I didn’t want to turn on any more lights than I had to. I let the flashlight lead me through the tidy kitchen. Either Oscar wasn’t doing any cooking these days, or else he was being good about cleaning. Here was the familiar, almost muddy smell of the herbal teas and supplements, the green matcha powder, the canisters and jars of beans and whole grains and other healthy ingredients that had failed to keep her healthy.

I passed on to the office and here I did turn on a light, blinking at the sudden brightness. The room had been gone over and then gone over again, the site of many rummagings and searches. The books were out of order in stacks on the floor and on the desktop, and file folders labeled in Viridian’s small, distinctive script were also set aside in piles. I looked for what seemed like a long time, keeping my ears open in case a car pulled up out front, or worse, some creepy sound came from within the house itself.

When I found it, finally, I saw that I’d mistaken it for something else. I hadn’t expected it to be this large volume bound in dark blue leather with a gold-embossed spine, like something you might give as a gift in the last century, or the one before:

A Defence of Poetry

and other works

of Percy Bysshe Shelley

One corner of the heavy leather cover had been loosened, then glued back. You might not notice it if you weren’t looking for it. I pried it apart with care and extracted a thick bundle of printed pages. There were also many plain lined notebook pages covered in handwriting. All of it slightly crumbly with age, smelling stale and airless.

I spread it all in front of me on the desktop and began to read. A buzzing noise started up in my head, blotting out any other sounds.

After a few minutes? An hour? I finished reading and stood, blinking and wobbly. I got out my phone and took close-up pictures of each page, both printed and handwritten, like a spy or a secret agent. When I had them all, I put the pages back in order and set them in their hiding place in the book’s cover. I resealed the cover, moistening the old glue with water from the kitchen tap so it would hold. Then I returned the book to where I’d found it on the shelves. After a moment I took my phone back out and took a picture of that also.

I still had the business card Larry Nagel had given me, and the next morning he was the first call I made.