Free The Ruby Tear by Suzy McKee Charnas

neighborhood, check out the local library and historical archives, the newspaper morgue—”
    “It’s done. That’s how I’ve found out as much as I have.”
    “It won’t do me any harm to have a look for myself.” In case you missed something. Bullshit! Schoen wouldn’t have missed anything. He was one of the best investigators in the business—he had found out about the document in the Burch Collection, hadn’t he?
    “All right,” Schoen said. He didn’t say, It’s your money, pal; if you want to pay me to do a search for you, and then pay me to take you over the same ground that I’ve already been over, that’s fine with me. He didn’t complain about being yanked out of his sleep in the middle of the night, either.
    Good money bought good help; Charles Griffin had used to say that. Nick grimaced, not comfortable at seeing aspects of his father’s more thoughtless behavior in his own now. He didn’t like himself much for rousting the hired help out of bed in the pit of pre-dawn morning because he couldn’t sleep himself.
    But need drove him. He gripped the phone tighter and said, “Exactly what is this ‘Burch Collection?’ I’ve never heard of it before.”
    Schoen told him again (Nick wondered if there was a Mrs. Schoen holding her pillow wrapped around her head in hopes of getting back to sleep).
    “Burch was an eccentric, a spiritual seeker, I guess you’d say now. He was a devotee of Madame Blavatsky, and he corresponded with Conan Doyle on spiritualist matters. He traveled all over America attending seances and watching dowsers at work—that was a secondary speciality of his, actually; there’s a whole sub-collection on it.
    “But his main subject of interest was New England hauntings, superstitions, that kind of thing. He even visited H.P. Lovecraft at one point, presumably to see if the old horror-spinner wasn’t practicing journalism instead of fiction.
    “Over the years, Burch built up a sizable file of documents on his obsession, everything from newspaper accounts to locks of hair and dowsing rods. When his niece went through his study after his widow’s death, she realized that though most of these objects had been tossed by her aunt she could still save the papers, which she thought might be valuable someday. She’s the one who set up the archive and got some funding to find a home for it.
    “Apparently there are dozens of old diaries, ships’ logs, office account books, letters, and legal papers—deeds, wills, sworn statements, that kind of thing—as well as a mass of oral accounts that Burch either took down himself or had collected by students he got to do some of his fieldwork for him. Did I tell you he was a professor of medieval English?”
    “You told me,” Nick said.
    “Well, when I was checking on your ancestors in Wellfleet I stumbled on a retired librarian who remembered hearing that one of Burch’s assistants had made a local sweep of old documents back sometime between the two world wars. That was the explanation she’d been given for some gaps in the Wellfleet town archives.
    “The present Burch curator, George Pease, affirmed by phone that they acquired at that time a hand-written document with a Griffin signature, and there’s no problem with letting us see it. I got the feeling Pease was flattered by our interest. He’s very, very part-time; ditto access to the collection itself. Rumor has it that they’ve had to sell off some prime pieces to keep going.”
    Nick said sharply, “You didn’t tell me that before. There’s no chance the Griffin papers are gone, is there? Sold with other things, and the curator’s forgotten?”
    There was a pause. “I don’t think we need to worry about that, Mr. Griffin. This isn’t what you’d call ‘prime’—like something with a Conan Doyle signature, for instance. I think we’re on okay.”
    Nick thought of the unknown enemy, the “demon” of the stories on the desk and shivered: not really, David;