Just inside the door, a thin, colorless woman in her sixties sat at a desk separated from the rest of the library by an old-fashioned bank of card files. A name plate on the desk said she was Ada Kendall. Another woman, fat and raisin-eyed, browsed in a section marked Historical and Romance Fiction. They both looked at him when he came in, casually at first and then with the interest and vague suspicion of small-town inhabitants for strangers who show up in a place strangers aren’t expected to visit.
“May I help you?”
“Well, I’m not sure,” Messenger said. He’d brought the copy of A Treasury of American Verse with him; he laid it in front of Ada Kendall. “Is this one of your books? It has a Beulah Library stamp on the last page.”
She frowned at him, frowned at the book. When she picked it up, opened it to the last page, it was with the tips of her fingers, as if she were afraid it might be contaminated in some way. “Yes, that’s our stamp. Someone’s torn the card pocket out.” She said the last as if she thought he might have done it.
“So it’s not a discarded book?”
“There’s no discard stamp,” she said.
“Then I wonder if there’s any way you can tell me who checked it out last.”
“That would depend on when it was last checked out.”
“I don’t know when, exactly. More than six months ago.”
“Whoever it was doesn’t seem to care about books or other library users. This book is in very poor condition.”
“Yes. But I—”
“The person will have to pay a fine,” Ada Kendall said. “A large fine. Where did you find it?”
“In San Francisco.”
“In... where did you say?”
“San Francisco. A woman named Janet Mitchell had it. At least, Janet Mitchell was the name I knew her by.”
Ada Kendall opened her mouth, closed it again; the frown, fixed now, had narrowed her eyes into a myopic squint. The raisin-eyed woman was no longer browsing. She stood watching him, Messenger realized, with a peculiarly eager intensity.
He asked the librarian, “Do you know anyone — a former resident of Beulah — named Janet Mitchell?”
“No.”
“Janet, then. Or Mitchell.”
“No Mitchells around here,” the raisin-eyed woman said. She moved over closer to where Messenger stood, as if to get a better look at him. It allowed him a better look at her, too; the intense expression was gossipmonger’s hunger. “No Janets either. Never has been, that I know of.”
“That’s what I was afraid of. Just a name she was using, one she made up.”
“Why would she use a name that wasn’t hers?”
“Well, she must’ve had her reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“I don’t know. I’m trying to find out.”
“You think she used to live here? On account of that book?”
“It’s possible. I thought so, anyway.”
“What’s she look like, this woman?”
“Tallish, thin, ash-blond hair, striking gray eyes—”
“My God,” the raisin-eyed woman said, “I knew it, I knew it!” Ada Kendall said nothing, but her thin mouth drew so tight the lips vanished into a crooked line, like a crack in an adobe wall.
Messenger felt a prickling of excitement. “Then you know her.”
“San Francisco. So that’s where she went. I never would’ve guessed a place like that, would you, Ada? A desert rat like her?”
“No. No, I surely wouldn’t.”
“What’s she doing there?” the gossipmonger asked him. “What’s she have to do with you?”
“She was a... she was somebody I knew.”
“Was? She leave Frisco, go somewhere else?”
“She’s dead,” he said.
“Dead? You say dead?”
“I’m afraid so. She—”
“How? How’d she die?”
“She committed suicide.”
“Ada, you hear that? She killed herself!”
“I heard,” Ada Kendall said. “Lord have mercy.”
“Lord had His vengeance, you mean. How’d she do it, mister? How’d she kill herself?”
“She cut her wrists with a razor blade.”
“Oh my! Wait till John T. hears that!” And the raisin-eyed woman burst out laughing, an eruption of sheer, unrestrained glee.
6
Messenger was shocked. He had never seen anyone react with such callous pleasure to the news of another person’s death. They hated her, both of them. Sad, broken woman like Ms. Lonesome... what could she have done to incite that much hate?
The fat woman’s laughter continued unchecked, rising to an almost hysterical pitch. The sound of it echoed through the close, dusty spaces of the library. It put a coldness on his nape. And for a reason he couldn’t define, it caused apprehension to rise in him like bile.
“You stop that, Sally Adams,” the librarian said. Her tone was schoolmarmish, as if she were speaking to a naughty child. “What’s the matter with you? Don’t you have a shred of respect? This is a library, for heaven’s sake.”
Her words had the opposite effect: The gossipmonger’s laughter came even harder, in whooping spurts, like the shrieking of a madwoman. Sally Adams broke forward at the middle, gasping and whooping, arms clutched across jiggling fat as if to keep it from shaking loose inside her bright print dress. Tears rolled down cheeks flushed the color of fire-roasted peppers. Visible spasms began to rock her; her buttocks twitched and rolled. It was as though her ferocious mirth had turned sexual and she were in the beginning throes of orgasm.
The look of her, as much as the sounds she was making, drove him out of there.
He opened the Subaru’s sun-hot door. All his earlier good-to-be-alive feelings were gone; the undigested remains of his breakfast lay sour in his stomach. He felt confused, not a little incredulous. Ms. Lonesome’s suicide was a source of pleasure for Ada Kendall too, he thought. Both of them, two women in a town this size... delighted to hear that someone they’d known was dead. It made no sense to him. There was no correlation between their reaction and his knowledge and impressions of Ms. Lonesome. A mistake? Not the same woman after all, despite the description—?
“Mister! Wait, mister — wait!”
His head came up, eyes pinching against the sun glare. Sally Adams had appeared on the library porch. She waddled down the steps toward him, wiping away tear-wet with fingers like brown sausages.
“Don’t leave yet,” she called to him in a breathless voice. “The details... the rest of the details...”
Quickly he folded his body inside. He had the engine rumbling when she reached the car; she came around to the front, stood there blocking the way, her mouth moving with words he couldn’t — didn’t want to — hear. He put the gearshift lever into reverse. The Subaru’s tires churned up a blossom of white dust as the car skidded backward. He kept on powering in reverse until Sally Adams was an indistinctly hazed shape in the middle of the street.
The church of the Holy Name sat by itself on a low bluff on the southwest edge of town. It resembled a rectangular box, unadorned and freshly whitewashed, with an ungraded parking area in front, a graveyard stretched out behind, and a smaller whitewashed building — probably a parsonage — off to one side. Cottonwoods had been planted around the buildings to provide shade. A few more dotted the burial ground, but most of it sat baking openly under the hard eye of the sun.