Lineage(105)

“Not at all. That’s why I cleared this one off. Take as much time as you need, I have urgent business to attend to upstairs.” Harold widened his eyes and poked a finger at the ceiling.

Lance listened to the older man’s receding footsteps as he disappeared up the stairway, and then looked around the basement again. The stacks of boxes and stoic objects stood motionless. He turned his attention to the first ledger he had pulled from the box. On the first page a date of June 13, 1955, was written in the upper left-hand corner. Lance breathed, turned the page, and began to read.



Lance looked up from the third ledger when he heard someone approaching down the stairs. Instead of Harold stepping in to the room as he expected, Mary’s face smiled brightly at him across the gloom of the basement.

“I didn’t expect to see you,” Lance said as she approached the table. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail, which accentuated her cheekbones and thin eyebrows. He couldn’t help but look at her lips and wonder if she would lean close to him again to press them to his own.

“Harold stopped by the store a couple hours ago. Said you were down here poring over these,” she said, as she pulled a chair from a nearby table and sat down opposite him. A moment of disappointment ran through him at the lack of a kiss, but he pushed it aside, chiding himself for being immature. “Found anything so far?” she asked, peeking over the edge of the box.

Lance sighed. “Yeah. Basically the ledgers have a daily account of current employees and a lot of meaningless information like what type of shipments were on each load and departure times. So far I haven’t really been able to figure out what the abbreviations for each of the employees mean.”

Mary glanced at the ledger that lay open before Lance and flipped to the beginning, eyeing the page from where she sat. “You skipped ahead to Rhinelander’s time period, huh?”

Lance nodded. “Yeah. He was hired in 1967. Nothing seems out of the ordinary. He’s listed in the ledgers until October of 1968, just like Harold said. Other than that, I can’t see anything strange.”

Mary’s eyebrows scrunched together, and she inspected the box again. “What’s in the smaller box?” she asked, shifting her eyes back to Lance.

Lance reached into the container and pulled the smaller box from within. “It’s a few newspaper clippings about the shipping company. There’s only two or three, actually.” He pulled the top off the box and pushed it across the table.

Mary held the yellowing pieces of paper out and examined them. She turned the first one over, showing it to Lance. “That’s actually the first picture I’ve ever seen of your grandfather and grandmother. I’d heard the name of the company before, but never knew who really owned it or what happened to them.”

Lance nodded. The photograph gracing the thin page from the local paper depicted three people standing before a docking bay and the flat calm of Superior beyond. Two of the people he immediately recognized. Annette looked almost like a different person, her hair flowing in golden waves and a smile on her nearly unlined face. She had been pretty, Lance thought as he looked at the photo. The man to her left wore a black mask over the lower part of his face, covering the damaged tissue underneath it, but there was no mistaking the eyes that burned in the picture. Lance had seen them only the night before, boring holes into him from the corner of the room by the light of the shotgun.

This had been the only photo of Erwin Metzger that Lance had come across in the box. Erwin stood apart from his wife, like a statue hewn of the coldest stone. A rotund man with a paunchy smile on his face stood on the other side of Erwin, and was identified in the wording below the picture as Brian Ethridge, the mayor of Stony Bay at the time. The headline above the photo read Front Line Shipping Co: A growing powerhouse in the industry. The article went on to chronicle the accomplishments and endeavors the company had achieved so far. Nothing more than his grandfather’s and grandmother’s names were mentioned in the story.

Mary placed the clipping back into the box after reading it and its brethren. The other two articles only briefly outlined the startup and the subsequent buyout of the shipping company after Erwin’s death. A few moments later they heard a thumping as Harold made his way down the stairs.

Lance smelled the coffee before he ever saw the tray Harold carried. Mary cleared a spot on the table as the old man set the load down and began to pour cupfuls from a steaming pot.

“Thought you could use a little pick-me-up,” he said, handing Lance a boiling cup of the black liquid. Lance thanked him and sipped the drink, suddenly aware of how tired he truly was. Mary pulled another chair close to the table and Harold sat at the end, crossing one leg over the other, a cup in one hand.