Tell me what's so important it can't wait for regular hours."

She sat. The chair was wooden and creaked. She told it plainly, the way she'd told the board twice already. "I'm up for head winemaker at Corbett and Voss. There's a restructure coming in the spring, and the board is voting on who keeps the title in January. It's between me and a man named Dale Prewitt, who is forty-nine and has a very good website. My method for the reserve line depends on a soil amendment process I developed, and Dale has been telling the board it isn't mine, that I adapted it from an older source. He's not wrong exactly. There is an older source. But the process is mine, and I can prove the lineage if I can show them the original text and my notes side by side."

"Which text?"

"Compost and Crystalline Structure. 1874 edition, the Harmon and Stiles printing. It was referenced in a footnote in a journal from 1911 that I found in the university library. The footnote said a copy was held in a private collection in this county. I did some digging. Everything pointed here."

Austin drank his coffee and said nothing for a moment. Somewhere in the building a pipe ticked.

"We have it," he said. "Or we have a thing that matches your description. Harmon and Stiles, 1874, the soil chemistry one. It's on the restricted shelf."

"What does restricted mean? Is it damaged?"

"Restricted means the board that funds us made a deal with the family that donated it. Viewing by appointment, supervised handling, and a written request filed ten business days in advance. Ten days. The board vote is in seven."

"Ah," she said.

"So you see my problem."

She saw his problem. She wrapped both hands around the paper cup and thought about it. "I'm not asking you to steal it. I'm asking to look at it. Tonight, with you sitting right there. I'll wear the cotton gloves, I'll use the book cradle, I won't photograph anything without your say so. I need to read forty pages and cross-reference three passages against my own lab notes. That's it. Dawn, I'm gone, the book goes back on the shelf, nobody files a report."

"That's the theory," Austin said. "The reality is a bit more of a bend than that. The restricted shelf is in the back office, behind the file cabinets, and there's a log sheet I'm supposed to fill out for every retrieval. If I put your name on the log with tonight's date, it becomes a matter of record that I opened a restricted item off schedule. If I don't put your name on the log, then I've done something worse, which is quietly."

"And if you get caught quietly, you lose the grant?"

"The preservation fund grant. Four hundred thousand over five years. The board reviews it in February. So yes, I've been sitting here for an hour doing arithmetic."

Lorraine looked at the green lamp. The light made his face look like an old photograph. She remembered him at twenty-one, in the library at school, a skinny white farm kid complaining about a professor, and herself at the next table, one of four Black students in the department that year. It had gone nowhere and ended fine, and she had thought of him maybe four times in forty years, which she felt was a reasonable number.

"Then don't do it for me," she said. "Do it for the book. That book has been sitting behind a file cabinet for probably fifty years. Nobody has read it. I'm the first person in decades who has a reason to. An archive where nobody reads anything is just expensive storage. You said yourself I'm the most interesting thing to happen here since the roof."

"That's a low bar and you know it."

"I know it. I'm still walking through it."

He laughed, short, and stood up and took off his coat, which she took as an answer. He hung it on the hook by the shelf and looked at her over his glasses.

"Rules for tonight," he said. "Gloves at all times. Cradle at all times. No pens on the table, pencil only, and I hold the pencil when you're not using it. If I say close it, we close it. And it ends at dawn. Six twenty-two sunrise, I looked it up. At six twenty-two you're out the door and the book is home, and whatever happens in between stays in between."

"Whatever happens in between is me reading forty pages," she said.

"I know what I agreed to." He walked back toward the office, then stopped and turned. "For what it's worth, I hope you get the title. Prewitt sounds like a man with a very good website."

"He is a man with a very good website." She stood and shouldered her bag. "Lead the way."

The back office was small, lit by a second green lamp that matched the one in the reading room, and crowded with file cabinets and a desk with three generations of computers on it. Austin moved a cabinet of donor correspondence aside on its wheels and crouched behind it. There was a low metal door, unlocked, and he pulled out a gray clamshell box, set it on the desk, and stood with his hands on the lid for a second.

"Last chance to file a request like a law-abiding citizen," he said.

"The vote's in seven days."

"Right." He opened the lid and folded back the tissue paper. The book inside was dark green cloth, plain, with the title stamped in faded gilt along the spine. He slid it out with both hands and laid it in the cradle he'd brought over from the reading room. "Harmon and Stiles, 1874," he said. "There she is. Forty-one years and you're still talking me into things."

"You were easy at twenty-one too," Lorraine said, and pulled on her gloves.

Austin dragged a wooden ladder over from the corner and set it against the restricted shelf. The empty clamshell box lived on the top shelf, he said, and it went back there while the book was out, because the cradle belonged on the desk and the box belonged to the shelf, and she'd stopped following the logic halfway through. (Archivists had rules the way other people had opinions, except the rules never changed.)

"Hold the ladder," he said. "Not because you'll drop me, but because if anyone looks in the window, it's better I'm on a ladder than on the floor."

"Who's going to look in the window at midnight?"

"You'd be surprised. Moths, mostly. Once a state inspector." He put one foot on the bottom rung and tested it. "You always were in a hurry."

"There it is," Lorraine said. "I wondered how long you'd hold that one."

"Hold what?"

"The hurry thing. You've been sitting on it since the reading room." She put her hand on the rail. "Go on, then. Say it proper."

He climbed two rungs, slow, keeping one hand on the shelf. "You used to cut people off. In the library, in seminars. Not rude about it, just done with the conversation before the other person knew it was over. I liked talking to you, but I always felt like I was slowing you down and you were too polite to say so."

"So you ended it before I could."

"I ended it because I had two years of school left and no money and you had a plan that didn't have room for a boyfriend in it. I read the plan. I wasn't in it past June."

"That's not how I remember it."

"How do you remember it?"

She thought about it while he climbed another rung. The truth was she remembered the library and the chair by the window and not much else, which seemed like a poor return on forty-one years. "I remember you never touched me first. Not a hand, not an arm. I always had to go first, every time, and after a while I got tired of being the one reaching. I figured you weren't that interested."

The ladder creaked. He stopped with his head about a foot from the top shelf. "Huh," he said.

"That's your whole response. Huh."

"Well, that's a different version of the story than mine. Mine's that it was 1983, and you were the only Black woman in that seminar, and I was a white boy from a farm town who'd heard every ugly thing people said about a couple like that. I wasn't going to put you through it unless you asked me to." He took his eyes off the top shelf and looked down at her. "You were the most certain person I'd ever met. I figured if you wanted something you'd take it."

"I was twenty-one. I wanted somebody to take something once in a while."

"Forty-one years," he said, half to himself, and turned back to the shelf.

So that was that, more or less, except that it wasn't, because now she was standing under a ladder at midnight holding a rail and thinking about a boy in a corduroy jacket who wouldn't put his hand on her knee. He'd been quieter then. Guarded, like the library itself, everything locked up and available by appointment only. She'd thought age might have loosened him. It hadn't, from the look of it.

He climbed the ladder and set the empty box on the top shelf with both hands, the way she supposed archivists did everything, and came down, and that was when it happened. He handed her the pencil, or tried to, and their fingers touched over it, her glove mostly but some skin, and he flinched. A small flinch, quick, the pencil nearly dropped, and he covered it by making a joke about the gloves.

"Sorry," he said. "Static, probably. This building eats carpets."

"Sure," Lorraine said. "Static."

She took her seat at the desk and pulled the cradle toward her and opened the book to the first of the forty pages, and Austin went back into the reading room, or near enough to it, and began filing. She could hear the drawers opening and closing. He was pretending to file. Nobody files at midnight, and besides, she'd watched him open the same drawer twice. But she let it go, because the book was open and her lab notes were out and she had a diagram in front of her that was going to save her career.

The trouble came on page twenty-six. Harmon and Stiles had drawn a cross-section of a compost bed with a drainage layer, and the labels were numbered but the key was three chapters back, and the third number didn't match anything. She read it twice. She looked at her notes. She looked at the diagram again, and the numbers sat there refusing to mean anything.

"Austin," she called. "Come explain your diagram."

He appeared in the doorway with a file