“May I help you?” asked an attractive older woman with short, dark gray waves. She was setting books from a rolling cart onto a shelf next to the circulation desk. The tag on her blouse said her name was Emmajean.

Liza bit her lip. “Maybe. I’m with The Sugar Bend Observer and I need some information. To be honest, though, I’m not exactly sure what I’m looking for.”

“The library is a good place to start if you don’t know what you need. I bet we can help.”

Ten minutes later, Liza stood before a strange machine with a large roll on one side and a green glow coming from underneath.

“This is our microfiche printer,” Emmajean said. “It’s where we keep a lot of old documents and research materials. If you need something from pre-internet days, chances are you’ll find it here.” She clicked through a few pages on the computer sitting next to the microfiche. “Now, you mentioned old newspaper articles, right?”

“That’s right. I need information about a man named Jay Malone. I think he owned an ice cream shop around here.”

The woman’s hands stilled on the keyboard. Her gaze dropped and a small sigh escaped her. “I read your article in the paper. About the boat that washed up. You think it’s his?”

Liza nodded. “I do. Of course, I can’t be absolutely sure, because no one by that name has come forward claiming the boat. No one seems to know anything about it. Or care, really. But I saw an old photo of him standing in the boat.” She shrugged. “I’m just assuming it’s his.”

The librarian pressed her lips together and turned back to the machine. “I’ll show you how to use this, then I’ll leave you to it.” She walked Liza through how to load the slides into the machine and how to scan through them quickly. There was no way to search for a specific word or name, like a microfiche Google, but if she had a general idea of what she was hunting for, she could move through the pages quickly with an eye peeled for particular words and headlines.

When the librarian walked out, Liza got to work. She started on slides from the midseventies, scanning through pages of newspaper headlines, minutes from city council meetings, briefs on land usage and zoning requirements. She found a list of every type of tree growing in Sugar Bend, reports on damage from dozens of hurricanes, and hundreds of real estate listings.

As her eyes began to burn, she scanned past an old advertisement, then paused and wound the knob backward to see the ad again. Jackpot. Three women were lined up across the page, their arms around each other’s shoulders. They wore red-and-white dresses, knee-high boots, and little hats with a red flower on the front. Above their heads was the phrase, “Enjoy Friendly’s Ice Cream—the best in town!”

She stared at the ad a moment, then scanned the following pages more slowly. Among articles of farmer’s markets, housing prices, and a rare manatee sighting in the river, she saw several more ice cream ads, more photos of the Friendly Girls, and a photo of Jay with one of the girls, a Trudy Figg, whom he eventually married. There was a short write-up in The Observer about their marriage, and how at the reception that followed an out-of-town wedding, they served ice cream in wineglasses.