Chapter 18
I expected to be frog-marched down the Grand Staircase past the stone lions on their pediments, through the bronze doors sculpted with the figures of Wisdom and Knowledge, and shoved right into the waiting handcuffs of the Boston Police Department.
Instead, Chester dragged me down a side corridor to the Abbey Room with its checkered marble floor and Renaissance paneling and inlaid ceiling, shoved me inside with the requisite steely I’m watching you glare, and slammed the door.
I stood there in the ornate chamber, which used to be a book delivery room and was now rented out for wedding receptions and corporate fundraisers, stomach churning sickly as the lock turned over, wondering how long I’d have to wait before the BPD arrived to haul me away.
A library page knocking a security guard on the head might not be that high priority. Maybe I’d be here for hours.
The room was set up with round tables covered in red cloths; clearly some kind of event was planned for later.
I sank down at the nearest one, mostly because my knees didn’t want to hold me upright anymore.
“Shit,” I mumbled under my breath, but this was so far beyond cursing.
I looked at my mother’s crumpled note and stuffed it into my pocket.
I didn’t know where she was, if she’d ever been here at all or if it had been some kind of trap—I was leaning toward trap at this point—but over the sick stutter-step of my heart at seeing her handwriting, an even more terrifying drumbeat kept thrumming: Violent criminal assault. Violent criminal assault.
How much time did you serve for that? No chance I’d get off, even as a first-time offender who’d never clocked so much as a parking ticket—I’d been caught red-handed, dead-to-rights guilty.
Maybe a decent lawyer could get the charges knocked down to community service, but how was I going to afford that with my bank account frozen and Libby Bibb stealing my identity?
(Let her go down for assaulting Chad, if she wanted my life that badly.)
Violent criminal assault. I didn’t even know if that was the real term for what I’d done or if it was just something Chester had heard on Law it wasn’t going to un-choose me because of a desperate mistake like what had happened with Chad.
The Library understood the desperate and the lost; that was almost the first thing the Librarian had told me.
If I could just get out of the Abbey Room before the police arrived, get back to the Reading Room, I was sure I’d see my door fly open in welcome.
Maybe one would even open up for me from here—
But when the door thudded open, it wasn’t the Astral Library I saw as I scrambled to my feet.
I didn’t see any Boston Police Department uniforms either.
A much more familiar and much more welcome figure walked into the room, jeans and purple-framed glasses and a full sleeve of flower-vine tattoos showing from her short-sleeved blouse.
“Elizabeth,” I exclaimed, almost falling on my boss.
“I’m so sorry, if you can let me explain—”
She held up a hand, and my words dried up.
My slightly funky boss who prided herself on being a cool librarian and not the old bun-wearing shushing kind, who tried to get me extra hours and sounded genuinely sorry when she couldn’t, who traded tattoo stories with me—was she really going to send me off in a cop car?
Hope rose cautiously because she was smiling as she looked at me.
“Alix, please have a seat.” Waving a hand back at the red-clothed table by the ornate Abbey Room fireplace.
“I didn’t mean to hurt Chad,” I burst out, sitting. “I swear I never meant—”
“Of course you didn’t,” she reassured me, sitting down opposite and laying her clipboard on the table. “Chad’s fine, just a bump on the head. I know you, Alix, and you couldn’t hurt a fly.”
That should have been reassuring—certainly the news that Chad wasn’t headed for the emergency room sent a lurch of relief through me—but somehow it wasn’t.
How well did Elizabeth know me, if she thought I wouldn’t hurt a fly?
I wasn’t really very nice. Any kid from the foster system came out with teeth, usually well-sharpened ones.
But I wasn’t going to point that out to someone who held my future in her hands. I was just going to sit here looking harmless and penitent. “Please don’t turn me in to the cops, Elizabeth. Please. I’ll do anything, I’ll—”
“Yes. I know you will.” Her smile widened at this point to an absolute beam, and that was even less reassuring. In fact, it started my stomach clenching all over again. “So let’s have a chat, you and me. I’ve been trying to run you down all day, but really, you’ve been very hard to catch up with.”
“Why have you been wanting to talk to me?” I managed to ask.
Her eyes twinkled through her purple-framed glasses. “Because I’m the president of the Library Board.”
That moment stretched out into a little infinity all its own.
Me, sitting there staring stupidly at my boss, the tiny details piling up in my brain because I couldn’t—wouldn’t—let the big picture come fully into focus.
The smell of wood polish in this room, the bigger smell of old books that permeated all libraries through every wall and ceiling panel, the smell of the chemicals that had been used recently to restore the fifteen antique panels that lined the walls, depicting Galahad and the Grail Quest. Galahad himself, single-minded and dense in his red cloak, striding through adventure after adventure from his Perilous Seat at the Round Table to the Castle of Maidens.
Not as dense as Alix Watson, who had thought she was on an adventure but hadn’t realized it was a trap. And now here I was in the heart of it, steely teeth closed hard around me.
“I don’t suppose you actually have my mother here?” I heard myself say, sounding eerily polite. Feeling the crumpled note in my pocket, the handwriting that I would have sworn on a stack of Bibles was hers.
“Oh God, no. What do you take us for, kidnappers?” Elizabeth laughed. “Your mother’s married now, living in San Diego with an eight-year-old—”
I recoiled in my chair like I’d been slapped. “I don’t believe you.”
A shrug. “She wasn’t hard to find, Alix.
She runs an online shop, Bookish Notions, makes earrings shaped like tiny bookstacks, that kind of thing.
I ordered a few kitschy little trinkets off her; she does her own packaging and writes her own receipts, so it wasn’t hard to get a feel for her handwriting. ”
“I’m pretty sure forgery is a crime,” I managed to say.
“All for a good cause!” Elizabeth twinkled at me. “We had to hook you out of that Library somehow. And really, a twenty-six-year-old with abandonment issues, it wasn’t too hard to guess you’d come running for Mommy if Library Security had trouble nabbing you.”
That hurt, even through my enveloping shock.
How easy I’d been to manipulate. A forged note and a few manufactured book-world sightings .
. . or maybe the Board hadn’t even been behind those.
Maybe I’d been imagining Mom all along, because I was just that desperate and needy.
Elizabeth made a note on her clipboard, and I couldn’t stop staring at this woman who had pulled the wool over my eyes with such ease.
“Are you like the Librarian?” I heard myself ask, still somehow sounding polite.
“Hundreds of years old, with a magic tablet and the ability to turn into a dragon?”
“Oh, no. Just an ordinary woman doing an ordinary job—all the regular Library Board members are. We’re all a lot more in touch with reality than these old fossils like the Librarian. Much better for the Library if she retires and lets the younger generation run things, am I right?”
No, I thought. Not in the slightest. “If you’re the head of the Library Board and in charge of all kinds of—of astral programming or whatever—what are you doing working in the Boston Public Library?”
“Using this as a base to dig out the Librarian, of course,” Elizabeth replied cheerfully. “Not to speak ill of her, because of course the old dear is quite an institution, but I don’t mind telling you she has been a headache.”
“She’s in a goddamn coma.” I felt the first red flickers of rage starting to burst through my shock. “You sent your hell-fiend card catalog on her trail. You broke her arm and tried to blind her.”
“Come on, she wouldn’t be in this position if she hadn’t refused every attempt at a more reasonable negotiation. The Board invited her input at any one of our meetings, but even when she attended she completely refused to discuss modernizing the Astral Library.”
I remembered the Librarian’s smoky, cynical voice: They’ve been trying for years to take the Library away from me by bureaucratic means . . .