At two in the afternoon I parked behind the public library in downtown Tyler.

The building was quiet and smelled of floor wax and old paper, and a young woman in small wire glasses sat at the front desk stamping index cards.

“I need to look up an obituary from last November,” I said, resting my hands on the tall wooden ledge.

“For a Mrs.

Thomas Rountree.”

The librarian took me down a dim side hall to a windowless back room full of gray metal file cabinets and two glowing microfilm readers.

She took a small cardboard box labeled late autumn obituaries from a drawer and threaded the thin plastic film across the glass rollers.