Chapter 6: The Journal

The Reverend Mary Anderson was pacing back and forth, back and forth. Her hands were squeezed tightly together and she was whispering to the walls. I had never seen her like this. Usually, she was the picture of calm even when everything else was a storm of chaos.

When I came into the common room, she looked up. “Thank you for coming, Nathaniel.” I didn’t like the tone in her voice and began to speculate what sort of trouble I might be in. She stared at me for a moment and fell silent. I bowed my head so as not to have to look her in the eye. “I need your help,” she continued.

“How can I help you?” I asked.

“I have heard you have the ability to locate lost items.”

“Have you been talking to my grandfather?”

“Yes. And Mrs. Langton whose glasses you found, and Mary Craft whose bicycle you located. You have built a loyal following. People call you the great detective. Now I am at your mercy.”

“Have you lost something?”

My Sunday sermon. I’ve lost the Sunday sermon. Nathaniel, I worked so long on it. It’s about charity to others. Twenty pages of notes. I can never redo that by tomorrow.” Behind her on the wall, a large portrait of the Reverend Peter Bulkely who founded the Church in 1636 stared down at me as if to say Go on son. Work your magic.

“When was the last time you you remember having it?”

She breathed a long, withering breath that made her face wrinkle. “Well, I keep everything in a manilla folder marked sermon notes. I know I was looking it over when the phone range. Then I took it into the Church while I watered the flowers from the window sills.”

“Did you set it down on one of the pews?”

“I looked all through the pews, unless someone picked it up by mistake and wandered out.”

I tried to imagine a disgruntled parishioner laying in wait for the opportunity to seize the Sunday Sermon and save the best part of a Sunday morning.

She continued:”I remember carrying the folder upstairs with me. I’ve been cleaning out some of the closets. They haven’t been touched for years!”

She told me all about how she was arranging the closets, how she spoke to a musician about a wedding service, how she prepared the garden beds along side the Church and in short any number of other jobs. I grew tired just listening, but I just didn’t hear any clues.

“Maybe I’ll just have a look around, and I’ll let you know what I find.”

“Thank you, Nathaniel. I know I’m in good hands.”

Her confidence scared me . I tried to retrace her steps as best I could, but I was sure there was something she left out. Something she did so often that she didn’t even have to think about it while she was doing it. If I could figure that out I would find the sermon.

I went around in circles for a while, and began to get dizzy from the repetition. Then I stopped and sat in a pew. Fingers of sunlight filtered through the plain glass windows. The church was so quiet I could hear the birds singing outside and enjoyed their music. Then it hit me. Of course, the Rev. Mary loves music and would often sit at the piano and plunk out a song. I could just see her stopping by the piano on the altar as she went about her tasks. She might stop. Set down her sermon folder and play. She would play without thinking and without thinking she would walk away from the piano without her folder. Sure enough, when I checked, there was the folder sitting invisibly behind the music holder above the keys.

Needless to say, she was overjoyed when I handed her the sermon.

“I knew you would save the day, Nathaniel.” She hugged me tight. “It’s true, you are Concord’s greatest detective. Wait here, I have the perfect reward for some one of your ability.”

I shook my head. “No need to reward …” but she had disappeared before I could complete my sentence. I imagined myself counting out the dollars, or eating the sweetest apple pie all by myself. When she returned she handed me something else.

“I found it in my closet. It is dated 1846. “ She handed me an ancient notebook. Its cover was leather bound, its pages yellow, and scribbles decorated the yellowed pages. Dust clouds erupted as I paged through it. I didn’t know what to say.

“You could write in it, Nathaniel. It’s historic. Probably worth a small fortune as an artifact.”

“You don’t have to give me anything.”

She pushed it into my hands. “Oh no. Thanks to you, we’ll all profit from my sermon on Sunday. I don’t know what I would have done. “

I thanked her with as much enthusiasm as I could muster. All I could picture was sitting in the pew for hours on Sunday thanks to my detection abilities. I was such a genius.”

“Don’t forget to write in the journal, Nathaniel,” she called.

Little did I know as I walked out the door how much those words would change my life. I did not forget to write in that journal. And my life was never the same again.