“So you knew Tom?” I said.
Mary nodded. “That I did. A real ladies’ man. All charm and very little substance.” She laughed. “My mother called him a ‘slick willie.’ Pretty much tells you all you need to know.”
“What about Sam?” I asked. Hercules was moving in the bag against my hip again.
“Sammy Ingstrom? He was a grade behind us. Plus his father had money. Sam used to drive this aquamarine T-Bird to school. We didn’t run in the same circles.”
I thought about that photo again. Was I seeing something that wasn’t there?
We went up the last few steps. “You know, I always thought Sam had a bit of a crush on Pearl, though,” Mary said as if she’d somehow read my mind.
“Really?” I said.
“Oh yes,” she said, her blue eyes twinkling. “It would probably surprise you, given how much he likes to go on and on now, but back then Sammy didn’t say much. And if he was around Pearl, well”—she gave me a knowing smile—“the boy was practically catatonic.”
She headed down the hall to the staff room and I went into my office. Maybe Maggie was right. Maybe Sam had lied about knowing Pearl purely out of embarrassment.
As soon as I let Hercules out of the bag he went for my office chair, sending it looping around in a circle when he jumped on the seat.
I reached for the back and stopped it spinning and the cat looked up at me slightly cross-eyed it seemed to me.
“You like that,” I said. He may not have cared for catnip the way Owen did, but it was clear Hercules liked the rush of spinning around in my chair.
I turned the seat to face the window so he could both bird and people watch. Then I hung up my jacket and changed my rubber boots for shoes.
The pen cap that Hercules had found at the co-op was still in my pocket. I took it out to look at it again. It was clearly old. It looked a lot like the pen I’d seen Everett use, which he’d mentioned once had been his mother’s, but I didn’t see how the cap from a pen belonging to Everett could have ended up at the co-op building. It wasn’t Maggie’s as far as I knew. I turned the piece of the pen over in my fingers, wondering where Hercules had found it and why he’d thought it was important enough to bring to me.
“Care to tell me why you think this is important?” I asked. The cat looked over his shoulder at me with the same unreadable gaze Maggie had given me earlier. I sighed and put the small piece of metal and plastic back in my pocket. I wasn’t going to get any answers from a cat. I needed to get the library ready to reopen, not play Nancy Drew with Hercules.
“Stay in here,” I warned the little black-and-white cat. “If Mary or Susan find you roaming around the library there will be way too much explaining to do.”
As usual, he ignored me.
I stopped for a moment at the head of the stairs and surveyed the library space below me. The renovations had been complicated and more than once I’d thought the job would never be finished. But the building looked wonderful. The mosaic tile floors in the checkout area had been repaired. There were new windows and new flooring elsewhere in the building, as well as additional shelving and a new checkout desk that was more efficient—thanks to Mary’s organization skills—and that took up less space.
Oren Kenyon’s beautifully hand-carved wooden sun shone down from over the front doors, above the words LET THERE BE LIGHT, the same phrase that was over the entrance to the first Carnegie library in Dunfermline, Scotland. And now we were getting ready to celebrate the centennial of this building.
That reminded me that I needed to talk to Rebecca about the missing pages in her mother’s journals as well as ask Maggie for her ideas on how best to display Ellen’s sketches.
I went down to the main floor and stood looking around the computer area. My plan was to rearrange the space for the main centennial display. Maggie had already started the photo collage panels I wanted to put in the room.
Susan came to stand beside me. “Do you remember how we were talking about displaying the photo panels on some kind of oversized easel?” she said.
“I do,” I said.
“I had an idea. I don’t know if you’ll like it and I don’t know if Oren will say it’s doable.” She pushed her dark-framed glasses up her nose.
“What is it?”
She tipped her head back and pointed at the high ceiling. “I don’t know if you can see them or not,” she said. “But there are hooks up there, in the beams, in more than one place.” She pointed. “Look.”
I squinted up over my head. Susan was right. I hadn’t noticed them before, but there were what looked to be metal hooks fastened to the ceiling beams in several places.
“If there are enough hooks and they’re in the right places, maybe the panels could be hung from the ceiling.”
“I like that idea,” I said. “I’ll call Oren and see what he says. Thank you.”
She pressed both palms together and gave me a deep bow. “I live to serve,” she said.
I walked over to the desk for a piece of paper so I could write myself a reminder to call Oren…and Maggie…and Rebecca. The phone rang while I was standing there and I answered instead of letting the call go to voice mail. It was someone wanting to know if we’d be reopening soon. I was happy to tell the caller tomorrow.
It didn’t take long to get the library ready for people again. Mary and I had kept up with the book drop and the reshelving. Now she dusted and put out the new magazines while I vacuumed and Susan checked the computers. Then I checked the e-mail again, while Mary took care of the voice mail messages and Susan dealt with the mail Mary had stopped to pick up from the post office on her way over. After about an hour we stopped for Mary’s coffee and—no surprise—the conversation turned to Jaeger Merrill’s death. The news was spreading fast.
“So how long is the co-op store going to be closed?” Mary asked.
“The police are already finished there.” I added a bit more cream to my cup. “And Larry Taylor found a pump for the basement so if the rain holds off”—Mary was quick to rap her knuckles on the edge of the wooden table—“Maggie may be able to reopen in a few days.”
“Are the photo panels she’s doing for the centennial finished?” Susan asked, poking the silver skewer a little more securely into her hair.
“Almost,” I said. “And I got some things from Rebecca—from her mother, actually—that I’d like to use.”
“That reminds me,” Susan said, shaking a finger at me. “Abigail found a list of library rules from back in the late fifties.”
“Library rules?” I said.
Mary was already nodding and smiling. “They used to give them out when you got a library card. Every kid got a copy. The rules of proper library behavior. That was back in the days of ‘children should be seen and not heard.’”
“Whoever came up with that saying clearly didn’t have any kids,” Susan said, dryly.
“So what were the rules for proper library behavior?” I asked Mary, leaning back to get a bit more comfortable.
“No voices above a whisper, for one,” she said. “And everyone was supposed to wash their hands before they handled any books.”
“That rule isn’t necessarily bad,” Susan said. “Remember the guy who was reading Sonnets from the Portuguese and eating the peanut butter and marshmallow fluff sandwich? I’m sorry but peanut butter and fluff are just not romantic and they’re not good for books either.”
“What else?” I said to Mary.
“Children were expected to step lightly, preferably tiptoe so as not to disturb the other patrons.”
Susan rolled her eyes.
“And when I was in school, I can remember the teacher instructing us that we should choose books that would enrich our minds instead of ones that encouraged frivolous pursuits.” Mary smiled at the memory. “Treasure Island, for example, was considered to be a book that encouraged too much daydreaming.”