The Kind Worth Saving (Henry Kimball/Lily Kintner, #2)(10)

Joan shivered. “Ugh, gross. Did you like him when you were little kids?”

“No, he was terrible. He used to steal my toys, and he used to beat me up.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Joan said.

“You’re laughing.”

“Am I?” Joan said, and laughed some more. “I’m an inappropriate laugher. That’s what Madison calls me. I don’t mean anything by it.”

“I don’t care,” Richard said.

They were quiet for a moment, and Joan could hear voices somewhere out on the third-floor hall. “Does anyone else ever come in here?”

“This library? Sometimes, but mostly people just come in here and get a book and leave. I come up here to read at night because Duane’s probably in our room watching sports and farting into his pillow, and I don’t really like to hang out in the lobby with all the old people.”

“It’s a little creepy in here.”

“There’s a framed letter over by that shelf with all the photography books. This place was started by some relative of the owners because he wanted to create a free lending library for all the people who came for the summer. It was his life’s work or something.”

“Is he dead now?”

“Uncle Murray? Yeah, totally dead. Can’t you sense him in here?”

Joan laughed, then worried for a moment that Richard was being serious. But he laughed too. “I have a really good sense of smell,” she said, “and when I was a kid I thought I could smell ghosts.”

“Oh, yeah.”

“Yeah. I can tell that Uncle Murray is definitely a ghost in this room.”

“What does he smell like?”

“He smells like creepy old man. Like crusty underwear and soup.”

“Ugh,” Richard said.

Joan crouched to look at the spines of some books that looked familiar. She realized she was standing in front of the young adult shelves, which included about a hundred Nancy Drew novels. It felt weird telling Richard, a boy she would never talk to at high school in a million years, how she thought she could smell ghosts. It wasn’t anything she’d told anybody else, not even her parents. Suddenly, she had a panic that when she started sophomore year Richard would always be by her side, trying to talk to her, or something.

“So this is what you’re going to do for your summer? Sit in a smelly room and read books?” she said.

“Sure,” Richard said, unfazed by what she thought was a pretty condescending tone.

“Okay, well,” she said, about to tell him she was going to go back to her room to watch television, but she spotted a cluster of books written by Joan Aiken. “Look, Joan,” she said.

He looked where she was crouched, and said, “Joan Aiken. Did you read Wolves of Willoughby Chase?”

“It’s right here,” Joan said. “No, I haven’t. Any good?”

“Not bad.”

Joan stood up, leaving the book on the shelf. She really did think she needed to go, even though the thought of going back to her room, where her sister would probably be reading or journaling or something, was not that appealing.

“So you’d help me get revenge on your cousin, right, if I wanted to?” she said.

Richard pushed his lips together, as though considering it. “Sure,” he finally said. “If I had the guts, I’d murder him, then he wouldn’t be anyone’s problem.”

Joan laughed, and said, “Oh my God.”

“What?”

“Are you serious?”

“No, but I’ve thought a lot about it. I only wouldn’t do it because I’d probably get caught and have to spend my life in prison.”

“So how would you do it?”

“How would I murder him? I’ve given this a lot of thought, actually. He’s from New Jersey, so if I had to murder him there, I’d probably just hire some Mafia people to bump him off.”

“You’d need a lot of money for that, probably.”

“Yeah, I hadn’t thought about that. I guess I could murder him here. He’s actually a really terrible swimmer. I mean, he can swim and all, but he always looks like he’s struggling to just stay afloat.”

“Drowning him. I like it.”

“He’s always looking for alcohol, so I’d give him a bottle of whiskey or something, and then push him in the pool when he was too drunk to swim.”

“That could work,” Joan said, moving to look at a separate shelf of books. There was a large Stephen King selection at eye level and she spotted the empty spot where the book Richard was reading had probably been.

“Nah,” Richard said. “There’s too many things that could go wrong. He’d have to be pretty drunk to not be able to climb out from the deep end. There’s a ladder there.”

“You could keep pushing him back into the pool with that long . . . whatever it’s called, the net they use to skim the pool.”

“It might leave evidence,” Richard said. “It would cut open his head or something and then they would know that it wasn’t an accidental drowning. When you kill someone it has to look like an accident, or it has to look like someone else killed them, otherwise it’s no good.”

Joan touched the spine of a book called It. “You’ve given this a lot of thought.”