Diane paused. “You really don't get it?”
“No, I don't.”
Diane had known Agnes longer than any of them except Sylvia. They had been neighbors throughout Diane's childhood, and Agnes had often babysat her. “Her parents disowned her when she married Richard,” Diane said.
“That much I know.”
“Did you know she hasn't had so much as a postcard from any of her relatives in almost sixty years? Waterford isn't just an adopted hometown to her. It's her home, her only home, and Union Hall was once the pride and joy of the town. She's not going to let it be eliminated and forgotten as if it never existed.”
And Sarah understood.
She asked Diane to keep her posted, and then she ended the call and checked in to the hotel. Exhausted, she ordered room service for supper and called home to speak to the twins and update Matt on the day's developments. Gretchen and Maggie had come home, exultant in victory, and added a few other details to Diane's story. The friends of Union Hall knew they had not won yet, but they believed the momentum was turning in their favor.
That night Sarah slept restlessly in the unfamiliar bed, and she woke to the sound of her cell phone buzzing on the nightstand. Groping for it, she blinked sleepily at the caller ID and was startled awake when she read Jeremy's name. “Hello?” she said, sitting up in bed and drawing the covers around her. “Jeremy?”
“Hi, Sarah.” He sounded tired and drained, not as if he had woken too early but as if he had not slept well for days. “How are you?”
“I'm fine, but the question is, how are you? How are Anna and the girls? I haven't heard anything from you in so long, I was beginning to worry.”
“Anna and the girls are fine. I'm sorry I've been out of touch. I'm even sorrier that I gave you cause to worry.” Jeremy inhaled deeply and sighed. “The thing is, it's been kind of a bad week.”
Sarah suspected she knew why, but hoped she was wrong. “What happened?”
“I didn't get tenure.”
“What? Why not? How did that happen? Anna said the faculty voted in your favor.”
“They did, and as required, the tenure committee forwarded everything to the dean of the college. And . . . that's where it all fell apart.”
“The dean turned you down?”
“The dean turned me down.”
“The dean, who's married to the chair of your tenure committee, a woman who inexplicably hates you.”
“That's the one.” Jeremy sighed heavily. “He weighed the evidence and decided I wasn't a strong enough candidate to warrant forwarding my dossier to the provost.”
“That's not fair. How were you ever supposed to get an unbiased decision out of those two?”
“I don't have a good answer for that.”
“Can you go over the dean's head?”
“I could but . . .” Jeremy's voice trailed off. He cleared his throat and continued. “It would get ugly. It would mean legal action, and I don't think I have the stomach for that. I also don't think I have much of a case, and I definitely can't afford the legal bills.”
“I'm so sorry, Jeremy. This is just wrong, so wrong.”
“Thanks.” He sounded numb, drained of all emotion. “I couldn't agree more.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Look for another job. I actually started sending out CVs months ago. It's standard procedure for anyone going through tenure review, but in my case it seemed especially prudent.”
“How long do you have?”
“How long do I still have a job here, you mean? Until the end of spring semester. With any luck, I'll have something else lined up by then, and if I'm very lucky, it will be within a tolerable commute so we won't have to move. The way my luck's been lately, though . . .”
He didn't need to complete the thought.
Sarah thought it was deplorable that he would have to finish out months of teaching and committee work for that department with everyone knowing he had, essentially, been fired. “If there's anything I can do, you know all you have to do is ask.”
“I appreciate that,” he replied. “All the more since I haven't responded to your questions.”
“For perfectly legitimate reasons.”
“Maybe, but they were easy questions to answer and the need was urgent. I should have stopped wallowing in self-pity long enough to get back to you. I hope it's not too late.”
Thanks to Agnes, it wasn't. “Your timing couldn't be better. Does this mean you know something that could help us save Union Hall?”
“I think so. Have you read Abel Wright's fifth book?”
“No, only the second. Agnes has read the first, and I was going to start the third today.”
“You might want to skip ahead to the fifth. In one of the essays about halfway through the book, Wright discusses ownership of land and property, especially the ownership of community assets, and how that can raise families out of poverty. He describes how the women of Water's Ford incorporated in order to maintain control of a grand hall constructed for the purpose of hosting fund-raising events to benefit local soldiers and veterans. Then, almost as an asideâbecause for all of his accomplishments, Wright was a modest manâhe suggests that he was the architect and the construction foreman.”
“He says he built Union Hall?”
“Not single-handedly, of course.” Jeremy hesitated. “And he doesn't come right out and say it. He uses a lot of passive voice in that section, as if he expected his reader to know who the architect and foreman was, so it would have been unnecessary and perhaps even boastful for him to name himself. Keep in mind that he was writing for a contemporary audience. He wasn't thinking of what a reader more than a hundred years in the future might need explained.”
“Abel Wright built Union Hall,” said Sarah decisively. “It makes perfect sense. In 1863, he wanted to serve his country, but men of color weren't permitted to enlist yet. Naturally he would use his skills to serve another way.”
“That's a logical conclusion,” said Jeremy, “especially if you take into consideration that he helped build the first library in Creek's Crossing several years before that, and the architectural styles are similar. Anyone familiar with Abel Wright's publications and the literary conventions of the time would take the statements in his essay to mean that he designed and built Union Hall. However, I don't know if anyone meeting that description sits on the city council.”
“You can be our expert witness. You can tell them.”
“I'd be happy to,” he said. “Anna and Gina would love an excuse to visit Elm Creek Manor. Just tell me when you need me.”
“It might be as soon as next week. Can you get a sub to take over your classes?”
“Probably, and if I can't, I'll just cancel them. What are they going to do, fire me?”
Sarah was glad to hear humor in his voice. “It's their loss, Jeremy.”
“Anna says the same thing, but you know, it's my loss too. Aside from the departmental politics, I like it here. My students are bright and motivated. We like our house and we have great neighbors. Gina loves her school and she has nice friends there. Anna's personal chef business is doing okayânot fantastic, but okay. We aren't looking forward to starting over somewhere else.”
“It'll be all right,” she said, hoping it was the truth. She asked him to give her love to Anna and Gina, and they hung up.
Quickly she showered, dressed, and had a bite to eat at the free continental breakfast served in the lobby. After packing and checking out, she made one last trip to Special Collections to find and photocopy the passage from Abel Wright's fifth book that Jeremy had mentioned. Then, after stopping by the campus bookstore to buy Nittany Lions sweatshirts for Matt and the twins, she drove home.
Matt welcomed her with kisses, and after telling him what she had learned, she spent most of the afternoon on the phone with her friends, sharing her discoveries and hearing the story of Agnes's triumph over and over, with each narrator offering some new detail the others had not known. Sarah was very proud of her friend, and when Agnes announced another workday and brainstorming session at Union Hall, Sarah promised to be there.
The next day, as she helped Leslie repair the red velvet curtain that had once hung proudly above the main stage, she asked about the first library in Creek's Crossing, the one Abel Wright had helped build.
Leslie looked puzzled. “I wasn't aware that Abel Wright was involved in the library's constructionâbut of course, I didn't know he had built Union Hall either. Unfortunately, the original building was torn down in the 1950s after the new library was built on Second Street.”
“Don't tell me; let me guess,” said Sarah dryly, working her needle through the plush, heavy velvet. “They built condos on the site.”
“You're almost right,” said Leslie, smiling. “It was student apartments.”
“I guess I can't blame Krolich this time.”
“No, he would've been only a teenager then, perhaps younger. His predecessor arranged that sale.”
Sarah froze with her needle stuck in the velvet. “You mean University Realty handled the transaction?”
“They called themselves College Realty in those days, but yes, it was the same company.” Leslie sighed and brushed lint from the heavy folds draped over her lap. “Same company, very different sense of civic responsibility. Before the original library was razed, they took care to preserve important artifactsâthe cornerstone, several brass plaques engraved with the names of generous donors, a framed declaration by the town council celebrating the library's tenth anniversaryâthings of that sort. They kept some for themselves, but others they donated to the historical society. Some of them are on display here, others”âshe nodded to the ceiling to indicate the upstairs galleries, where dozens of unsorted storage boxes remainedâ”others are still packed away.”
“They saved the cornerstone?” asked Sarah.
Leslie nodded. “They incorporated it into the foundation of the new library. It's on the north side of the front entrance, opposite the cornerstone for the new building.”
“Does the old cornerstone include any information other than the date the first library was built?”
“I think it has only the year, but don't quote me on that,” said Leslie. “I see it so often I don't really pay attention. If you're curious, why don't you stroll over there and take a look? It's no more than a five-minute walk.”
“I think I will,” said Sarah, pushing herself to her feet and promising to return soon.
The day was cold and overcast, with strong gusts of wind that warned of a storm approaching. Sarah pulled up the hood of her jacket and tucked her hands into her pockets as she made her way a few blocks west of Union Hall to the Waterford Public Library. She found the old, preserved cornerstone exactly where Leslie had told her it would be, but she was disappointed that it provided the year of its dedication, 1850, and nothing more.
She studied the cornerstone, thinking, then headed back to Union Hall. Halfway there, she took her cell phone from her pocket and called Jeremy. He answered on the second ring, and after asking him how his job search was faringânot well, he said, but he was trying to stay optimisticâshe got to the point. “How did you know Abel Wright built the first library in Creek's Crossing?” she asked. “He didn't refer to it in his second book, the Underground Railroad memoir, and that was the one that covered the year 1850. Unless I missed it.”
“You didn't miss it,” said Jeremy. “Thanks to his characteristic modesty, he didn't mention it. I stumbled across that detail in a book published by the town chamber of commerce in the early twentieth century. The title was something like
Waterford: The First Hundred Years,
and it was meant to commemorate the town's centennial. It wasn't a best seller by any definition, not even in the Elm Creek Valley. Apparently there was some controversy over what year actually marked the centennial, which isn't surprising, considering the various names the town has gone by. Some people apparently refused to buy the book for that reason alone.”
“The authors included a photo of the library in the book?”
“Yes, as well as a photo of a plaque that apparently had been mounted inside the front entrance. The names of the library board, the first librarian, and many of the people who had a hand in the construction were engraved upon it. I noticed Abel Wright's name right away because it was the last one, and it was the only name out of alphabetical order.” He paused. “That leads me to believe his name was added later, but I don't have a good explanation for why.”
Sarah thanked him, wished him luck, and hung up. She wondered what had become of that plaque, whether it had been given to the Waterford Historical Society and was in one of the upstairs galleries awaiting discoveryâor whether it was locked away in a vault at the new offices of University Realty, where Krolich might have seen it, and perhaps other documents and artifacts alerting him to the historical and cultural significance of Union Hall.
The cloudburst struck when she was half a block from Union Hall. The wind drove icy drops into her face as she ran the rest of the way, holding her hood closed with one hand, darting up the front stairs and through the tall double doors. Inside, she stood on the mat and caught her breath, brushing rainwater from her jacket and hair as she scanned the foyer walls. Her gaze rested upon the engraved copper plaques on the walls flanking the doors; she had noticed them on her first visit, when they were still tarnished and dull, not polished and gleaming as they were now. Most of the plaques had been polished, anyway; a few were partially covered by the enormous mahogany antique curio cabinet. Heavy and dark and stuffed with mementos, it didn't suit the light elegance of its surroundings. Sarah suspected that someone had put it there because the foyer was the only first-floor room other than the theater large enough to accommodate it, and hauling it upstairs to one of the galleries would have been out of the question.