But the amount and type of paper we were examining were not consistent with these possibilities.
There were very few unburned fragments, none bigger than a dime or worth placing under the infrared-filter-covered lens of the video comparator. No technical aids or chemical tests were going to assist us in examining the remaining tissuey white curls of ash. They were so fragile we didn’t dare remove them from the shallow cardboard box Marino had collected them in, and we had shut the door and vents of the documents lab to keep the room as airless as possible.
What we were doing amounted to a frustrating, painstaking task of nudging weightless ashes aside with tweezers, picking here, picking there, for a word. So far we knew that Miss Harper had burned sheets of twenty-pound rag paper imprinted with characters typed with a carbon ribbon. We could be sure of this for several reasons. Paper produced from wood pulp turns black when incinerated, while paper made from cotton is incredibly clean, its ashes wispy white like the ones in Miss Harper’s fireplace. The few unburned fragments we looked at were consistent with twenty-pound stock. Finally, carbon does not bum. The heat had shrunk the typed characters to what was comparable to fine print, or approximately twenty pitch. Some words were present in their entirety, standing out blackly against the filmy white ash. The rest were hopelessly fragmented and sullied like sooty bits of tiny paper fortunes from Chinese cookies.
“A R R I V,” Will spelled out, eyes bloodshot behind unstylish black-framed glasses, his young face weary. He was having to work at being patient.
I added the partial word to the half-filled page of my notepad.
“Arrived, arriving, arrive,” he added with a sigh. “Can’t think of what else it could be.”
“Arrival, arriviste,” I thought out loud.
“Arriviste?” Marino asked sourly. “What the hell is that?”
“As in social climber,” I replied.
“A little too esoteric for me,” Will said humorlessly.
“Probably a little too esoteric for most people,” I conceded, wishing for the bottle of Advil downstairs in my pocketbook and blaming my persistent headache on eye-strain.
“Jesus,” Marino complained. “Words, words, words. Never seen so many words in my damn life.
Never heard of half of ’em and not sorry about the fact, either.”
He was leaning back in a swivel chair, his feet propped on a desk, as he continued reading the transcription of writings Will had deciphered from the ribbon removed from Gary Harper’s typewriter. The ribbon wasn’t carbon, meaning the pages Miss Harper burned could not have come from her brother’s typewriter. It appeared that the novelist had been working in fits and starts on yet another book attempt. Most of what Marino was looking at didn’t make much sense, and when I had perused it earlier I had wondered if Harper’s inspiration had been of the bottled variety.
“Wonder if you could sell this shit,” Marino said.
Will had fished another sentence fragment out of the god-awful sooty mess, and I was leaning close to inspect it.
“You know,” Marino went on. “They’re always coming out with stuff after a famous writer dies.
Most of it crap the poor guy never wanted published to begin with.”
“Yes. They could call it Table Scraps from a Literary Banquet,” I muttered.
“Huh?”
“Never mind. There’s not even ten pages there, Marino,” I said abstractedly. “Rather hard to get a book out of that.”
“Yeah. So it gets published in Esquire, maybe Playboy, instead of a book. Probably still worth some bucks,” Marino said.
“This word is definitely indicating a proper name of a place or company or something,” Will mused, oblivious to the conversation around him. “Co is capitalized.”
I said, “Interesting. Very interesting.”
Marino got up to take a look.
“Be careful not to breathe,” Will warned, the tweezers in his hand steady as a scalpel as he gingerly manipulated the wisp of white ash on which tiny black letters spelled out bor Co.
“County, company, country, college,” I suggested. My blood was beginning to flow again, waking me up.
“Yeah, but what would have bor in it?” Marino puzzled.
“Ann Arbor?” Will suggested.
“What about a county in Virginia?” Marino asked.