Of course, the east end soon wouldn’t be as shabby as it had been for years, thanks to the efforts of my friend Rafe Niswander. By day, Rafe was the best middle-school principal Chilson had had in years. By night, he was the renovator of what had been a run-down wreck of a house within shouting distance of the marina, and he was taking his own sweet time about it.
Whenever I told him that he could have finished two years ago if he hadn’t spent so much of his summer in the marina’s office, hanging out with the manager and the manager’s marina buddies, he would loftily say that perfection couldn’t be achieved in a day, and walk away, whistling.
“Morning, Minnie!” Pam Fazio fingered a wave at me. She was sitting in a small slice of sunshine that was hitting the front steps of her store, Older Than Dirt, and cupping her hands around what was most certainly not her first cup of coffee that morning.
I gestured at her drink. “Number three or number four?”
Pam had moved north from Ohio a year earlier, fleeing the clutches of corporate life, and had vowed that she’d spend every morning the rest of her life sitting on her front porch and drinking coffee. She’d done so through last winter’s abnormal cold spell without missing a single day and, though I suspected that the contractor I’d noticed parked at her house would soon be glassing in her front porch, her vow was still intact.
She held the coffee close to her face and breathed deep. “Two. I’m trying to cut down. And I’m waiting for a delivery.”
“Is it container day?”
Pam went abroad two or three times a year, searching the nooks and crannies of Europe, Africa, Asia, and Antarctica, for all I knew, for items old and new to sell in her store. She had an uncanny knack for choosing things that would sell like hotcakes, and the arrival of the shipping container piqued interest across town.
She nodded and drank deep. When she surfaced, she said, “Should be here any minute.”
I needed to get to the library, but I couldn’t leave, not just yet. “Um, are there books?”
“Now, Minnie, you know I don’t tell.”
“You used to,” I muttered.
“Sure, but that was before I figured out what a draw container day could be. Off with you. Come back when everything’s unpacked, just like everyone else.”
“But—”
“Go!” She pointed toward the library with an imperious index finger, but she was smiling.
“Greedy, manipulative retailer,” I said as seriously as I could.
“Naive and sentimental public servant,” she shot back.
Laughing, I told her to have a good day and moved on.
Moving faster now, I walked past the shoe store, past the local diner known as the Round Table, and past the women’s clothing stores whose super-duper sidewalk-sale offerings were still beyond my budget. I admired the new fifteen-foot-high freestanding clock, a gift to the city from the chamber of commerce, and moved swiftly past the side streets, where I caught glimpses of the local museum and the Lakeview Art Gallery. Past the toy store, past the post office and the deli and the T-shirt shop and the multitude of gift stores, and then up the hill to the library.
I supposed there might be a day when I wouldn’t smile with pure pleasure when I approached my place of work, but since it hadn’t happened in the four years I’d been assistant library director, I wasn’t sure it ever would.
Once upon a time, the two-story L-shaped building had been Chilson’s only school. When the growing population had packed the classrooms to panting capacity, new buildings had been constructed to house the older students. Decades passed, computers came into their own, and the town eventually realized that a modern elementary school was needed. The old school, built to last and filled with Craftsman-style details, locked its doors.
And there it sat. For years. Then, just before it crumbled away into dust, the library board looked around and noticed that the existing library was packed to the rafters, with no room to expand. Hmm, they collectively thought. You know, if we could pass a millage to renovate that old school . . .
Smiling, I hopped up the steps to the library’s side entrance. Even though I’d started working at the library only a few weeks before the library moved into its new home, and in spite of the fact that I hadn’t been involved in a single renovation decision, I felt as proprietary toward the building as if I’d refinished every piece of trim myself.
It was beautiful. Gorgeous, even. One of the most comfortable public spaces I’d ever stepped into, and I was grateful beyond words that Stephen, my boss, and the library board had chosen me out of the dozens of applicants.
I inserted my key into the lock of the wooden door and amended my thoughts. Stephen, my former boss. Because even though, just the previous winter, he’d said he was grooming me to take over when he retired in a few years, Stephen had jumped ship when he’d been offered the directorship of a large library that just happened to be in a climate where snow was seen maybe once every two years.
We’d been directorless for going on two months, but the library board would soon be interviewing candidates. I was sure the board would choose wisely, but I was also wondering what the future would hold for the impetuous five-foot-tall, cat hair–covered Minnie Hamilton.
“Quit worrying,” I said out loud, and pushed open the door. The library didn’t officially open until ten, but there were things to do, so here I was, walking into the building two hours early, happy that my best friend, Kristen Jurek, couldn’t see me.
“You’re salaried,” she’d say flatly. “You make the same money if you work forty hours a week or sixty, so why are you working seventy?”
A huge exaggeration. I’d never once worked seventy hours in a week. Sixty-eight was my absolute tops, and that was only because one of the part-time clerks had called in sick. And if Kristen ever said that to me again in person, I’d point out that, as the owner of a top-notch restaurant, she routinely worked more than I did.
Then, if the past was any guide to the present, she would retort that at least she made lots of money, slide a bowl of crème brûlée over to me, and I’d agree with whatever she said.
The library’s door shut quietly behind me and I breathed deep, drawing my favorite smell into my lungs: books. Flowers were all well and good, but what could compare to the scent of stories, of knowledge, of learning, of history?
My soft-soled shoes made little sound as I crossed the lobby on the way to my office. I flicked on the light, dropped my backpack on the floor, and, just as I started to sit down, saw the stack of reference books I’d meant to put away last night.
To shelve or not to shelve, that was the question. Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to—
“Oh, just do it,” I told myself. Though I could put the pile onto a cart for a clerk to file, I enjoyed putting books in their proper homes. I snatched up the books and made my way back through the lobby.
I didn’t bother to turn on the pendant lights as I entered the main hall; enough sunshine was streaming through the high windows of what had once been a gymnasium that the extra illumination wasn’t necessary. I also didn’t bother to look at the call numbers on the ends of the bookshelves; I knew the library so well that I could practically have put books away blindfolded.
Which was why, instead of looking where I was going, I was paging through the top book in the stack, a foreign-language dictionary, seeing if I could stuff a few words of Spanish into my brain before I shelved it, and which was why I didn’t understand what had happened when my foot hit . . . something.
This made no sense at all, because I was walking through nonfiction, call numbers 407 through 629. There shouldn’t have been anything on the floor here except, well, nothing.
Frowning, I stopped reading and looked down.
My sharp gasp was loud in the quiet space. The books fell with soft thumps to the carpeted floor, and I dropped to my knees, reaching forward, hoping that the woman lying on the floor was simply sleeping in a very strange place and in a very strange position.