A Gala Event by Sheila Connolly Page A

surprising. “A loose end that’s been bugging me from the start.” He leaned forward again, forearms on the table. “You know that my grandmother—my mother’s mother—died in the fire, right? She was the person I was closest to. She wasn’t a pushover, and she gave me grief when I went off the rails, but she always made it clear that she loved me, and I know that I loved her. Well, she’d moved in with Mom and Dad, maybe a year before the fire. Her mind was sharp, but she couldn’t handle stairs, and she needed help doing other things. The house was big enough that Dad could set off a kind of in-law apartment for her—connected to the house, but private, you know? She had an aide who came in half days, but Gramma ate her meals with us, and I’d spend time hanging out with her.”
    â€œAaron, what’s this got to do with anything?” Meg asked.
    â€œI’m getting there. When Gramma moved out of her house, I helped her clean it out. You can probably guess what the place was like: she’d lived there ever since she married, and she wasn’t great about throwing stuff away. Not like a hoarder or anything, but there was a lot. I’d go over there, and we’d work together. I’d haul the boxes down from the attic, and we’d go through them, and she’d decide what to keep and what to toss. Gail, some of it was old family papers,and she wanted those to go to the Historical Society; Dad wasn’t interested in keeping them. I was the one who delivered them, to whoever was running the place back then. I was going to ask if you’d kept them and where they were.”
    â€œYou want to see those?” Gail asked, clearly surprised. “Because I’d have to do some digging to figure out where they might be.”
    â€œThanks, but it’s not just that. One thing I do remember. A couple of weeks before the fire, Gramma called me in and said she had a couple more boxes that should go to the Historical Society. She’d labeled them ‘Family Papers.’ I didn’t think much about it at the time. I just took them and handed them over. It was only afterward I realized that we’d done a pretty good job of sorting out all the family papers from her old house, so what the heck was in the new boxes?”
    â€œAnd you think that could have anything to do with . . . what happened?” Gail asked, incredulous.
    â€œI know it’s a long shot. But I remember thinking then that it was kind of odd. It could be nothing at all, or she could have slipped a few gears and put in all her old magazines, for all I know. But I’d like to see those boxes. If that’s possible.”
    Gail said, “You’ve arrived at an odd time. We just built a new storage area under the old building, which will give us room to assemble all the collections that people have been giving to the Historical Society since we first opened. The problem is, they’ve been scattered all over town, wherever someone had room to keep them. And our early record-keeping left a lot to be desired. Bottom line is, I’m not sure where a lot of the stuff ended up—I’m still trying to track down some of it. Worst case, someone could have forgotten what it was and thrown it out. I’ll look for your grandmother’s stuff—it sounds like there’s more than those last fewboxes, although there’s no guarantee that any of it was kept together—but I won’t promise I can find it.”
    Aaron gave her a slight smile. “I’d really appreciate that, especially after I half scared you to death.”
    â€œAnd I nearly killed you with a vegetable chopper—which, by the way, is part of one of those wandering collections. So there’s a kind of logic to it all.”
    Aaron stood up, albeit a bit unsteadily, his fatigue showing. “I should get out of your hair. You’ve been very