Postcards from Summer by Cynthia Platt

Author:Cynthia Platt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers
Published: 2022-05-30T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 29 Lexi (Now)

Caleb!” I call as I sprint into the library. But instead of the adorkable librarian, the girl who helped me the other day is sitting there, her nose deep in a book. Liza, I think?

“It’s Caleb’s day off,” she says.

It takes a second for me to catch my breath. The girl at the desk is completely unfazed by this. She doesn’t even look up from her book.

“I’m having kind of a research emergency,” I tell her at last.

“You know where the computers are.” She points to the left. “Yell if you need help with anything.”

I stand there, staring at her for a second. Is this girl for real? “Um… uh… can I just tell you what I need help with without having to yell?”

Liza finally looks up at me over the book she’s been reading. “Not yelling works, too.”

I guess that’s progress. And I really do need her help. “Okay… so I need to research a fire that happened at the Palais du Lac. Maybe about twenty years ago?”

She nods. “Look up the Island Crier in the library database,” she replies. For the first time since I got here, she closes her book. “And it actually happened nineteen years ago, not twenty. Year before I was born.” She writes it down for me on a sticky note.

The girl points to the computers again. “It was during the summer,” she says. “But I don’t know when exactly. Just start in, like, May of that year and go from there. That rag of a paper only comes out once a week, so it’s not like it’s an extensive archive.”

“Oh… okay,” I say. “Thanks.”

Despite the nonchalant attitude, she’s being remarkably helpful.

So I sit down and open the library’s database and take a deep breath. This might finally lead to something. Or at least it might if I actually looked at the newspaper archives.

The Island Crier isn’t hard to find, and it’s easier to navigate than I thought a small island paper would be. Beginning with May 1, I start sifting through the papers.

There’s everything under the sun: articles about fighting hunger on-island, tidbits of gossip, Little League stats, pictures from the high school graduation, even an advice column called Ask Mack. For a paper that only comes out on Thursdays, it covers a surprising amount of ground.

That’s just in the first two issues. I open up the next one. And the next. And the next.

Finally in June I find a piece about the hotel. The picture that goes with the article is bigger than the article itself. It shows a petite Black woman standing in front of the hotel. The caption reads, Clarice Bello plans the party of the century at the Palais du Lac. As I read through the article, though, disappointment sets in.

PALAIS DU LAC CELEBRATES 100TH ANNIVERSARY

June 6

The Palais du Lac first opened its door one hundred years ago this summer, and is going to be marking the occasion in style. “While every summer is filled with

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