proximity of important discoveries. Here was the family name that had drawn him to this town in the first place. Had it been mere coincidence that he’d focused on the surname Balzar, and that it so closely resembled his original target subject, Hyam Balazar? His intuition was leading him again, and he knew better than to ignore it. He wasn’t particularly a believer in the paranormal, but sometimes he couldn’t figure out any other way to explain a wild inspiration that paid off.
He would certainly want to find the living Balzars before he left Natchitoches, as he’d intended to do before Natalie Armiger started calling the shots. And he would also like to explore the building bearing the Balzar surname–a waste of time, maybe, but he was feeling uncommonly lucky.
At the parish courthouse, his story was that he was in town doing amateur family-history research. Just an ordinary guy, with a harmless hobby. Clerks got nervous and snippy if they thought you were researching their records for nefarious reasons, like trying to make a buck.
Nick proceeded to search through probate, deed, and tax books, and other public records beloved of genealogists. Two hours later, he had found no mention of Balazar. Weird. Frustrating. The records were misfiled or missing, or this was the wrong locality altogether.
There had been a fire at this courthouse, and a flood, for good measure; so the woman at the clerk of court’s office curtly told Nick when he asked for assistance. She was filling in for a regular worker who was sick, and was clearly impatient to get back to whatever she’d been doing before he disturbed her. Her coffee break, he assumed.
Some old records had been destroyed, or damaged probably beyond reclamation, she said, drumming her fingers on the counter. Nick suspected she was making up the story as she went along. A good liar can always spot a bad one.
“But most of it was just those St. Denis Parish records. Nobody gives a hoot about those,” she said. “Ancient history. We got us a parish government to operate, hon.”
Nick recognized the blind arrogance public office could bestow on certain people.
Stubbornly quizzing the woman further, he knew he was onto something.
Once there had been a small parish named St. Denis, very French and anti-American, just a few large landowning families. St. Denis Parish declared its ethnic pride by seceding from larger Natchitoches Parish in 1816; the old boundary was just a few miles outside of town. During the fifty years it claimed to be an independent parish, plucky St. Denis squirmed out of conducting decennial federal censuses–but it did conduct local ones. Natchitoches Parish never recognized the split. Thus the obscurity of the junior parish to all but specialists in the area. No map or reference book Nick had checked in New Orleans so much as mentioned the ephemeral offshoot.
Even the experienced researcher is humbled every day; and so he learns.
The two parishes decided to reunite in 1866. Over the years, less-determined researchers had swallowed the story that the records no longer existed, that they had been destroyed in the Civil War or later, after the two parishes had consolidated, in the fire and the flood at this courthouse.
It seems that many courthouses have suffered such disasters. Nick was ever skeptical of this excuse for missing records. He knew that often this was the way apathetic or overworked local bureaucrats handled pesky genealogists.
The dirty little secret of this courthouse was that much of the St. Denis Parish records had indeed survived, and it was rudely piled in boxes on bowed steel shelves in a large dank subbasement just off the stairway, where Nick’s reluctant guide now took him, after he had persisted beyond her endurance.
“Microfilmed? You got to be kidding!” she responded to Nick’s question. At certain moments, she reminded Nick of his seventh grade teacher, for whom he still held an abiding antipathy. “’Course they haven’t been microfilmed. Reagan blew out the candle on that project, and Bush took away the cake, hon. We don’t get funds to keep the place from leaking, these days. I don’t even know what all’s in here; nobody does, since old Juanita died; and if you ask me, we ought to have us a nice big bonfire and throw it all in. We close at four o’clock.”
She turned her lumpy backside to him and bounced toward the door, but turned to deliver one final warning: “Sharp!” And then she left.
Her gruffness didn’t affect Nick’s glee, which he