Chapter Twenty #2
Strangely, the only person she’d met here so far who hadn’t been part of Khaki’s stories was the man she’d cohabited with for the whole time she’d been here—Trey.
She’d come to care about Khaki’s great-nephew more than she could have dreamed was possible that first day when he’d greeted her with a growl and a scowl.
Had Khaki’s omission been deliberate? Or had she not even known Trey would be here?
Probably the latter. But Callie wondered what her friend would have said if she’d known he would be the one to welcome her.
She also wondered what Khaki would have said when she saw that the woman who’d broken Trey’s heart had come wandering into her library. She couldn’t help but think Khaki would have had some stronger words for Trey’s wife than Callie had.
Ex-wife, she reminded herself.
Besides, it’s not like Monica was here to stay.
They were only talking. And even now, Trey might be telling that blonde floozy (really, though, who used that word anymore?) to take a hike.
But then again, they’d been married. Sworn to stay together until death.
What did a few months with Callie measure against that?
Heck, they’d only been together together for a month.
That was just a drop in the bucket when you compared it to a marriage.
Realizing just how negative her thoughts were becoming, she took a deep breath and gave herself a little shake. Jumping to conclusions had never done anyone any good. Everything was fine until proven otherwise.
She’d come to town with a task in mind, and it was time to focus on it.
Feeling more herself, she pulled up before the stucco-covered Petite C?te Public Library building, which stood on its own just beyond where the strip of local businesses ended.
She hopped off the bike, then walked it around the side of the building to where the bike rack was located.
As she maneuvered the front wheel into the rack, she glanced up in admiration at the colorful mural of island musicians, which had been painted by local schoolchildren.
The artists depicted included Bob Marley, Jimmy Buffett, Jack Johnson, and Aaron Neville—though she wasn’t sure what Aaron Neville had to do with islands.
Maybe they felt like they needed to include someone from New Orleans, since it was the nearest big city to PCI.
Still puzzling over the mural, she snapped her bike lock into place, then jogged around to the front of the building and opened the door, stepping into the blessed cool of an air conditioner running on full blast.
She hadn’t managed to pay a visit here yet, in part because she rarely checked out print books anymore, and had still been using her Cincinnati login for e-books and audiobooks since she’d arrived on the island.
But, as she glanced around with interest, she noted with a pang that there was also something comfortingly familiar about a library—any library—no matter where it happened to be located.
There was the circulation area, where a handsome dark-skinned man with a lanyard around his neck stood checking out a stack of books to a teenager.
And on the far side of the room was a doorway with a cheerful door that marked it as the children’s area.
And, of course, her destination today, the reference desk.
The woman sitting behind it wore a pair of reading glasses on a beaded string around her neck (a look Callie had been waiting her whole life to sport) and was peering at the screen on her desktop, jotting down notes on the pad beside her keyboard.
Approaching the woman with the glasses, Callie noticed that her name tag read, ruby. “One second, cher. I gotta get this down before I forget.”
Callie thought she heard Ruby mutter something about fucking peri-menopause but couldn’t be sure.
As promised though, she soon put her pen down and looked up at Callie with a bright smile. “You’re a new face! Welcome to Petite C?te. How can I help?”
Quickly, Callie explained how she’d recently inherited some property on the island and wanted to learn a bit about its history. But any hopes she had of keeping her own identity or that of the property to herself were dashed as soon as she opened her mouth.
“Oh my gawd, you’re Khaki’s librarian!” The older woman’s gasp made Callie feel like she imagined movie stars must feel when spotted in the wild.
“Honey, why didn’t you say? I’ll be happy to help in any way I can.
So long as you give me the scoop on what it’s like living under the same roof as Trey LeBlanc. ”
She waved an imaginary fan over her face. “I know I’ve got about fifteen years on that man but I don’t even care that he won’t understand my cultural references. I’d just want to look at him mostly anyway.”
Callie couldn’t help it. She gave a snort of laughter. “I somehow think that the reality of living under the same roof is not nearly as exciting as whatever’s going on in your imagination.”
“Don’t ruin my dream, Callie.” Ruby shook her head. “I need something to get me through the rest of summer reading and there’s not that many good-lookin’ men around during the offseason.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” Callie said with a grin. “In that case, he’s everything you’ve ever hoped for and more. And he’s allergic to wearing clothes.” That last part was true, but Callie didn’t want to give this nice woman a coronary.
“That’s better.” Ruby nodded with a grin. “Now, what can I help you find?”
Callie explained that she wanted to see if there was anything about the history of the St. Ignatius College Library that might help her learn a little bit more about her new home’s past.
“That makes sense,” Ruby said with a nod. “I can definitely help you with that. Let’s see what we can dig up about the library for you.”
For the next hour, Callie and Ruby scanned through microfiche of every story in the now defunct Petite C?te Press Register from the past twenty years that mentioned the St. Ignatius Library building.
Most had been around the time of Hurricane Katrina, which, in addition to the well-publicized damage it had done to New Orleans, was responsible for convincing the trustees of St. Ignatius College to close the island-based campus after fifty-seven years in operation.
“It was such a blow to the morale of everyone on the island to have St. Ignatius close,” Ruby said to Callie.
“We understood how hard, not to mention expensive, it was to keep rebuilding every couple of years, but even so, for anyone who’d been here for more than a few years, that was hard.
Especially for all the employees who’d made lives for themselves on the island. ”
If the devastation on Petite C?te Island was even a fraction of what Callie thought would happen in her hometown if the University of Cincinnati were destroyed by a tornado and decided not to rebuild, then this island must have been well and truly crushed by the closure.
“Not to mention all the students who brought their dollars to the local economy.”
“That’s definitely true,” Ruby said, her tone mournful. “It’s never really bounced back, to be honest. The mayor and city council have tried various ways of bringing revenue in but some of them have been unpopular with the locals.”
This was the first Callie had heard about any kind of conflict among the locals.
It seemed like such an idyllic place—like Stars Hollow if it were populated by Cajuns and tourists who also loved deep-sea fishing—but she supposed there were conflicts anywhere there were people.
No community was completely without strife all the time.
“What kind of ideas?” Callie asked, curious to know what had caused turmoil among the locals.
“Well”—Ruby pursed her lips—“there were several members of the council who thought PCI needed to increase the spring break crowds. There was even a proposed rebranding campaign that would call us ‘Little NOLA,’ which didn’t sit too well with a lot of folks.
One of the things that makes Petite C?te so charming is the family-friendly atmosphere.
Not that we don’t have our share of drinking and partying.
But we don’t want to re-create Bourbon Street in the middle of the Gulf either. ”
Callie remembered her trip to New Orleans for Mardi Gras when she was in college.
It was the one and only time she’d seen a man peeing in the middle of the street in broad daylight.
It certainly wasn’t her fondest of memories, though she’d found New Orleans as a whole to be fascinating.
That kind of scene on tiny Petite C?te Island would certainly be a big change.
“I can’t imagine Khaki would have been in favor of that,” she said aloud. The woman she’d known was hardly what she’d call a killjoy, nor did she strike Callie as the sort to put up with the kind of hijinks that accompanied spring breakers.
Ruby chuckled. “Hardly. She was one of the most vocal opponents. But it was the next idea the council proposed that really got steam coming out of her ears.”
Having seen Khaki fuming a time or two, Callie smiled at the notion of her elderly friend’s ears making like a teakettle.
“The city government was approached by one of those reality TV outfits,” Ruby explained, warming to her story.
“One of them happened to come to the island on a day trip from New Orleans and fell in love with it. Of course, she immediately thought of what a great fit it would be for one of those shows where they put a bunch of people in a house together. Only she saw the library and heard the story of the college that used to be there and realized the library itself would be the perfect location. And not only that, it would be the perfect location for the haunted version of the ‘people in a house together’ show.”