Dead Letters Read Online Free

skulking in corners looking for the same thing and being rather sloppy about it.
    But I didn’t really believe that. Based on my quick reading of Arthur’s character, he’d seemed sincere, and he had come directly to me, and only me. He was clearly accustomed to dealing with the highest level. He had found something in his own records that upset him. He wasn’t trying to cover anything up; he only wanted confirmation. At least, that’s what I wanted to believe. Now, at the end of his life, was he putting his affairs in order, righting old wrongs? If so, was it for his own moral satisfaction, or was there something larger at stake? Could it have something to do with the Logan fortune, of which he was the heir and custodian?
    John Catherwood, the shelver, pushed his rolling cart around the end of the row of stacks, and I headed toward him.
    “Hi, John, how’s it going?” John had been with the Society for years and had never been promoted past shelver, but apparently he had never wanted anything more.
    He bobbed his head. “Great. Nice to have time to catch up with the backlog here.” He nodded at his overflowing cart of books and document cases.
    “Well, I won’t get in your way. But before I go, um—you spend a lot of time alone up here, don’t you?”
    “Sure, all the time. Why?”
    I felt silly asking my next question. “Do you ever get the feeling there’s somebody else up here, even when you know there isn’t?”
    “Sure, all the time.” John flashed a shy smile. “You thinking of Thomas?”
    “Thomas?”
    “The Society ghost.”
    In the five years I’d been working at the Society, nobody had ever mentioned to me that we
had
a ghost. But then, many of the staff had been here less time than I had, so maybe they didn’t know either. I was intrigued. “Tell me more. Who’s Thomas?”
    “Used to be the librarian here, and just about the only staff member, back around 1900, when this place was more or less a gentlemen’s club. He actually lived in an apartment here, kind of like a caretaker. It was on the third floor—you can’t see where it was anymore because of all the renovations since.” John paused for a moment before adding, “He died here, too.”
    “You mean in the building?”
    “Yup. He’d been here for years—didn’t have any family. Luckily he was found pretty quickly.”
    Thank heavens! I didn’t want to contemplate what would have happened if he hadn’t been found fast. “Why do you think he’s still around?”
    John shrugged. “Odd things, now and then. I find a book or folder where I know I didn’t leave it, although there are staff members who are lazy about putting things where they should be. Or like you said, I kind of sense somebody watching. It’s hard to say—this is an old building, and funny things happen sometimes. But if it’s him, he’s never done anything harmful, so I just leave him in peace. Were you looking for something up here, Nell?”
    “Just checking a reference for a grant proposal. I’ll let you get back to work.”
    I slipped past him to the collection I had been looking at the day before, wondering why no one had ever mentioned to me that the building was haunted. But it was hard enough to hire people at the skimpy salaries we offered, and probably no one had wanted to scare applicants off. I smiled to myself as I envisioned a job description that included the line, “must be willing to work with ghosts.”
    So far I had amassed a cache of personal letters, a family tree, and a history of the Logan rifle, all linked by the Logan name. And, I realized with a small chill, all had come to me under rather odd circumstances: a folder shoved askew on the shelf, papers left behind in the copier, a book I was bound to stumble over. Was somebody leaving me a trail?
    I all but flew down the stairs, back to my office: I wanted to look at the family tree chart again. I brought with me the Logan Repeater book. I had to think that it must have