Theday she discovered the third letter, she had of course expected nothingunusual. It was a typical midsummer day in Boston — hot, humid, with the same news that usually accompanied suchweather — a few assaultsbrought on by aggravated tensions and two early afternoon murders by people whohad taken it too far.
Theresawas in the newsroom, researching a topic on autistic children. The Boston Timeshad an excellent database of articles published in previous years from avariety of magazines. Through her computer she could also access the library atHarvard University or Boston University, and the addition of literally hundredsof thousands of articles they had at their disposal made any search much easierand less time-consuming than it had been even a few years ago. In a couple ofhours she had been able to find almost thirty articles written in the lastthree years that had been published in journals she had never heard of, and sixof the titles looked interesting enough to possibly use. Since she would bepassing by Harvard on the way home, she decided to pick them up then.
Asshe was about to turn off her computer, a thought suddenly crossed her mind andshe stopped. Why not? she asked herself. It's a long shot, but what can I lose?She sat down at her desk, accessed the database at Harvard again, and typed inthe words:
MESSAGEIN A BOTTLE
Becausearticles in the library system were indexed by subject or headline, she choseto scan by headlines to speed up the search. Subject searches usually producedmore articles, but weeding through them was a laborious process, and she didn'thave time to do it now. After hitting the return key, she leaned back andwaited for the computer to retrieve the information she requested.
Theresponse surprised her — a dozen differentarticles had been written on the subject in the last few years. Most of thosewere published by scientific journals, and their titles seemed to suggest thatbottles were being used in various endeavors to learn about ocean currents.
Threearticles seemed interesting, though, and she jotted down the titles, decidingto pick those up as well.
Trafficwas heavy and slow, and it took longer than she thought it would to get to thelibrary and copy the nine articles she was looking for. She got home late, andafter ordering in from the local Chinese restaurant, she sat on the couch withthe three articles on messages in bottles in front of her.
Anarticle published in Yankee magazine in March of the previous year was thefirst one she picked up. It related some history about messages in bottles andchronicled stories about bottles that had washed up in New England over thepast few years. Some of the letters that had been found were truly memorable.She especially enjoyed reading about Paolina and Ake Viking.
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