She angled the rearview mirror down to see her face and then carefully applied her lipstick. After puckering her lips, and then blotting them with her handkerchief, she picked up the clipboard and flipped past the first blank page, and then the second page, where she had written the answers to her phony census survey. The third page was the letter she had received from the city clerk’s office. It stated the following:

We have Birth records on file from 1873 to the present. However, these records must be on file for seventy-five (75) years if you are not a relation.

Marriage records are on file from 1907 to the present. In order for marriage records to be searched, both husband and wife must be deceased and proof of death must be submitted along with the request.

It hadn’t been seventy-five years since the birth of Mildred Fischer Dalton Taggart’s son, and Vivian no longer had her driver’s license to use for identification, but there were exceptions to every rule. Vivian needed to get back in that office and see how exceptional the exception needed to be.

Vivian guessed that the extremely unexceptional twerp in the shirtsleeves behind the counter was in his late twenties. Obviously, his mother hadn’t raised him properly, or whoever had trained him here at the clerk’s office had done what Edward would call a “piss-poor job” and hadn’t taught him how to treat people. She supposed she shouldn’t have expected much from a local government that couldn’t even be bothered to put a bench outside their building. (If she hadn’t just had her cigarette she might’ve said “a goddamned bench outside their goddamned building.” Thank goodness she was feeling a little more relaxed.) Even Mayor Reed made it a point to add extra benches around Wooster’s Public Square, so people had somewhere to sit, for chrissakes.

She approached the counter once again. The large man with the hat (who had not had an appointment) had gone, and there was no one else in the office that she could see.

“Back again?” the man asked wearily from his desk.

“I am.” Vivian smiled, as she mentally turned her charm dial from one to ten. The eyelashes were fluttering, the finger was tracing coy little circles around on the countertop, and then she sneezed and one of her clip-on earrings dropped from her earlobe, bounced and clanked onto the counter and onto the floor. She’d been aiming for smooth and sly, like Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai, but the operation was probably looking more like Lucy and Ethel in anything.

“Ohh, no, Looooocy,” she muttered to herself in her Ricky Ricardo voice as she groaned and bent down to pick up the earring.

The file room was enormous, lit with horrible fluorescent light that cast a blinding white-greenish hue over everything. It smelled like paint, metal, and lemon floor cleaner. There was almost an echo as Vivian followed the young man, whose name she now knew was Nicholas, through the doorway and into the center of the room as he pointed out which filing cabinets held which records.