The Amish Clockmaker by Mindy Starns Clark Page B

official request.”
    â€œCan you at least tell me if it’s going to be worth the trouble?” I asked. “It’s kind of a long shot that the address would even be on there, isn’t it?”
    â€œSorry, but that’s not something I can look up here,” he said, gesturing toward the computer. “Our digital records only go back to the late seventies.”
    â€œSo how do I get that information?” I asked, trying to keep the frustration from my voice.
    He looked at me blankly. “File an information request.”
    I pinched the bridge of my nose. “How long will that take to process?”
    â€œIf it gets cleared, you should have what you need in about five days.”
    Five days? Starbrite could have tracked down Clayton by then. But what else could I do?
    â€œAll right. I assume there’s paperwork I need to fill out?”
    â€œThere is.”
    â€œMay I have it?”
    â€œWe don’t keep that here, sir. You’ll need to go to the clerk of court’s office in Lancaster.”
    I sighed. That would require hiring a car—and missing another day of work at the shop.
    â€œYou might be able to do it on the Internet,” a policewoman offered from a nearby desk.
    Deciding that was my best bet, I thanked them both and left for the nearest library, which was in Leola. Once there, I signed up for a computer, waited my turn, and then filed the request form online. Sure enough, it said I would receive the results in approximately five days. Why had I even bothered?
    Hoping to redeem the trip, I moved on to another task. Still online, I googled “quitclaim deed” and then looked through the list of options until I found what I needed to create such a document for myself, just as the lawyer had suggested. Fortunately, a template was provided, and it wasn’t long before I felt confident in what I was doing. Step by step, I pulled the deed together, filling in every blank except the price, as I knew that depended on Clayton and what we ended up working out once I found him and explained what had happened.
    When I had finished creating the deed, the site instructed me to print it and have it signed in the presence of a notary public. After that, I was to take the notarized deed to the country records office to get it recorded, which would require a filing fee. Then all that would be left was to wait for the original deed to be mailed back to me.
    Satisfied, I printed out the completed page and paid for it at the front desk. Maybe I’m jumping the gun, I thought as I returned to the computer, but I want to be prepared for when I finally track down Clayton.
    I still had time to spare before my hour on the computer was up, so I decided to go into some old newspaper archives and read whatever reports I could find from back in 1955 about the death of Clayton’s wife, his subsequent arrest, and his later release. Unfortunately, that was easier said than done. I knew the Lancaster paper, the Intelligencer Journal , had been around for a long time, so I started there. As it turned out, the paper had actually been in existence since the late 1700s—but their online archives only went as far back as 1989.
    The Philadelphia papers weren’t much better, the oldest archives dating from 1978. Frustrated, I tried casting the nets a little wider, searching papers in New York City and Washington, DC. I didn’t know if the story had been big enough to merit coverage outside the Lancaster/Philly area, but given the unusual Amish element, I knew there was a chance. And though I was able to find some archives that went back that far, none of them included anything about it.
    After a good fifteen minutes of poking around, I’d come up with only one thing, a single, brief mention in a now-defunct newspaper out of Baltimore I’d never heard of. It wasn’t even an article about the incident, just a photograph and a snarky caption. The picture,