Unbelievable. “How did she get into the cage once she was in the stacks? There’s no way in.”
“She’d pull up the bottom and secure it with a bungee cord, then crawl underneath.”
That was the scraping sound Sadie had heard, when she’d almost come face-to-face with the thief. Robin’s tiny frame had worked in her favor, both in the dumbwaiter and in the stacks.
“If they were looking for books to fence, why did she tear out the page from the folio? That doesn’t make any sense, it’s just mutilation.”
“She said that was just for her own private collection. Wouldn’t give a reason.”
There were too many loose ends, in Sadie’s opinion. But the library was mainly interested in knowing how she pulled off the thefts so that they could prevent anything similar from happening again.
However, there was one question left. The most important one. “The dumbwaiters. I get that it’s obvious that the one in the Reading Room led to the stacks. But Robin knew enough about the library to be able to escape through the one in the women’s room on the third floor when I was chasing her, which wasn’t even in service anymore. How did she know about that in the first place? How did she get down it?”
“She said she shinnied down the shaft, even bragged about pulling that particular escape off. But as for how she knew about them in the first place”—Nick shook his head—“she wouldn’t say. Even when we pressed her, she wouldn’t say.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
New York City, 1993
With only four days until the exhibit opened, Sadie was more nervous than excited. She’d worked so hard on this, yet it wasn’t quite right, and she wanted it to be perfect.
She’d been allowed to come back to work right after the arrests of Richard Jones-Ebbing and Robin Larkin. Dr. Hooper wasn’t thrilled about Sadie’s connection to the thief, but the fact that he’d placed Robin’s coconspirator on the board of the library meant that he had to shoulder some of the blame himself. Sadie made sure to push that fact when they met to discuss the terms of her return, and had been reinstated as curator of the exhibit.
Inside the exhibit hall, Sadie stared out over the display cases where the best of the Berg Collection sat opened to their most important pages, like a bunch of literary peacocks. She took the tour as if she were a visitor, new to all this. To start, there was the First Folio. The title page had been carefully laid into the correct position, but not affixed. It couldn’t just be glued back; the damage was permanent. Heartbreaking, indeed. The description next to it stated as much.
A 1719 copy of Robinson Crusoe included a vivid illustration of the title character, and next to that was her beloved Tamerlane. Its label stated that the anonymous author listed on the cover—By a Bostonian—was indeed Poe, and mentioned that the volume had been recently rediscovered. If only Sadie had more than six lines to describe the book’s journey.
The exhibit itself was a journey of sorts, of letters, manuscripts, and books, of poets and writers, Austen and Tennyson and Yeats. To have them all assembled in one room was a dream. It was as if she’d summoned the very ghosts themselves to chatter with each other, compare edits and changes, remark on the elegant bindings. The exhibit almost made up for the ordeal she and her family had gone through the past few months. Almost, but not quite.
The case against Robin was still making its way through the court system. The prosecutor had warned Sadie not to get her hopes up, that judges didn’t view valuable books the way they might a painting or other item taken from a museum. In fact, the typical sentence was less than three years in jail.
Sadie had asked to speak at the sentencing, in the hopes of pleading their case, but so far hadn’t heard anything back. She made a mental note to bother the prosecutor again tomorrow.
There was still no understanding of how Robin knew about the dumbwaiter system in the library. The original floor plan of the building hadn’t been checked out for years. Sadie had called Miss Quinn in London to ask if she knew of the girl, but no luck there, either. It was as if she’d sprung out of nowhere, insinuated herself into Sadie’s family, and then taken advantage. Richard Jones-Ebbing had pleaded guilty right away and volunteered all the information he could about Robin, but it didn’t add up to much.
Lonnie, LuAnn, and Sadie had brought Valentina back to the library a few weeks after her overnight adventure, hoping to ease any lingering trauma. She’d proudly shown them where she’d hidden out in the nook in the Reading Room; then she’d skipped down the main stairway to the basement, where Mr. Babenko had found her and taken such good care of her.
In the exhibit hall, Sadie stopped in front of Laura Lyons’s walking stick, displayed between Dickens’s cat-paw letter opener and Charlotte Brontë’s writing kit. The nonliterary choices gave the attendees’ eyes a rest from the printed page, and also helped humanize the authors as actual people who opened letters and walked and traveled. Souls who’d accomplished amazing things during their lifetimes, and were more than just a litany of names from high school English class.
She unlocked the display case and lifted out the walking stick, wishing again they had an original piece of writing from Laura Lyons to include, not just the old library newsletters. She ran her fingers over the curve of the wood. Her grandmother had put her own hand there, gripped the stick as she made her way across London, to her death. According to Miss Quinn, she’d been found still clutching it, surrounded by debris.
In her most recent call with Miss Quinn, the woman had volunteered that the walking stick, which Laura never left home without, had been a gift from Amelia Potter. By now, Miss Quinn had become a confidante of sorts, and regaled Sadie with stories of Laura and Amelia taking weekend trips to Brighton in the warmer months, of hosting dinner parties that dissolved into laughter and song. Even though they kept separate residences, they were rarely out of each other’s sight, staying together in one place or the other. It made Sadie happy to learn that her grandmother had been loved, and she’d changed the label on the case to reflect that new information.
“Laura never left home without it,” Miss Quinn had said.
Sadie paused. Wasn’t that the same thing that Laura Lyons had said about the essay she mentioned to Miss Quinn before her death? It told the truth, and . . . for now she always carried it with her.
She regarded the walking stick again, remembering the ones she’d seen on television or in the movies with flasks or knives hidden inside. Holding it up to the light, she examined its handle, looking for any edges where it might come apart. Nothing. The wood was smooth, with no signs of separation.
She turned it upside down. The very bottom was worn, but in the middle, there appeared to be a kind of stopper made from a similar wood, so that it was hardly noticeable.
What to do? This was a valuable artifact. If she dug her nail in to try to wedge it out, she might damage the stick.
But Sadie couldn’t help herself. She had to see if the plug could be removed. She wouldn’t do anything drastic, not use a screwdriver on it, for example, but if her fingernail could loosen it a little . . .
It popped off, landing with a click on the floor and rolling to a stop by her shoe. Sadie bent down and picked it up, placing it carefully on top of the display case.
She peered inside the opening of the cane and could barely make out the edges of a piece of paper rolled up inside.
Laura Lyons’s final essay. The one she always carried with her.
Sadie knew she shouldn’t attempt this alone. She picked up the plug and the cane and went back into the Berg Collection’s main room, where Claude looked up with concern. Since Sadie had returned to her job, they’d reached a lukewarm détente, both eager to move forward and focus on mounting a successful exhibit. Their alignment of interests had smoothed over their previous troubles.