“This was originally the nursery,” Roxanne said. “From back in the days when children were seen, not heard.” She led Clare through the maze of boxes toward the back of the room, where a wooden table was pushed up to a fourth window. It held a computer, a lamp, several heaps of old books, and a plastic caddy stuffed with office supplies.

Clare leaned against the long refectory-style table to look out the windows. The ice-shrouded garden stretched out below, culminating in a green-roofed carriage house opening onto the back alley. She could see part of the clinic next door as well, shotgunning toward an identical carriage house in a series of additions that ate up any garden they might once have had.

“What you’re going to do is very simple. You open a box, tag everything inside, and enter the descriptions into our electronic catalog,” Roxanne said, booting up the computer. “Nothing in this room’s been done. So feel free to read the notes on the outside of the boxes and start anywhere you like,” she explained, pulling up a padded folding chair and seating herself in front of the monitor. “We’ve tried to keep donations from families or institutions physically together, although we’ve taken them out of whatever god-awful decaying chests and albums they came to us in and stuck them in archival boxes. When possible, we’ve interleaved ephemera with acid-free tissue paper.”

“Ephemera?”

“Papers, letters, photos, that sort of thing. We’ve got three-hundred-year-old handbills touting the southern Adirondacks as the place for hardworking Scotsmen to get rich, we’ve got canal-era advertising calendars, we’ve got playbills for the Millers Kill opera house-”

“Millers Kill had an opera house?” Clare couldn’t keep the disbelief out of her voice.