Every once in a while, something very interesting will come into my mom's library.
We live in a small town, so people often go to the library for answers, knowing that my mother has an extensive background in researching things like history and genealogy. Those are the people we get most often, actually: people with questions about their own family history. Oftentimes they'll come in with partial records and ask my mother to fill in the gaps. She's always more than happy to do it. Not only is she good at it, but it also serves as an acceptable reprieve from the relative boredom of small-town life.
I enjoy helping her out, too, from time to time, and hearing about the cases she works on. Some of them are interesting and tell stories you wouldn't believe - murders, secret graves, sordid suicides, and a million other gritty pieces of humanity that have been swept under the rug. Since I was a child, this has fascinated me.
But I wish that my mother hadn't taken on this last case.
It was an elderly woman living on the edge of town who brought the photo album in. She claimed it wasn't hers and didn't know where it had come from. "It belonged to my mother, but I'm certain that none of the pictures are from our family. She must have gotten it from someone, but for the life of me I just don't know who! I'm sure it belongs to someone in the town. Perhaps you could find the original owners?"
My mother was all too eager to agree. After all, she loves a good mystery. She can never walk away from one. So the woman handed over the album and left in good spirits, glad to be rid of it as it was "cluttering up her house."
I didn't understand that last statement until I saw it. Let me tell you, the album is HUGE. It's perhaps the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen, actually. The cover is thick and heavy, definitely made of wood, and bound with a fabric that was probably once resplendent but now resembles a slice of dilapidated old carpet from a murder house. The pages are thick, too, but of what material I'm not entirely sure. They are burgundy in color and each page holds about four photographs.
And the photographs.
My mom practically squealed when she saw them. The latest pictures are from 1910, with the majority of the pictures from the mid-1800s. The pictures are clear and most of them are labeled with first names, which my mother found very interesting. "Why no last names?" she muttered as we looked through the pictures. But she didn't seem to mind, it just added to the mystery. It would be a fun challenge.
But something about those pictures really freaked me out. I mean, I was really, really uncomfortable. And I just couldn't explain why. There wasn't anything strange about them, but I found that I didn't want to look at them very long. I just felt like I'd stumbled across something I shouldn't have.
After a few weeks, my mother seemed to have reached a dead end with the album.
No matter how hard she looked, she was unable to identify its original owner. Although an "S" was inscribed on the metal clasp, none of the families in the area with last names beginning with "S" seemed to have any connection to the album. And the more my mother looked, the more confused she became.
"Maybe it isn't from our town at all," she mused to me one afternoon. "Maybe it's from somewhere else... that woman's mother could have gotten it from another acquaintance or another family member. At this point, we'll never know. But I really don't think it's from around here."
I sort of shrugged it off. I was kind of glad that it came to nothing. It made me feel a little more relaxed.
But it shouldn't have.
As a last resort, mom decided to stop out at the old town cemetery. It was in use up until the mid-1900s, at which point it was too full, and a new one was opened up closer to the edge of town. The cemetery was fairly dilapidated now, but my mother did her best to take care of the gravestones that were left, hoping to preserve some of history.
