Whatever Happened... to Robot Jones? Continued

Chapter 4: Obituaries

The town's public library, shaped like a little red schoolhouse, was pretty small. But as Robot vowed to prove to himself, even small things could prove to be very useful.

When the boys arrived a short time later, the building was surprisingly busy for a weekday-at least so thought the boys who didn't see a reason for these institutions to exist anymore. Not when there were movie theaters, TV shows and arcades to pass the time.

Not wanting to startle little old librarians with frail hearts, Robot nudged Socks up to the information desk first. The woman who sat there was busy, stamping checked-in books from a cart next to her, but she smiled when Socks approached. "Hello, what can I do for you?"

"Um, hi," Socks said, rubbing his elbows. "Do you know where we'd find the, uh, bitch-y things about a kid who died a long time ago?"

The librarian's smile dropped, and she raised her spectacles. "Excuse me?"

Robot came to Socks' aid. "He means, the obituaries. We need to do complete research on a fellow student who attended our school a few decades ago."

The librarian took a moment to ponder, then closed the book on her desk and stood up. "From roughly what range period are you looking for?"

"Nineteen sixty seven," Mitch offered.

The librarian rounded to the front of the desk, tightening her red bun as she did. "I know we have newspapers going back to the 1890s, but I'm not sure we'll have the person you're looking for. Come with me, I'll open up the archives."

The boys followed the woman to the left of the floor, leading to a wooden door and a glass-walled conference room. The door to this room was unlocked, and she switched on the lights, revealing a table and four swivel chairs. Straight across that was another door, with only a small, narrow window on the side. This door she opened with a key hanging around her neck, and encouraged the boys down a narrow, white flight of stairs. "We keep all the old newspapers down here to preserve them from sunlight and dirty hands."

As the kids continued on, Socks looked at his hands, and brushed them on his pants before reaching the bottom floor with the rest. The librarian switched on another light, exposing the length of the narrow room, in which there were only two rows, lined with newspapers, magazines, and other print. "All the newspaper titles are organized separately by their own dates, so it may take a while to search for one that says anything about the person you're looking for." She turned and looked at Robot thoughtfully. "You did say this was a child, didn't you?"

"Affirmative."

She frowned. "How sad. But one would imagine that a death so young would be covered by a stand alone article of the Town Chronicle, so you may be in luck."

"Maybe."

In the back of the group, Cubey was nodding off. Mitch jabbed him in the ribs to wake him up. "Sorry!" he hissed in a whisper. "This library stuff is boring."

"You're welcome to stay until close, but do let me know when you leave so I can lock up. Also, you can use the conference room if you need a table, but absolutely no taking home of these materials."

"Yes, ma'am," the boys droned.

"I have a lot of work to do, but let me know if I can help with anything else," she called to them, climbing the stairs rather gracefully on her old fashioned pumps.

"Now what?" Socks asked Robot.

"We start name hunting," the automaton replied.

The boys split up into four corners of the room, each tacking a different newspaper title that would hold anything related to Andy Fields. With no music and no windows to the outside world, time was lost in the archives as the terribly disinterested boys, and Robot, flipped page after page, careful not to create any rips in the yellowed newspapers that they would be liable for.