The hour had been later than she realized; it was nearly five by the time she'd reached home. She had noticed an ambulance parked outside the building, and an empty police car, but her thoughts had been on other things. Upstairs, when the elevator opened, she'd heard men's voices; they were coming from the old woman's apartment. Suddenly fearful, she had unlocked the door. A policeman was standing in the front room, talking to Mrs Slavinsky's daughter, while another spoke softly on the phone. Two black ambulance attendants were unrolling something near the entrance to the old woman's bedroom. All turned to look at Carol when she came in, but the only one who spoke to her was the daughter, who explained to her quite calmly, with little apparent grief and without a trace of accusation in her voice, how, sometime after Carol had gone out, she had phoned her mother, gotten no answer, tried again an hour later, still without success, and how at last she'd hurried over to find that the old woman, no doubt having returned to bed for an afternoon's nap, had somehow contrived to wind the blanket around her face…
She didn't seem to blame Carol. Later, after the men had left, bearing with them the shapeless thing in the bag, she had even offered to let Carol stay on in the apartment, at least until she was able to find a suitable place of her own. But Carol was in no mood to remain there; she was too horrified by the voices in her head, the guilty one that insisted it wasn't her fault, she'd done nothing wrong, and the one that reminded her how remarkably convenient the old woman's death had been. For now she was free to take the job at Voorhis; would have to take it, in fact. Absolutely perfect timing…
She reported for work at the library the following Monday and spent part of the first week in the Chelsea Hotel just up the block. But despite the place's legendary glamour and the furtive fascination with which Carol regarded the tenants and visitors who strolled its echoing yellow halls, the hotel was far too expensive. A roommate service in a shabby second-floor office on Fourteenth Street had connected her with Rochelle, whose previous roommate had moved out. Carol was more than willing to take the tiny bedroom; it was private, at least. Rochelle, who slept on a sofa bed in the living room, had the run of the apartment. She was not the sort of person Carol would have chosen to live with, and in the month they'd been together they had not become real friends; but (Carol reminded herself) the girl could be quite good-hearted at times, and besides, with the situation as it was, Carol knew she couldn't be choosy. She was grateful for the roof over her head, grateful she could remain in the city. For a while she'd been haunted by visions of returning home to Pennsylvania a failure, to throw herself, like a child, back on the support of her family. Now, at least, she had a job; she could survive here after all.
At two fifteen today she'd been summoned to the first-floor office by the assistant supervisor, Miss Elms, a greying, harried-looking woman whose desk, opposite Carol's, was piled high with correspondence.
'You look as though you could use a change of scene,' she said, regarding Carol dourly over the top of her glasses. 'When you come back off your break, I'm sending you upstairs. Mrs Schumann's got a four o'clock story hour – and since it's the last day of school, those kids may get a bit rambunctious.'
Carol would have much preferred working downstairs, but told herself that, with the weather grown so warm these days, most of the children would probably be staying outside.
'Remember,' the supervisor added, 'you're not up there to read, and you're not up there to daydream. You're there to give Mrs Schumann a helping hand.'
Climbing the stairs, Carol wondered if Mrs Schumann had been complaining about her to the supervisor. If so, it seemed unfair; she worked just as hard as anyone else. There simply wasn't very much to do on the second floor, short of helping fledgling readers with the harder words and keeping an eye out for the occasional fight. Yet she knew there'd been truth in what the supervisor had said; she had recently discovered that she preferred children's books to the children themselves.
All but the central desk upstairs was half-sized, a world in miniature: worktables like low wooden platforms rose just inches from the floor, and several of the chairs came only to her knee. Though she herself was slight of build and had small, delicate features, it was hard not to feel oversized here, like Alice down the rabbit hole or some invading giant from one of the fairy-tale books in the corner.
Mrs Schumann, the children's librarian, sat placidly behind the desk. She was a heavy, slow-moving woman who perspired easily and who left her chair only with the greatest reluctance. Except for her, a pair of laughing little girls, and a dispirited-looking preschooler trudging glumly round the bookshelves with his mother, the floor was deserted, the air oppressive and still. Above the humming of four small electric fans that turned their heads from side to side, she could hear the chugging of the Xerox machine on the first floor, the swish-swish, swish-swish of the outer doors swinging open and shut, and the tread of footsteps on the stairs. School was out; soon the room would be filling up.
The footsteps echoed hollowly in the silence of the hall; a tiny face emerged above the banister. The child peered uncertainly around the empty floor like the first guest at a party, then slunk toward the central desk to confer in urgent whispers with the librarian.
Carol drifted toward the front window and stared idly down at the street. The buildings across the way were drab and dull, a large old residential hotel gone seedy, a furniture showroom, a warehouse with trucks lined up in front of it all day.
The rear windows held a better view. Here sunlight slanted down upon a tiny courtyard hidden between the buildings; overgrown by creepers, vines, and weeds, it had lain black and apparently lifeless all winter, she'd been told, but in recent months had flourished, until it presently resembled a transplanted patch of forest. During free moments of the day – and when, as now, she'd been assigned upstairs before the schoolchildren arrived – Carol liked to stand by the window, glad to find some glimpse of nature amid the bricks.
Below her a clump of thornbushes were irregular green blobs upon a darker field of undergrowth and earth. An oak and two young maples struggled upward toward the light, their trunks thin as walking sticks, while delicate green fernlike vines grew up the side of the opposite building, higher than the floor on which she stood. Through the glass she watched the fronds blow and tremble in the breeze, some of which passed over the top of the open window just below the ceiling. The shade stirred softly above her. Lifting its bottom edge, she felt the touch of cooler air upon her face; it carried the smell of soil and leaves and, from somewhere, the faintest, most elusive trace of roses.
Downstairs the outer doors went swish-swish, swish-swish.
Seen from this height, the view from the rear windows reminded Carol of a garden gone back to the wild, and she could never think of it without a queer, indefinable longing; given over entirely to plants, it hinted at some mystery far deeper than the mysteries in the books that lined the wall. She felt a strangeness in it, yet without the sense of dread that wilderness on a vaster scale inspired. No being had ever set foot back there, at least no one she had seen; she wasn't even sure that one could reach it, for the courtyard appeared to be surrounded by high metal fences. It remained forever beyond the windowpane, like a fragile green world preserved within a bottle.