Our Crooked Hearts(20)

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For a long time Marion had been expecting—hoping—praying her life would change. But her life was a broken flip-book. She was twelve the night she discovered the library. And she was fourteen—taller, lonelier, angrier at being alone—the day she ducked in to wait out a September storm. It hadn’t happened yet but you could smell it coming, sizzled pavement and green mulch.

The guard wasn’t at his usual place when Marion rushed in. The front desk, too, was empty. She hadn’t been here in a while. Books had always felt like the cure to her loneliness, but lately she’d wondered whether they were the cause of it, too. Ninth grade had just begun and already her classmates had closed ranks. They passed around tubes of Dr Pepper lip gloss and stories about who got to third base and a dog-eared copy of My Sweet Audrina, which Marion had already read. Nobody was outright mean to her, but they didn’t let her borrow their Lip Smackers, either.

She had the right clothes, her mother still made sure of it. She wasn’t ugly. Her voice sounded normal and she smelled fine and plenty of kids were way weirder and they had friends. Why, then, was she always alone? Why?

She was motoring up the main staircase, tripping over her high-tops, when she saw the bird. Felt it: a winged bullet that zipped past her shoulder, so close her hair moved. Then it was perched on the top step, watching her. A cardinal, of all things, bright and uncanny as an elf.

Marion swiped at her wet eyes. “Hi,” she said.

The bird took off. She followed it down the stairs, hoping to scoot it out the front door, but it went left, wheeling around the grape-leaf cornices and through the basement doorway.

Marion stopped. It was just a stupid bird. She could pretend she hadn’t seen it. Then she realized the only person she’d be pretending to was herself, and that thought was so pathetic she followed the creature into the dark.

Not that it was dark. The staircase was murky and the lights too green, but it wasn’t like you couldn’t see. Marion shoved her hands into her jacket pockets, among the soft grit of old Kleenex and Nature Valley crumbs, and set out to find the bird.

It twittered showily up ahead. Resentfully she followed it through Medieval War History, Epic Poetry, past sub-subcategories that only occupied a fraction of shelf, scholarly tastes whittled down to unreadable pencil points. There was the little asshole, probably crapping on something valuable, and there, it was gone again. She saw a streak of red feathers swooping beneath a marble archway and hustled after it, eyes pointed up. No cardinal. When she turned her gaze down again, she sucked in a breath.

But she didn’t scream. And it didn’t take long for her heart to slow, her shock to cool into curiosity. She would wonder, later, whether this quick regaining of equilibrium was admirable or wicked. She never could decide.

There was a table in the room’s center, dark wood inlaid with a repeating design of paler wood fruit. In the table’s only chair was a scholar Marion had seen before, a fortyish woman with a Modernist bowl cut. She was slumped far over, forehead nearly touching the table’s surface. From the doorway Marion could see the dull glass of her open right eye.

The library was a place where you could, conceivably, lie dead and unlooked-for for days. But this woman hadn’t been dead long. For one thing, she didn’t smell. Or, she did, but it was of human things. Stale coffee and coconut shampoo and the cloying rasp of Swisher Sweets. Marion’s breath as she hovered over the woman displaced her satiny hair. The ripple made it seem, briefly, as if she might lift her head.

Her blackberry lipstick looked so fresh you could picture her sliding it on in one of the library’s wobbly antique mirrors. She would’ve looked like a ghost already. Her skin was neither warm nor cold. The tea in her thermos was still hot, though. Marion tasted it, scenting the cosmetic odor of lipstick on the mouthpiece.

There was a book pressed beneath the woman’s right arm. Howlett House: A History. That was the library’s name in its first life; now it was Howlett House Library. Marion frowned, because it seemed an unremarkable book to die on. But that was before she’d read the pages it was open to—and before she realized the woman’s left hand, hidden beneath the table, was curled around a second book. The book and the hand were stowed in the capacious black purse slouched in her lap, as if she were a kid in class trying to hide it from a teacher.

A book worth hiding is a book worth tugging from a dead woman’s cooling fingers, especially once you’ve seen that its rippled, no-color cover is enticingly blank, and too ancient-looking to be the woman’s own notebook.

From elsewhere in the basement, Marion heard voices. Not quite panicked, but quick and numerous enough that she knew she hadn’t been the first to find the body.

Swiftly she straightened. The volume of history and the unlabeled book went into her backpack. There was a gold lipstick tube glinting from the dead scholar’s purse. Marion took that, too.

Then she slipped from the room. She walked a circuitous path to the stairs, peering through shelves as two librarians and a pair of uniformed paramedics sped past. When they were gone she moved stealthily up the stairs.

The uncracked storm pressed its nose to every window, slippery dark and static-charged. But the tempest had gone out of her. Death was the only thing she’d ever seen that was big enough, hungry enough, to swallow all her anxieties and leave her quiet.

Up in her nook Marion read the chapter the dead scholar had been reading. It was a thumbnail history of the library’s first inhabitant—John Howlett, an eccentric munitions heir who built a dizzying chimera of a house, then died at thirty—and the female servant to whom he’d left everything. Her stint as mistress of the house was brief and ended with her murder, likely by the rich man’s nephew, who inherited once she was gone.