Free The Snowfly by Joseph Heywood Page B

things.”
    â€œIn with the specimens?”
    â€œIn a wooden box marked on the bottom with the letters MJK.”
    He nodded solemnly. “It’s been a long time since I was familiar with exactly what’s in there. A lot of my colleagues dump stuff there. Always have. Entomological detritus. All faculty members have keys.”
    My assumption of a break-in wasn’t necessarily right. Still, they didn’t fly off on their own: Somebody took them. That fact was indisputable. I got paper and rendered some sketches.
    He looked at them and shook his head. “Insufficient data,” he said.
    â€œThey were there,” I said. “Now they’re gone. I thought they might be snowflies.”
    I watched him closely to gauge his reaction. Nash grinned, “Snowflies, eh? Maybe it’s nothing, but a scientist learns to embrace coincidence.” We went to his library and withdrew two thin volumes from a shelf. The first was called On the Habits of Trout & Their Environs. The author was M. J. Key and the publication date was 1892. The second volume was called Trouts of the Americas and dated 1943. The author was also M. J. Key.
    The publication dates were more than a half century apart.
    â€œKey,” he said, “was a controversial professor here when we were still an agricultural college. That’s about all I know about him. Key’s trout works were ahead of their time. Barbless hooks, light tackle, catch-and-release, and habitat management rather than hatchery fish. He was a genius and outspoken in his views, and because of this, a lot of people thought he was a nut case. Maybe he was.”
    What did this have to do with white flies? I said, “He wrote two books, fifty-one years apart?”
    â€œWho knows? There aren’t many people left now who knew him, but those who did say Key was a mistrusting and almost pathologically secretive individual. He left the college under some kind of scandal in the late nineteen-thirties. Some say FDR called him to government duty, and others say he was run out. Nobody knows for certain. The college was informed by the government that he died during the war, but there were no details, not even a date. He was a foreigner and spoke German, so maybe he was a spy or in the intelligence business. His second work could’ve been posthumous. I guess we’ll never know.”
    â€œThe flies could have been his.”
    Nash nodded solemnly. “That’s one hypothesis among many possibilities.”
    â€œDid he write anything else?”
    â€œNothing I’ve read,” Nash said. “You can borrow my copies of his books if you like.”
    I did.
    Several weeks passed and I had worked hard to get more information on M. J. Key, but I hadn’t assembled all that much. On microfilm at the university library I managed to find some clippings from the Lansing State Journal saying that Key had been accused of Nazi sympathies and had been asked to leave the college. While there wasn’t much on Key the man, his work—despite its consisting of only two books—was cited and quoted just about anytime somebody wrote seriously about trout fishing. I read the books rather quickly because they were pretty thin with tight, sparse sentences. Whoever Key was, he seemed to be a shade, a figure from the past, lost forever. But I kept thinking there had to be more about him somewhere. There was no mention of the snowfly in his books, but I had found the flies and the box with his initials; it had to be more than a coincidence.
    The state of Michigan had a massive central library in downtown Lansing. I often went there for books because it was closer to my apartment and a lot less crowded than the university’s facility. Buddy Wilihapulus worked in the research section. He had come to East Lansing to play football for Duffy Daugherty, the first recruit out of Duffy’s fabled Pineapple Pipeline, but Buddy had blown out a knee,