Rachel Goddard 01 - The Heat of the Moon

newspapers on file from all over the country. If he died the way she says he did, the Minneapolis paper would’ve had a story. I can go tomorrow, it’s my day off.” I glanced at my watch. “God, look at the time. She’ll think I’m with you.”
    As I rose, Luke half-laughed, a sound of consternation rather than amusement. “You are with me. And what the hell does it matter what she thinks?”
    I grabbed my purse from the chair where I’d dropped it earlier and swung the strap over my shoulder. “I have to get home.”
    He jumped up. “You can’t be serious.”
    “I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”
    I started for the door but he blocked my way. “You’re not going back to that house. Rachel, the woman’s dangerous.”
    Looking into his dark blue eyes, I felt cracks snaking across the wall of my resolve. I laid a hand along his cheek. “Don’t worry about me. She can’t do anything to me now.”
    “I’m not so sure about that. Please don’t go.”
    “I have to. I don’t want her to get suspicious yet. I’ll let you know what I find out.”
    I pressed my mouth to his in a quick kiss and left him standing in his doorway.
    ***
    That night I looked directly into Mother’s eyes and lied so convincingly that she believed my story of an emergency at the clinic without hesitation. She was the one who gave herself away. The apprehension that tensed her body dissolved in an instant and I saw her relax like a taut string unloosed.
    By clearing my mind and stamping down on any thought that threatened to intrude, I got through dinner with Mother and Michelle. The next morning I stayed in my room, supposedly sleeping late, until I heard them leave.
    ***
    Although I’d lived in the Washington area most of my life, I’d never used the Library of Congress. In middle school I’d been inside the Main Reading Room and Great Hall on a class excursion, a midwinter traipse through all the imposing government buildings, led by a teacher determined that we’d be at least as well acquainted with the federal city as tourists were.
    I remembered feeling as if I’d entered a different century when I walked into the Jefferson Building, with its soaring ceilings, statuary and mosaics, stained glass and murals. But the Madison Building, which housed the periodicals reading room, was a big white box that sat firmly in the late twentieth century and had none of the Jefferson’s beauty and grandeur.
    Walking between rectangular marble columns to the door, I warned myself not to expect old newspapers to yield many answers. The story about the accident might not tell me anything new about my father and mother.
    But if nothing else, the story would certainly hold one bit of information: names of survivors. Maybe I would find a picture of us all together, the young family whose father had been tragically lost. I would surely be mentioned in the story itself. I needed to see some proof of my place among the Goddards. 
    When I entered the lobby I stood for a moment letting my startled skin adjust to air that was twenty degrees cooler than outside. I took a deep breath and willed myself to go about this task in my normal methodical way, as if I were researching a fine point of veterinary medicine in order to help a patient.
    A uniformed young man looked in my purse as I passed through the metal detector. He directed me down the hall to the periodicals room.
    It was as starkly utilitarian as any neighborhood library, with bright fluorescent lighting, pink-gray industrial carpet that needed shampooing, dark paneled walls, and a couple of lackluster dracaena plants by the main desk. It was hard to believe this impersonal place held clues to my family’s very personal secrets.
    While the desk clerk instructed me on the procedure for obtaining materials, a voice in the back of my mind kept whispering that I should just leave it alone, there was nothing to discover except the source of my mother’s heartbreak, something I already knew. The voice was Mother’s, silky and persistent, firmly planted and ineradicable. I couldn’t shut it up, but I wouldn’t listen to it.
    The clerk directed me to one of a dozen stations where reading machines were set up, and I sat down to fill out a request slip for microfilm.
    I didn’t know the date of the accident. But I knew it happened when Michelle was two and I was five, and Mother had said it happened in a snow storm, which could mean anytime from November through February. I requested four