Then a cloud passed in front of the sun, and the screen of memory went gray She had not come to town to reminisce. All business again, she checked voice mail on her cell, but Nina’s message about the surprise was not there. Presumably the same magical burst of static that had delivered it had also deleted it. She looked up, but no helicopter dogged her.

  Last week there was the breakin at the public library. Miss Kelly tells us nothing’s missing. The sheriff thinks it’s kids, having fun. I think it’s the strangers.

  You know what, Pete? So do I.

  One last call to make.

  She reached her cell-phone provider, fought through the automated menu, and explained to a human being about the fax tones and the unexpected voice mail. She had to wait on hold, was transferred to someone else, who was no help, and finally reached a personable young man, probably in Bangalore, who took her through a list of useless options and then suggested that she bring the phone in for service.

  Beck glanced up and down Main Street. “There’s not really a store in this area.”

  Then she could mail it, he said, and, if it could not be repaired, they would send her a new one, free of charge. “Here’s what I am thinking, ma’am,” said the personable young man, once she had further detailed her limitations. “A cell phone is simply a small computer. There are people, these days, who write viruses for cell phones. Yours could be infected.”

  (ii)

  The library turned out to be not, as Rebecca had expected, an aging relic of the town’s better years, but a sleek new building, of contemporary design, with lots of glass and unusual angles to catch the mountain sun. Smallish, yes, befitting the size of the town, but the plaque near the door named a famous architect, and an infamous donor: the public library was a gift to the people of the town from Jericho Ainsley, in honor of his parents.

  Beck tracked down the librarian in the children’s corner. Story time had ended an hour ago, and Miss Kelly was busy reshelving books and brushing up crumbs. Beck pitched in without being asked.

  “They’re not supposed to eat or drink in here,” the librarian explained in apology. She was a black woman, tall, and smart, and nearly without humor. She wore fifties-style dresses, and glasses on a chain, and evidently lacked a first name, because even the plate on her desk called her only Miss Kelly. “But their mothers don’t bother to ask, and the children—well, they’re just so cute.”

  “I know,” said Beck, stooping to help.

  “We don’t get as many as we used to for story time. It’s been every Tuesday afternoon for the toddlers and Saturday morning for the older kids since the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. The old-timers keep telling me the place used to be packed back in the old days, but they also seem to think the snow was deeper and the winters were colder and—well, maybe they’re right,” she concluded, mopping spilled juice from the table as Beck relieved her of the broom and dustpan.

  “I don’t suppose Dr. Ainsley came for story time.”

  Miss Kelly straightened. Her gaze was ever on the roam, so that half the time she seemed to be speaking not to Beck but to the walls, or the ceiling, or the floor. “That’s right. You’re Beck, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I wondered what you’d be like.”

  “You did?”

  The librarian nodded. Beck felt herself blushing. Everywhere she went in Bethel, it seemed, her story preceded her. But Miss Kelly’s smile neither judged her nor mocked her, and Beck relaxed. The librarian brushed her hair aside, then took her visitor by the upper arm and led her to the side of the room. Colorful bulletin boards proclaimed the magic of reading. Posters touting books by Stephanie Meyer and J. K. Rowling were prominently displayed.

  They sat side by side on low desks. “Everybody in town’s been talking about you.” A grin, half hidden behind all that hair. “Especially after last night.”

  “Last night?”

  “Your drink with Pete Mundy It’s a small town, Rebecca.”

  “It was just a drink.” She tried a smile. “I brought the book back. I don’t think Jericho’s had a chance to read it, but it’s overdue.”

  “What book? Oh. Thanks.” Miss Kelly did not even check the due date. She set the tome aside and waited, eyes once more focused on the middle distance.

  “Is there a fine?” said Beck.

  “I think you should tell me why you’re here.”

  “The book—”

  “Come on, Miss DeForde. I’m willing to believe that you’re a very fine person. I’m not willing to believe that you would leave the sickbed of a dying man you once loved to return a library book.”

  Beck took a minute. “You know Jericho hasn’t been well. I’m out here—well, to visit him. To help out a little. You understand.” The librarian was not saying whether she understood or not. Her gaze continued to roam the room. “To be honest, there have been some strange things going on. I’m leaving the day after tomorrow. Going back east. I just want to make sure that”—she hesitated, searching for the word— “that all he has to worry about is getting better.”

  Miss Kelly nodded. She was swinging her long legs like an impatient little girl.

  “You had a breakin here,” said Beck. “I was hoping I could ask you a couple of questions about it.”

  The ghost of a smile. “You’re here to nurse a dying man, but you take a couple of precious hours to drive into town because you’re curious about an act of vandalism at the public library?” She shook her head. “You’re going to have to do better than that, Miss DeForde.”

  The librarian’s elaborately quaint formality was beginning to throw her, as was perhaps the intention. Beck realized that in this case, at least, she would be able to buy truth only by paying truth. “I don’t think it was vandalism, Miss Kelly. I don’t think it was local kids or the town drunk. I think it was somebody who’s interested in what Jericho has been up to. I’m thinking that maybe Jericho spent some time here. Reading. Doing research. I’m not sure exactly what, but I’m betting he was in here a lot. I think that’s why there was a breakin. Somebody else was betting the same thing.”

  Miss Kelly was on her feet. She had an unusually firm bearing for a woman so tall. “I had a reporter in here the other day. Some kind of writer, anyway.” She was strolling toward her desk. Beck followed. “He asked me the same thing.”

  “Lewiston Clark?”

  “Sounds right. Big guy, red beard.”

  “That’s him.” Although, in Miss Kelly’s austere presence, she felt as if she should have said, That’s he. “So—what did you tell him?”

  “The same thing I’m going to tell you. Mr. Ainsley has been very good to me. All this”—waving her hand again—“didn’t have to happen. My degree isn’t in library science, Miss DeForde. I was a literature major. But I needed a job. Mr. Ainsley is a power in this town. He got them to hire me.”

  “Where were you before this?”

  “A foundation back east. I lost my job last year. I had trouble finding another one. Then a friend of a friend called Mr. Ainsley, we met, he thought I was smart—and, well, here I am. A librarian in Nowheresville.”

  Rebecca looked at Miss Kelly: tall and competent and hiding something. An accomplished, professional woman, retreating to a little Colorado town. Owing Jericho. Just the sort he would choose to—well, to help him.

  Naturally.

  Miss Kelly owed him, and Miss Kelly was an outsider. Beck had not seen many African Americans since arriving Sunday night, and her considered prejudices insisted that it was strange for a black woman to move to a Colorado mountain town.

  Jericho builds the library, and the library hires an outsider as librarian: no wonder they burglarized the building.

  Whoever they were.

  Meanwhile, Miss Kelly was still talking.

  “There isn’t much to tell. It was—let’s see—the Monday. Eight days ago. I usually get here about seven-thirty on weekdays. We open at eight-thirty. I was a little late that morning. When I arrived, that whole section over there”—she swept a hand—“was a mess. Books on the floor, some of them damaged. We keep DVDs over there, too. A lot of them were out of their cases. A couple were missing.” Another shrug. “I called some of the women from town. We cleaned it up as best we could.”

  Beck was on her feet. “Do you mind?”

  “Not at all.” That quick, shy grin. “If you see anything out of place, let me know.”

  The corner of the library Miss Kelly had indicated contained books on literature and history. At first Beck was not sure why they would be shelved together. Then she realized that the collection was organized according to the old Dewey decimal system, rather than the Library of Congress system so many major libraries used today. Literature was the 800s, history was the 900s. She roamed the shelves. She could not see why this area would be chosen for—well, whatever it was chosen for. She saw no obvious link to whatever Jericho was hiding.

  If he was hiding anything, she cautioned herself.

  On the wall just past those shelves were reference books, everything from home-improvement manuals to wildlife guides filled with photographs of flowering plants. Had one of these, she wondered, struck Jericho’s fancy? Was it possible that he had checked out the novel as an act of misdirection? That he had never read it because he had never planned to read it? That he had snatched it off the literature shelf to explain his visits to this corner of the library?

  Then something else occurred to her.

  Miss Kelly had said this was the only section where there had been vandalism. Perhaps it was just that—vandalism—in which case there was no reason to worry. If, however, the breakin was related to Jericho, then there had to be a reason the damage was limited to this section.

  Whoever the people were who broke in, they knew what they were looking for, which meant they knew which part of the library Jericho used.

  Which meant somebody had told them.

  (iii)

  Back at the desk, Miss Kelly was filling out requisition forms. Reading upside down, Beck realized that she was asking the selectmen for money to buy more books. In the current climate, she suspected, the selectmen would have other priorities.

  “May I ask you something else?”

  “Of course,” said the librarian, not looking up.

  “Did Jericho—did Mr. Ainsley check out any other books? You would have records, right?”

  The librarian was already shaking her head. Not in denial. In refusal. “You know, Miss DeForde, after 9/11, the government adopted all these rules about libraries keeping track of their readers. The library association has been adamant in opposing the rules. We’re not supposed to cooperate with inquiries like—well, like yours.”

  “I’m not the government.”

  “The principle isn’t anti-government. It’s pro-privacy” She crossed her arms, prepared to do battle.

  “The difference is, I’m trying to help him.”

  “A principle isn’t a principle if it respects such differences as that.” Miss Kelly waited, perhaps to see if her visitor would write this down. “I don’t doubt your sincerity, but you are asking questions that it would be unethical for me to answer.”

  “I don’t think he’d mind if you talked to me.”

  Miss Kelly nodded toward her desk. “There’s the phone, Miss DeForde. Why don’t you call Stone Heights and we’ll ask?” Beck was growing annoyed, but the librarian turned out not to be finished. “I appreciate what you’re saying. I do. But you have to understand my position. There are lots of ways for a librarian to get in trouble these days. I have a good job here. A job I’d like to keep. I had lots of trouble being accepted here. And Mr. Ainsley—well, he’s sick, but he helped. He was on my side when other people weren’t.”

  Beck could hardly mistake the message: without Jericho’s patronage, Miss Kelly’s thin supporting ledge might crumble. So she hunted around for a question the librarian might answer without getting tangled in her ethics.

  And found one. She was thinking about Jericho’s games with the folder, and wondered whether the library, too, might be a false trail— what Dak called a wisp. Perhaps Miss Kelly herself was neither his helper nor the witness who had told the strangers where to look. Perhaps she was but a diversion from a deeper truth.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to ask you to divulge any confidences.” Miss Kelly smiled her disbelief. “Let me ask something that has to be public knowledge. The times that Jericho came in here, did he ever speak to anyone? Someone else from town?” She considered how to frame the idea. “Maybe someone who was here as often as he was?”

  Miss Kelly was no fool. Dark eyes narrowed as she got the point. But if Beck had imagined that the librarian would again take refuge in the rules of her trade, she was mistaken.

  “You’re thinking that Mr. Ainsley used my library”—Beck noticed the pronoun—“for some kind of meetings.”

  “It’s possible.”

  Miss Kelly pondered. “Is this related to—well, the work he did before? The national security? All that?” A puzzled frown. “Forgive me, Miss DeForde. I respected the man, but not his politics. I never really approved of the kind of positions he took.” She pointed. “We have all six of his books, of course. Several copies. I’ve read them. I have to be honest: they frighten me. With all the troubles we have in the world, I think things would be worse if he’d been whispering all these ideas into the ears of the last couple of Presidents. I hope you’re not offended.”

  At last, a chink in the armor. “I’m not offended, Miss Kelly. I don’t like his ideas, either.”

  “Mr. Ainsley likes to talk about Richard Nixon. Maybe you know that. He says Nixon was a scoundrel, but he pulled off the greatest intelligence coup of the twentieth century.”

  “China,” said Beck, who had forgotten how Jericho would go on about the subject. Not only that Nixon went to China, but that he managed to fool the world. Nobody knew the old Cold Warrior was heading to China. All the negotiations were conducted in secret. And then, suddenly, the Soviet Union faced an unexpected alliance of its two greatest ideological enemies. Secrecy plus reordering the world: Jericho’s twin passions. Nixon obstructed justice and was driven from office, but Jericho Ainsley, who at the time of Watergate had been a young Agency case officer, remained devoted to him.

  “I would argue with him,” the librarian was saying. “I didn’t understand how he could admire a man of Nixon’s—views. And he would tell me how FDR lied about whether he planned to send American boys to fight in Europe, and Lincoln lied in the run-up to the Civil War—he seemed to think that lying in the national interest was something to be proud of. The bigger the lie, the more successfully the wool was pulled over the eyes of the American public, the greater Mr. Ainsley’s admiration for the liar.”

  Beck remembered this, too, how Jericho would teach, even in the classroom, that lying was neither right nor wrong; that truth was not a virtue; that all that mattered about words was what they accomplished.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Miss DeForde. I’m not saying we don’t have real enemies in the world. I just don’t happen to think lying for your country or blowing up every bad guy to Kingdom Come creates new friends. I think it creates new enemies.” She was getting wound up. “Are you saying he was using my library for secret meetings? Is that what you mean? Here? This is a citadel of knowledge. A sacred space. Books are the repository of ideas. They represent reason, argument, the interplay of—” She saw the visitor’s eyebrows arch and made herself stop. “I’m sorry, Miss DeForde. I’m afraid my passions on this subject run high.”

  Again Beck knew not to press. “I’m not saying he was up to no good in your library, Miss Kelly. I honestly don’t know what he was up to. I’m trying to find out.”

  “And that’s why you want to know if he met anyone regularly?”

  “Yes.”

  A slow nod. “Well, I suppose there might have been one.”

  “May I ask who?”

  “You may.” That ghostly smile again. “A man named Brian Navarro.”

  “Where would I find him?”

  “He’s a lawyer. There are only two in town. His office is on Main Street.”

  Miss Kelly walked Beck to the door and, unexpectedly, hugged her. “I should clarify what I said before. About why I needed this job. About why I’m indebted to Mr. Ainsley.”

  “You don’t have to—”

  “But I do. Because we have more in common than you might think. I told you that I lost my job at a foundation. I didn’t tell you why.” The girlish look was back as the librarian stared at her feet. “The head of the foundation resigned. Very quietly handled. The foundation was reimbursing him for a New York apartment. Turned out that he was overbilling for it, and using it as a kind of love nest besides. He used it for trysts with one of his co-workers, and—well, he resigned, and I got fired.”

  “I had no idea.”

  A grim smile. “In a scandal involving a great man’s marriage, nobody ever asks what happened to the other woman. But there’s one thing you know as well as I do. After the dust settles, she discovers that there’s a scarlet letter on her résumé. And it can’t ever be erased.”

  Beck nodded and mumbled something indistinct, uncomfortable with the librarian’s assertion of a commonality between them. Then she realized that there was a question Miss Kelly had not addressed.

  “How long have you been the librarian?”

  “I moved up here about six months ago.”

  From what Dak had said, Jericho’s madness—and his threats— began well before that. “Did Jericho use the library before you arrived?”

  Miss Kelly nodded. “That’s what I’m given to understand. He was in and out of here all the time, just like now.”

  “Where’s the old librarian? Your predecessor. Can I talk to her?”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. That wouldn’t be possible. Miss Waller died last year. That’s why there was an opening.”

 

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