“I’ll leave you to it,” he chirped with a grin and a wink.

Nicholas, as it turned out, was a truly devoted I Love Lucy fan.

Vivian winked back and then waited until he closed the door behind him before setting her pocketbook down on the long table farthest from the door.

The vital records were grouped by date in the filing cabinets, and then alphabetized by last name. Vivian pulled out one group at a time, and then spent fifteen to twenty minutes seated at the table, flipping through the files. Some of the records were on full 8.5˝ x 11˝ pages, some were on half sheets, and still others were transcribed onto index cards. It was a messy mass of information.

For the most part the records were in proper alphabetical order, as Mrs. Ada Carr probably demanded, but as Vivian sat at that long table shuffling through folder after folder she suspected Mrs. Carr may have been out sick for quite some time, and that the careless Nicholas had taken to doing his own special brand of filing. (In fact, she’d watched him hastily stuff the hat-holding man’s deed registration into a wooden tray marked “Marriage License Applications” before guiding her back to the records room.) Vivian had thought she was looking in the E–Fs, but as she shuffled through Ingraham, Jefferson, James, Ikehorn, she realized the records had been misfiled. She kept flipping the records in case an E–F might show up, because the tab on the outside did say “E–F,” and then she did see that one of those misfiled records had a name she recognized, and it wasn’t Mildred Fischer.

“Jesus Christ,” Vivian whispered aloud.

She held her index finger to the page under the names on the record, and thought if it’d been one of her movie magazines it would’ve said “Illicit!” and “Scandalous!” For the next five minutes she couldn’t look anywhere else other than at that misfiled record.

“How’s everything going, Looocy?” Nicholas popped his head around the door, rattling her out of her astounded stupor.

“Oh!” Vivian jumped in her chair, startled.

“Can I make any copies for you?”

“Copies?”

“Of the record you were looking for.”

Nicholas walked over to the table and took the record from her hand that had frozen in place like one of Freedlander’s glove mannequins.

As he walked back toward the door she remembered herself.

“I’m still looking for one more. I think these I-through-Js may be in here by mistake?”

Nicholas raised his eyebrows and walked back to where she was sitting. She pointed at the names and then the folder tab. Nicholas scratched his head, “Hunh, what do you know.” He then picked up the I–J folder and opened it to Eberhardt. “Well, there you go! The E-through-Fs!” He handed her the folder, unconcerned with the mix-up. “I’ll come back in a little.”

After a little, Nicholas did return, and by then Vivian had found what she came for.

“Nicholas, if you could copy these two records for me, that would be lovely. Would you mind?”