I sniffed appreciatively as we crossed the main reading room to the elevators.

"You need a Kleenex?" Sister asked.

And then we were in the department where I had had my first job. A portrait of Miss Boxx, the lady who had been responsible for this impressive collection of Southern history, stared at me as sternly as she had when I was nineteen. The artist had captured her daring anyone to mess up what she had spent years amassing.

"The genealogy stuff is over here," I said, turning left.

"Good God!" Sister said as a dozen Megs looked up from the tables to see who had come in. They all frowned and then resumed their work.

"They all look alike," Sister whispered.

"I think it's the same bunch that was here forty years ago." We giggled and got the same frowns. "Come on, let's look at some Georgia stuff. Fred said his great grandmother or somebody was born in Madison."

"What was her name?"

"I don't know. Maybe we'll run up on some Tates. Everybody in Alabama came from Georgia or South Carolina. Or Virginia."

"That really narrows it down." Mary Alice followed me to the Georgia section. Bound records are arranged alphabetically by states.

"Land grants?" I asked, looking at the shelves. "Census records? Deaths?"

"Yuck." Mary Alice plunked the briefcases down

on a table. Two Megs looked up and frowned. "Let's just wait on Meg."

But I had opened an 1842 census record and discovered a Tate listed in the index. "Look. Page ninety-four."

' 'Probably a horse thief like you said. I just want to know about the good ones."

' 'This is a good one. Joshua Tree Tate, landowner. Wife Maria Caldwell Tate. And five children. See?" I handed the book to Sister.

"What kind of a name is Joshua Tree? Isn't there a real tree named that?"

"I'll bet his mother was a Tree."

"Shhh," said the two old ladies at our table.

"You know what, Mouse?" Sister whispered, calling me by my childhood nickname. "These boys would all have been just the right age to serve in the Civil War."

"Those records are here, too," I said. "We could find out what regiment they were in and whether they were killed."

We were hooked.

It was at least a half hour later when Mary Alice wondered where Meg was. "She said she would be here in a few minutes."

"She's fine," I said. "Look. Here's where one of the sons married his brother's widow."

Another half hour had passed when we began to hear an unusual amount of noise outside. Fire trucks, police cars, ambulances. All seemed to be coming to a screeching halt close to the library.

"Think someone needs to shout 'Fire'?" Sister asked.

"Something's going on. I wish these damn windows weren't so high."

The librarian was talking into her phone. She hung up and came over to our table. "Something's happened over at the courthouse. Nothing to concern us."