The Ancient Nine

by Ian K. Smith, M. D.

  I picked up the cloth again and compared it to the picture of Prince Albert’s garter in the article. The two were eerily similar, except for the wording.

  “And there’s more,” Dalton said. He reached into the box and slipped back a clasp, then removed the bottom tray. He pulled out a circular silver medallion hanging on a blue-and-gold cloth. The three Delphic torches engraved in the front were identical to the torches pressed into the lid of the box. The initials R.A.W. and the date Dec. 10, 1943, had been stamped on the back.

  “This personalized medallion is given to all new members of the club during the initiation ceremony,” Dalton said. “Uncle Randolph never showed me the garter before, but I remember seeing him wear this medallion one night when he and Aunt Teddy had a big dinner at their house. I was ten or eleven. All these old men arrived in limousines, dressed in tuxedos and wearing these medals. I asked Uncle Randolph what they were, and he said all members of the Gas wore them to important functions. He said I would learn all about it one day when I went to Harvard.”

  “Are you sure your uncle’s not gonna be looking for this stuff?” I said.

  “He barely knows his own name half the time,” Dalton said. “I doubt very seriously he’ll be looking for this box.”

  “If he’s that close to dying, maybe you should ask him about the Ancient Nine,” I said. “He might be willing to tell you something.”

  “I did ask him, but he started talking about Aunt Teddy and when they met and how much he loved her. It was mostly gibberish.”

  “How about that article?”

  Dalton reached into a tiny compartment in the bottom of the box and pulled out a tattered newspaper article that had turned sepia with age. It felt like it was going to crumble when he handed it to me. The name of the publication and part of the date had been torn off, but Boston and 1928 were still legible.

  Over the winter break, the president of Harvard College, in conjunction with the Cambridge Police Department, issued a press release stating that the missing Erasmus Abbott ’28 is believed to be dead. The nationwide search for the heir to the Abbott fortune has been terminated, and plans for a day of remembrance are under way. Abbott has not been seen since eating in the Quincy House dining hall on the night of October 31.

  Over the last three months, the Cambridge Police Department has received several anonymous phone calls about Abbott’s disappearance, none of which have proved helpful in the investigation. The call that raised the most controversy came from an unidentified man who claimed Abbott had expressed a desire to attempt the Halloween prank of breaking into the Delphic clubhouse on Linden Street to find what many believe to be a secret room with hidden treasures.

  Rumors about this room have been circulating for several years on the strength of the rich history of this exclusive final club and its obsession with privacy. The membership, both current and graduate, have steadfastly denied the existence of this room, and have uncharacteristically opened their doors to the authorities. Both the Harvard University Police and Cambridge Police Departments report no such secret room, nor any evidence that Erasmus Abbott had succeeded in entering the mansion.

  Many students, however, continue to support the belief that Abbott’s demise was directly related to his quest to break into the storied room. According to one student by the name of______

  That was it. The article had been cut off.

  “What the hell happened to the rest of it?” I said.

  Dalton shrugged his shoulders. “I’m thinking either after all these years, the damn thing fell apart or someone purposely clipped it. But that’s why we’re heading over to Widener. If we can get some of those archived newspapers on microfiche, then maybe we can try to piece some of this together.”

  “We don’t even know what paper this was in,” I said.

  “No, but I’m sure there weren’t a lot of papers in Boston at the time. It was either a school paper or a city paper. That shouldn’t be too hard to figure out.”

  “It seems almost too coincidental for it to have fallen apart at that precise line,” I said. I carefully handed the article back to Dalton.

  “Makes you wonder what was really going on,” Dalton said.

  “Was your uncle around when this happened?”

  “Nope. He didn’t get to the college until 1932, five years later. But I looked at the family tree. His older brother Cyrus was a student then.”

  “Was he a member of the Delphic?”

  “Yup, the second Winthrop to join the Gas. Their father, Milton, was the first. He was a classmate of J. P. Morgan.”

  “So, you think Randolph got the article from Cyrus?”

  “Possibly.”

  “And you think someone would actually murder another student just because he was trying to get into that room?”

  Dalton held up the garter. “It’s possible they would’ve done whatever it took to protect the brotherhood. There must be some reason why Uncle Randolph kept the article hidden in this box along with the garter for the last fifty years.”

  “The library closes at ten,” I said.

  Dalton looked down at his watch. “That gives us almost two hours if we run.”

  7

  THE WINDS RATTLED the lampposts as we made our way up Dunster Street, toward the Yard. The cold nights of a Boston autumn were the outstretched hands of an approaching winter. The naked trees cast their long shadows on the frozen ground as brave and determined pedestrians in tight skullcaps jammed their hands into wool-lined pockets, their faces hidden behind knitted scarves. Few words were exchanged between these lonely partners of the night as they stared downward, jackets zipped above their chins, their footsteps marching quickly toward warmer destinations.

  We entered the Yard through the Holyoke gate and walked alongside Boylston Hall. A group of ambitious freshmen was tossing a football and attempting to tackle each other on a small corner of grass in front of Wadsworth House. While it was strictly forbidden to ride bikes in the Yard, many were emboldened by the darkness of night and pedaled across the paths that crisscrossed the expansive rectangular lawn.

  “Roz Minter lives over there in Weld,” Dalton said as we passed the dark residential hall in the southeast corner of the Yard.

  Roz Minter was the much-talked-about freshman volleyball player from Santa Barbara, California. She was every bit of six feet, devastatingly gorgeous with warm caramel skin, and the reason why half the upperclassmen walked by her corner of the Yard, even when they didn’t have to, hoping to get a glimpse of her. I’d seen her in the training room once and immediately fell in love.

  We turned the corner of Widener Memorial Library and scaled the long gray slab steps. Lights beamed from the tiny windows of the upper floors as the brainy seniors worked through the night, researching theses the rest of us could barely pronounce, let alone understand.

  Dalton stopped and looked up at the enormous columns fronting the library. “Somewhere on one of those floors, in some corner of this monstrosity, could be our answer,” he said, wrapping his arm around my shoulder. “Let’s get in there and complete the mission set before us, comrade.”

  We walked past the security guard, sneaking in three cans of soda, a couple of candy bars, and a wool blanket to battle off the notoriously fierce draft in the bookstacks. Regardless of how many times I clambered up the giant marble steps that led to the second floor, I was always struck by the sheer size of the building. Widener had the third-largest collection of books in the country, outnumbered only by the Library of Congress and the New York Public Library, and like everything else at Harvard, Widener had its own story. Construction of the library began in 1913 with a two-million-dollar donation to the university by Mrs. George Dunton Widener. Eleanor Widener generously donated the money as a memorial to her son, Harry Elkins Widener, class of 1907, who met his tragic fate in the spring of 1912 on one of his many forays to Europe to purchase rare books for his collection. Returning from England on the Titanic, Widener and his father went dow
n in the Atlantic along with the many rare books he had just purchased. According to legend, Harry Widener had been about to step into a lifeboat that would have saved his life, when he remembered one of his newly acquired books, a rare 1598 copy of the second edition of Bacon’s Essays. Against his father’s protests, he ran back to retrieve the book and was never seen again. Mrs. Widener, who had also been on the Titanic, made it safely to one of the life boats, but her husband and son perished at sea.

  Every freshman was told the story of how Mrs. Widener agreed to donate a large sum of money in her husband’s and son’s memory, but only if Harvard would adhere to a litany of contractual stipulations. The one stipulation that gave the school the most trouble was the “no movement clause.” This asserted that once the library was finished in 1914, the outside face of the library could never be changed—“not a brick, stone, or piece of mortar shall be changed,” was the legal language. Mrs. Widener even went so far as to have this stipulated in her will, ensuring this restriction would be in place forever.

  Some years after her death, the university wanted to construct a breezeway between Widener and the adjacent Houghton Library so that students and faculty wouldn’t have to walk outside in the harsh cold to get from one to the other. It was a great idea, except for one obstacle—the Widener stipulation. The dilemma was resolved only after months of brainstorming between a team of legal experts next door at Harvard Law and a group of Boston’s most decorated architects. The only way to circumvent the restrictive clause was building the walkway through one of the gigantic windows on Widener’s third floor. This way, no brick was moved, just glass, and there would be no violation of the binding will.

  After Dalton and I walked up the first flight of stairs to the mezzanine landing, the staircase opened to heavy oak double doors that stretched to the ceiling. This was the Harry Elkins Widener room, dedicated to its namesake. An eerie feeling came over me every time I reached that landing and thought about his drowning on the legendary Titanic, his family’s incredible wealth, and his mother’s obsessive need to immortalize his name with one of the biggest libraries in the country. The room stayed open only a few hours during the day, remaining closed through the evening and holidays. I had once read that the Widener room was finished in English oak, carved in England and brought across the Atlantic in individual panels. An expansive chandelier hung from the domed rotunda, illuminating the antique stained-glass windows that had once been compared to those found at the Vatican.

  An enormous portrait of the young, emaciated Widener hung on the back wall, surrounded by glass-encased bookshelves housing his private collection of 3,500 rare books. A small brochure highlighted the literary gems in the room, like copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio and a fifteenth-century printing of the Gutenberg Bible the family donated in 1944.

  Dalton and I reached the second floor and passed rows of students anchored at computers, furiously typing on their keyboards. We entered the spacious reading room, big enough to host a rock concert. The bespectacled reference librarian sat behind the desk, her wrinkled arthritic fingers gripping the handle of an oblong magnifying glass. The tiny print of a Walt Whitman poem jumped off the page.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Can you tell us how we can find out about the newspapers that were printed in Boston in 1927 and 1928?”

  She looked up, cupped her ear with her right hand, and leaned forward. Her skin looked like it had expired a thousand years ago. “Excuse me, young man?” she said.

  I stepped closer and raised my voice a little. “We’re looking for the names of the papers that were published in Boston in 1927 and 1928.”

  “That could be quite a task,” she said. “But if we’re lucky, there might be a directory that would have all that information compiled in one place. Are you looking for dailies, weeklies, or monthlies?”

  I looked at Dalton.

  “All of them,” he said.

  She shook her head and ran her bent fingers across the keyboard. I was surprised by the speed of her typing.

  “Okay, we have something,” she said, bending even closer to the monitor. “I’m showing five major directories. First, the History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690 to 1820, edited by Clarence S. Brigham.”

  “No good,” I said. “We need 1927.”

  “Here’s another one,” she said. “Working Press of the Nation. Wait, that’s no good either. It doesn’t start until 1945.” She tapped a couple of more keys. “Here we are,” she announced proudly. “N. W. Ayer and Son’s American Newspaper Annual. Published by N. W. Ayer and Son in Philadelphia.”

  “What years does it cover?” Dalton asked.

  “Eighteen-eighty to 1986,” she said. “This says it was published annually as the Ayer’s Directory, and includes a list of newspapers and periodicals published in the U.S. and Canada and arranged geographically. It also includes subject listings such as culinary and housekeeping, fashion, matrimonial, millinery, woman’s handiwork, and women’s clubs. Do any of those subjects interest you, gentlemen?”

  “Not really,” I said. “But if we look through the directory, we might be able to find the paper we’re looking for.”

  “And which paper is that?”

  “We’re not sure,” I said. “We only have the date and part of the title.”

  “What part of the title do you have?” she asked.

  “‘Boston,’” Dalton said.

  “Good luck,” she said, shaking her head. “I was hoping you had a more specific word that might help narrow down the list, but there were many papers at the time with ‘Boston’ in the title. You’ll have to search each one in the directory.”

  “Where can we find this directory?” Dalton asked.

  “On the eighth floor of the stacks,” she said, scribbling down the call number on a piece of scrap paper. “Once you get the name of the paper from the directory, then you can go down to the microfilm reading room and see if we have it on film.”

  “Do you have a list of the newspapers that are stored on film?” I asked.

  “Sure,” she said, tapping the keyboard. “We have them arranged by state and city. I’ll print the list out for you so that you can take it with you and see if what you find in the directory matches the film we have in our collection. If they don’t have the film downstairs, they might be able to tell you what other library carries it, and we can make an interlibrary loan request.”

  Within minutes, we had eight sheets with more than 180 titles of Boston newspapers that were available on microfilm.

  “I’m not sure what you’re researching, but you also might want to check some of the Harvard papers from that time,” she said. “Off the top of my head, I know the Harvard Gazette and the Crimson were being published. There might’ve been others. The microfiche room will have a complete listing.”

  We thanked her and quickly headed to a part of the library that most students dreaded even hearing about let alone entering. To most of us, the Widener stacks belonged in a Stephen King horror flick. Sequestered from the main part of the library, the stacks occupied their own enormous wing. There were ten floors in all with 3.2 million volumes housed in over five miles of bookshelves. Its collection of rare books dated back to the sixteenth century. The stacks were always cold, dark, and damp, and odd sounds echoed down the empty narrow aisles. Some of the floors were encased in a metal fence, and it could take a while sometimes to find an exit that wasn’t locked. The Widener stacks were legendary in the academy, serving as the research base for some of the most widely published and internationally acclaimed scholars in the world. While the rest of the library had been renovated with new equipment and material improvements, the Widener stacks were left untouched and distinctly primitive, as if to remind us that true academic rigor should be austere in all aspects.

  Dalton and I had to turn sideways to fit into the creaky old elevator that would transport us into the cold dungeon of knowledge. It was one of those antiquated elevators with the sliding metal
doors and mesh cage that allowed you to see outside as the car moved between the floors.

  “One day someone’s gonna die in this damn box,” Dalton said as the door barely closed shut.

  We finally reached the eighth floor, where Dalton flipped on the switch at the entrance of the passageway, turning on a row of naked lightbulbs dangling from the ceiling. We broke off in opposite directions down the narrow aisles. Many of the books were so old and dusty that their titles had faded into the cloth of the jackets, and the call numbers, which had been stuck on with tape, were barely clinging to the chipping spines.

  After almost twenty minutes of searching, I heard Dalton’s cry. “Got it! Get over here, Spense!”

  I ran down the hallway, almost crashing into one of the bookshelves as I slipped while turning a tight corner. Dalton was sitting on the ground, surrounded by several piles of books. A thick book sat open across his lap.

  “Did you have to empty an entire bookcase?” I said.

  “I couldn’t read the damn call numbers,” Dalton said.

  “Is that it?” I said, taking a seat next to him on the floor.

  He turned to the title page, sending a cloud of dust into our faces. The old typeface confirmed that this was in fact Ayer’s Directory.

  “Where’s that list of microfilm titles she printed out?” Dalton said. “Let’s see if anything matches.”

  The librarian was correct. There were several pages of Boston newspapers that had been published in 1927. But what made it difficult was that they had included magazines in the directory and hadn’t made any notations that would help distinguish them from the newspapers. We spent the next forty-five minutes cross-referencing the microfilm list with the directory until we came up with a list of five papers that might have contained the Abbott article.