Three Can Keep a Secret, page 7
I pulled up the request in the system and scrolled through it. Anita had placed it. She had listed both libraries, with Walters’s school first. They’d entered a status of “missing” two days after the request was put in. Anita would have checked the catalog, as I did, so it must have appeared to be there, and she put in the second library as a backup. The first had looked for it, discovered it wasn’t there, and moved the request along. All pretty standard. Still, I had questions.
First, why was Anita so interested in this? Was it the topic, or the author? Based on what I’d learned about her files, my guess was the author. I did a quick search on J. P. Walters. Someone named John Patrick Walters came up as the head of the history department at a local private college. It wasn’t far—across the Hudson, and a bit north. Though not large, it was well-known for science, and it had a strong nursing program. Not the first place I thought of in terms of history, but they did offer liberal arts courses. There was not a lot of information beyond that. No profile on any networking site, not many mentions anywhere. Unusual for an academic—their work was often cited by others, and they participated in conferences and gave talks. Apparently, J. P. Walters did not get around as much as some of his colleagues.
A little more digging got me an issue of the online student newspaper from a few years ago, in which Walters’s appointment as department head had been announced. It was brief, containing the usual types of quotations from college officials and Walters himself, but it did contain a rundown of his previous appointments. His career was a study in mediocrity. Maybe I was missing something, but I didn’t see anything that would get him a nice job at a respected private school, even if it wasn’t known for his area of expertise. But these things sometimes happened through personal connections, politics, or what have you. It didn’t explain Anita’s interest, though.
I looked at the time and put the thesis to one side. I could think about this while getting through the rest of my to-do list. I’d do some more digging later. I started to process the rest of the interlibrary loan items. From the looks of them, all were for library patrons. Those requests all went through me—I was system administrator for the library, so I reviewed anything put in by a patron. Helene, Jilly, and Anita all had user credentials, the first two because they were full-time staff members, and Anita as a courtesy to a board member. That meant they could place requests directly without going through me. Helene and Jilly usually did that, only consulting me if they had something tricky. Anita would sometimes do her own and sometimes email me with what she needed if she didn’t have all the information—what we called a complete citation. She hadn’t sent any requests to me lately; the last batch had to do with grant writing, as far as I could remember, but that was earlier in the fall. She’d sometimes order things related to history, which often had to do with her work with the historical society. Others were personal interest. I thought she had been a history major in college, but I couldn’t remember. She was a good researcher, but a thesis was not a typical request. Which led me to wonder what else she might have asked for.
Once finished processing the recently arrived items, I went into the interface and searched for requests from Anita. There were a few recent ones, none of which had gone through me. One was a copy request—those she usually handed off to me because journal articles could be fussy to find. But she’d done all of these herself the previous weekend. The copy request was pending, two items were in transit, and the last was working its way through potential lenders with no luck. If there was a pattern to what she requested I couldn’t see it. On the upside, I didn’t have to figure out whether to cancel these. Anita wouldn’t be needing them, but they were on the way. I could just send them back when they got here. I wasn’t sure what the etiquette was in terms of library items for a murder victim. Would the police even be interested? How far did patron privacy extend? Time for a chat with Helene. I doubted we had a policy, but it was her call.
I closed out of the interlibrary loan interface and picked up the stack of books I’d processed, then grabbed the weeding report. With any luck, the page would have time to help me pull old materials. Shelf space was getting tight in some areas. I handed off the ILL books to David at Circ and checked on the status of the page. David let me know that she was shelf reading in the Young Adult area and would be able to help me. I found her, divvied up the weeding list, and got a book cart. I was on my way to Nonfiction when Cheryl called to me. She was standing over the copier with a patron. I sighed, parked my cart, and went to see what was up, hoping it would be a quick.
“This lady would like to scan some documents to a flash drive,” Cheryl said. “I must be doing something wrong. I thought all I had to do was switch the function to scanner and plug in the drive. It won’t go in, though. Do I have the wrong spot or something?”
I sighed again, this time inwardly, and bent to look at the USB port on the side of the multipurpose machine that was the bane of my existence.
“That’s where I tried to plug it in,” Cheryl said. “That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said. “I think there’s something stuck.” I pulled out my phone and clicked on the flashlight. This couldn’t end well. Cheryl bent to peer in.
“There is something there,” she said. “But what is it? It’s not part of a broken flash drive.”
I knew what it was, and it wasn’t a broken drive. It was the work of Gummy Bear Sinclair.
Gummy Bear, whose real name was Jonathon, was the youngest of the three Sinclair children and the only boy. The Sinclair family were regular library users. We saw them at least once a week. Jonathon was four. He had told me so himself on his last birthday. His sisters were six and eight, or maybe nine. They came in after school with their mom and little brother. Since Jonathon hadn’t started kindergarten yet, we still saw him some mornings for story hour. It was on one of those mornings that Jonathon had earned his nickname.
Sarah Sinclair, Jonathon’s mom, had always encouraged her kids to ask the reference librarian if they were looking for something in the library and didn’t know where it was. Jonathon in particular was a heavy user of reference services. He liked to come over to the desk and stand at my elbow, watching what I typed into the computer after he’d told me what he was interested in that day. On one occasion he suggested that I was spelling something incorrectly. Everyone’s a critic. On the morning of the initial gummy bear incident, Jonathon came over to the desk as usual. The rest of the story-hour crowd had checked out their books and left, and his mother was sitting at a table, looking at a cookbook.
“Tissue, please,” Jonathon said. I handed him one from the box on the desk. He took it, said thank you, and stood shifting from foot to foot. I waited a minute, watching him.
“Did you want me to look something up for you?” I asked.
He looked down the room at his mother, then at the tissue in his hand, then back at me. His brow furrowed.
“Knights and castles,” he said.
I turned to my computer. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him raise the tissue to his mouth and spit something into it. Always alert to a child about to vomit, I grabbed the trash can beneath my desk and spun to face him.
“Do you feel sick?” I asked him.
He shook his head and held out the tissue. It contained a gelatinous blob in a screaming shade of red so unnatural I knew it was nothing his small body had produced.
“Tastes like rocks,” he said. “Yuck.”
I had never tasted rocks, so I was willing to take his word for it. At that point his mother looked up from her magazine and then zipped over to the reference desk. She took a look at the tissue and sighed.
“Jonathon! Ugh! What am I going to do with you?”
Her child shrugged. “Rocks,” he said again.
“Not rocks, vitamins,” his mother said. “I guess you better throw that away.”
He crumpled the tissue. I held the garbage can out and he dropped it in. Then he looked up and asked, “Knights?” I found the call number and wrote the numbers on a scrap of paper. He took off toward the children’s nonfiction section without making eye contact with his mother.
“He’s a fussy eater,” she said to me. She went on to explain that the doctor had told her to give him a children’s vitamin daily if she was concerned. Jonathon wouldn’t swallow a pill, so she’d tried the gummy vitamins, since he loved gummy bears. She had to sneak them in, mixing them with the real thing and changing the time of day he got them. It usually worked, she said, but sometimes he tucked them in his cheek and spit them out when she wasn’t looking. She apologized and joined her son in the kid’s section.
I told Jilly about it later. She’d found a similar blob the previous week. It was on the floor in the community room after story time. From that day on, we regularly found colorful blobs of goo in all sorts of places in the library, though none higher than the eye level of a four-year-old. Gummy Bear had decided he was better off stashing his unwanted vitamins, since he’d been busted when he tried to throw one away. He’d become as adept as a squirrel at storing them in his cheek until he could dispose of them. Unfortunately, we often found them long after they’d been hidden. We had learned that well-masticated gummy vitamin, exposed to cool, dry air for any length of time, hardened to the consistency of rubber cement and was equally adhesive. I was sure that was what was stuck in this USB port. The uneven, shiny neon green surface gave it away. There was no way I was going to get that out.
“I’m sorry,” I told the woman. “I’m afraid we’ll need to have this repaired. You can still scan your documents and email them to yourself, then save them to your drive at a public computer or at home.” She decided that would be okay, so I left her with Cheryl and went to Circ to ask David to call in the repair.
“Oh, Greer, I’m sorry! Anita asked me to do that Monday night before her meeting, and I completely forgot. I had to referee a fight between the Eldridge twins. You know Maddie likes to put all the board books in alphabetical order, and Macy always wants to arrange them by color. Maddie was singing the alphabet song the entire time she was ordering the shelves, and when her sister started to rearrange them, she let out such a shriek. Went right through me—I had such a headache from the singing! By the time their dad quieted them down and took them home, it had gone right out of my mind. I’ll take care of it now. Something stuck in one of the ports, is that right?”
I explained the problem and chose the appropriate sign from our collection of “Temporarily Out of Order” notices. I taped it to the machine while David made the call. Then I retrieved my cart and weeding list and got to work on the overcrowded pet care section. I was starting to get a headache myself, though I couldn’t fault David for the forgotten call. Or Maddie, for that matter. I sang the alphabet song when I was shelving too, though I did it in my head rather than out loud. The kid might end up a library page someday. Her sister was probably headed for a career in interior decorating. Arranging books by color, indeed.
I was twenty minutes into my project—did we really need this many books on hamsters?—when I realized I’d missed something important. Anita had been trying to scan something and save it to a drive and couldn’t. What had she been trying to scan? Did it have anything to do with those files? And if she couldn’t save it to her flash drive, what had she done? She could have emailed it to herself, as I’d instructed the patron to do. Or she could have saved it to her file on the library shared drive. That’s what I usually did. It was also the path of least resistance—you had to type in an email, but if you had a folder on the shared drive, you could hit a button, bring up another menu, and choose your folder. For something confidential, email was a better bet, but it was easier to save to a flash drive directly from the shared drive.
That brought me full circle: What had Anita been trying to save? It might be nothing more than updated budgets or meeting minutes from one of her committees. I reviewed what I knew of her Monday schedule. The historical society and the library book sale had been the focus of her day. The Friends kept the minutes for their meetings, though Anita might have had notes for the book sale committee. And David had said she was trying to scan before her meeting. So probably not book sale related. That wouldn’t be of much interest anyway, but anything from the historical society might be. As would the mysterious missing files. It was worth a look.
I checked the time and saw I had about fifteen minutes before I was due to help Jilly find some props for Saturday’s event. After eyeballing what was left of my weeding list, I finished pulling items from the shelf I was working on and shifted things around so that the range made sense by subject. After plucking off one final title that looked like it had been chewed on, I checked in with the page and towed my cart back to my office.
Jilly was on the phone, and the Friends office seemed to be empty. Still, I angled my book cart so that no one could come around the corner and catch sight of my screen. I fished through my tote bag for my own flash drive and plugged it in. Within seconds, I was scrolling through the library’s shared drive. I had to go into a few subfolders, but I found Anita’s pretty quickly. Nothing in here was password protected because the whole purpose of this was to provide access to anyone who needed to see something. It didn’t happen often, and it’s not like people were in the habit of rifling through each other’s digital files. Yet here I was. I couldn’t believe I’d never thought of it before.
As I scrolled through all the files, I realized I hadn’t missed much by not snooping sooner. What a snore. Anita had kept copies of every set of meeting minutes, budgets, plans, or what have you, going back years. It was reasonably organized, though there were several folders labeled either “Misc.” or with abbreviations I couldn’t follow. This would take a while. I could tell that Jilly was wrapping up her call, so I copied the lot onto my flash drive. By the time Jilly popped her head around the corner to see if I was ready, I’d gotten out of the shared drive and pocketed my flash drive. I’d study it later, at home. Finding something useful was a long shot, but worth a try.
Jilly seemed much calmer now than she had been all week. Neither one of us brought up the murder, instead talking over different elements of the book sale. She had already asked Millicent if there were any old picture frames she could use for a photo booth, and had been directed to a rarely used section of the top floor.
“She said that if there are any—and there probably are—they’ll be against the wall in the north corner, near the tower,” Jilly said. “We’ll have to look under all the dust sheets, and she doesn’t know what kind of shape they’ll be in, but we can take whatever we need. The two of us should be able to manage, but we might need to shift some things around to get to them.”
“I’m surprised she’s not supervising,” Jilly had added as we came up the final set of stairs. “She’s usually so protective of everything up here.”
“True, but she seems to be letting go a bit. She’s let me have input in the new arrangement of the archive. I think she’s getting tired.”
“Yes, I’ve thought that as well, and so has Helene. You don’t think she’ll retire, do you? It’s hard to imagine the place without her.”
“It is,” I said. We picked our way through the attic, peeking under sheets at likely looking piles, making our way to the corner. So here we were. Millicent had said she’d check in with us after we’d had time to hunt around.
Jilly and I viewed the tarp-covered heap with some trepidation. We were in the far back corner of the attic, having wound our way through an assortment of old furniture, stacked crates, and unknown objects draped in sheets. There was a layer of dust, visible to the naked eye even in the dim light, over everything around us. This was the part of the attic never used by staff or volunteers. Even Millicent had given up on creating order here.
“This must be the pile she meant,” Jilly said. “I guess we better pull this tarp off.”
“Right,” I said. “But let’s open the shades on these windows. If anything scurries out from under that stuff, I want to know what I’m dealing with.”
“Good idea.” Jilly sidled around the pile to the window on her side. I had to walk a few feet to the one closest to me, but at least the path was clear. I could hear Jilly coughing as she struggled with the window shade. Mine went up easily, with only a squeak of protest. I squinted in the sunlight and waved away some dust. I had a view of the back parking lot and the woods beyond.
“Ready?” Jilly said.
“Ready,” I said. We each took a side of the tarp and lifted it gently, trying not to stir up more dust. We draped it over an old bureau behind us and took a look at our find.
“Wow,” I said.
It was the motherlode of overwrought Victorian portrait frames. Some painted, some varnished, all solid wood, carved, and ornamented to a fare-thee-well.
“Is that one in the back full length?” I said, trying to get a closer look.
“I think so,” Jilly said. “If it is, it’s perfect for the event. We’re going to have to move everything to get to it, though. Help me pile the small ones over here.”
It was like an oversized game of Jenga. We shifted things around, gently untangling and spreading them out. The frames were in great shape considering how old some of them must be. Jilly found a couple in different sizes that would suit her purpose, but we still wanted to get to the big one.
“Look out,” Jilly said as the light reflected off something in the pile. “I think one of those has glass in it.”
I eased a couple of frames to one side. A face stared at me from behind streaks of dust.
“There’s still a picture in it too,” I said. I lifted it carefully and held it up so Jilly could see. “Looks like an old black-and-white photograph.”
