Cemetery World by Clifford D. Simak Page B

no answer. I did not expect an answer. There was no one there to answer. It was enough that I should say it. It was a debt I owed them.”
    She looked at me with frightened eyes. “I don’t know why I tell all this,” she said. “I did not intend to tell it. There is no reason I should tell you; no reason you should hear it. The facts—the facts I could tell in just a few sentences, but it seemed that they must be told in context.”
    I reached and touched her arm. “There are some facts that can’t be stated simply,” I told her. “You are doing fine.”
    “You are certain you don’t mind?”
    “Not at all,” said Elmer, speaking for me. “I am fascinated.”
    “There’s not much more,” she said. “There was a doorway, still intact, leading out of the room into the interior of the house and when I went into this room beyond, I saw that it once must have been a kitchen, although only part of it was there. There was a second story to the house, a part of it still standing, although all the roof was gone, having long since caved in on the rest of the structure. But above the kitchen there was no second story. Apparently the eaves of the house had extended over the kitchen and there was a pile of weathered debris lying along what had been the kitchen’s outside wall, the debris from the caving eaves. I don’t know how I happened to notice it—it was not easily detectable—but extending for a short distance out of one section of the debris was a squareness. It looked wrong; it didn’t have the look of debris. It was dust-covered, as was everything in the house. There was no way to know that it was metal. It had no gleam. I guess it must have been the squareness of it. Debris isn’t square. So I went over and tugged it out. It was a box, corroded, but still intact—the metal at no point had been broken or worn through. I squatted there on the floor beside it and I tried to reconstruct what had happened to it and it seemed to me that at some time it had been tucked away underneath the eaves, up in the attic, and then somehow was forgotten and that it had fallen when the eaves had fallen, perhaps crashing through the kitchen roof, or perhaps, by that time the kitchen had no roof.”
    “So that’s the story,” I said. “A box with a treasure clue …”
    “I suppose so,” she said, “but not quite the way you think. I couldn’t get the box open, so I carried it back to my apartment and got some tools and opened it. There wasn’t much in it. An old deed to a small parcel of land, a promissory note marked paid, a couple of old envelopes with no letters in them, a cancelled check or two, and a document acknowledging the loan of some old family papers to the manuscript department of the university. Not a permanent gift; they were just on loan. The next day I went to Manuscripts and made inquiry. You know how manuscript departments are …”
    “Indeed I do,” I said.
    “It took a while, but my status as a graduate student in Earth history and the fact that the papers, after all, were my family’s papers finally did the trick. They expected I simply wanted to study them, but by the time they were produced—I think that they had probably been misplaced and may have been difficult to locate—I was so fed up that I filed notice that I was revoking the loan and walked out with them. Which was no way for a devoted history student to behave, of course, but by that time I’d had it. The department threatened me with court action and if they had started action it would have been a lovely mess for someone to untangle, but they never did. Probably they considered the papers worthless, although how they would have known I had no idea. They were a small batch of papers, pretty small potatoes in a place like that. They had been placed in a single envelope and sealed. There was no evidence they had ever been examined; they were all haphazard and mixed up. If they had been examined, they would have been sorted