Dead Letters Read Online Free Page A

appeared in my path for a reason, although I didn’t want to look too closely at the “how.”
    An hour later I had cobbled together a likely scenario and a candidate for Arthur Logan’s scandal. The Logan Rifle Company had been founded by James Reilly and Jeremiah Logan, great-grandfather of Arthur, before the Civil War, but it had become successful only when the Logan Repeater had been introduced. The company made a lot of money, quite legitimately, but apparently overreached, collapsing into bankruptcy only a few years later. James Reilly had died at about the same time. Reading between the lines I guessed that either he had drunk himself to death or had killed himself, unable to deal with the shame of his failure. Jeremiah, on the other hand, had risen from the ashes and moved on to found new businesses. He had had at least two sons: Joseph, who had fathered the correspondent Josephine, and James (named for his partner, in the early glory days of the company?), Arthur’s grandfather. Laura, the author of the letters, had married James.
    And I still had no insight into why Arthur would be so upset by this. A family business had gone bust in the chaotic years after the Civil War. It had happened to a lot of companies. One partner had moved on and flourished, the other one had given up. Where was the scandal?
    But the name Reilly rang a faint bell, and I reached over to my bookshelf for the history of the Society that had been written a few years earlier, and turned to the chapters dealing with the early years of the twentieth century. Yes! That librarian Thomas whom John had mentioned had borne the surname Reilly, and a quick check of online genealogy websites verified that he had been James Reilly’s son, born shortly before the senior Reilly’s death. Was it really dead Thomas who was leaving me a trail of clues? That was ridiculous. I was a sane and sensible adult, and I refused to believe a ghost was feeding me information. There had to be someone else looking at the same materials and neglecting to return them to their places.
    But what if . . . ? Ghostly guidance or not, I still didn’t see anything that Arthur Logan might have found shameful—just a rather sad family history. There had to be something more. If Thomas was my informant, would he talk to me by daylight, or did I have to wait until the building emptied before seeking him out?
    Nell, you’re going nuts
.
You are not seriously thinking about talking to a ghost, are you?
But there was one tangible thing I knew I could do. If Thomas Reilly had been sole custodian of the collections, he must have left records of his time at the Society, and from the Society published history I could tell that its author must have located them. If she could find them, so could I, and a quick check of the footnotes in the book verified that there was a cache of early Society records. I turned to my computer to look at the online catalog and found that they should be stored on the third floor, not far from where I had been looking, and that they included some Reilly citations. I headed back upstairs.
    All was serene on the third floor as I made my way to the correct tier of shelves. There they were: the Society papers, including one box neatly labeled “Reilly papers,” most likely by Thomas’s own hand. What was I looking for in that box? Were there Logan files? Corporate files?
    The box stood out about three inches from the others on the shelf. I pulled the box down and, clutching it to my chest, made my way to a table by a window and sat down. Opening the box, I found on top a folder labeled “Logan Rifle Company.” Nice to know I was on the right track. I opened it to find a hodgepodge of letters, newspaper articles, and corporate records, but on the top of the pile were two documents pinned together: the award for the patent for the Logan Repeater rifle and the rough draft of the application form. The final patent bore the name of Jeremiah Logan; the draft