Chapter 2 of 5The Boring Old Books

The library board votes at its next meeting on whether Marianne Abbott's job will continue to exist, and Owen Pritchard has the votes to end it. Sofia said so on Monday, standing in the doorway of the second-floor archives of the Harmony Creek Public Library with a ring of keys in her hand, before she had even found the light switch. On Tuesday morning the book most likely to hurry that vote along lies open on the desk: a leather ledger out of the Westwood Collection, miscatalogued for longer than anyone now working in the building has been alive, its pages filled by a small slanting hand that never once bothered with a column of figures.

The archives take up the north end of the second floor, steel shelving and a long oak table scarred by other people's research, and behind glass the Westwood Collection sits in its uniform gold-stamped spines, shelved and re-bound and polished at Owen Pritchard's expense.

Marianne reads the line at the top of the page and gets no more sense out of it than she got the day before.

The chickadee sings loudest before the frost.

Under it, on its own line, the same hand had written, Sow beans when the oak leaf is the size of a mouse's ear. Beneath that: The bitter root goes in before the thunder.

Much of the ledger reads like a kitchen: boneset for a fever, yarrow for a cut that will not close, mullein for a cough that settles deep. The rest reads like a letter nobody finished. "Fascinating," she murmurs, and reaches for an index card, because a long working life spent sorting other people's papers has taught her that coincidence is a lazy reader's answer. She copies the sayings down and tapes the card above her desk lamp.

The fog off Harmony Creek has not burned away yet, and the hills beyond the tall Carnegie windows come up out of the gray in stages, green first and then gold.

The door swings open and Sofia Navarro comes through it sideways, a paper cup held out ahead of her, a tote bag sliding off her shoulder, her scarf a yellow loud enough to argue with the wallpaper.

"Okay, so. You're already reading it."

"I am."

"You've been here since yesterday."

"Since before the fog lifted."

Sofia sets a cup down beside the lamp and keeps the other one. "Sheetz. Their dark roast is better than it has any right to be."

"Thank you."

"Don't thank me. It's a dollar eighty-nine."

She looks at the index card, then at the ledger, then back at the card. "So what is it?"

"A household almanac, I think. Remedies, planting notes, weather signs. And something else."

"Something else how?"

"I haven't gotten there yet."

"Daniel says you pulled it out of the Westwood Collection."

"I did."

"The one his family funds, that he paid to have re-bound, that he mentions at every board meeting as if the town built it a shrine."

Sofia drinks her coffee. "He wants your position off the payroll. You know that."

"I know."

"Okay, so here's my one warning for the day, and then I'm going downstairs to fight with the HVAC contractor. Owen doesn't argue. He waits. Everyone in this town who ever crossed him found that out eventually."

She digs in the tote and comes up with a sheet of letterhead.

"What's this?"

"His Founder's Day request. He wants the Historical Society display cases moved out of the archives and into the lobby."

"Out of my reach."

"I'd say so." Sofia shoulders the tote. "I'll send Daniel up with the cart."

Daniel Murphy comes in pushing that cart with his earbuds hanging around his neck, and he stops short when he sees the ledger open under the lamp.

"Morning."

"Morning. You beat me in. You found something."

"Something. Nothing that makes sense yet."

"Show me."

"First tell me about Eleanor."

He leans his elbows on the top of the cart. "What about her?"

"She wouldn't let you shelve the 973s."

"She wouldn't let anybody. End of the day she'd shut this door and do it herself, cart by cart."

"Why?"

"She said the boring old books are the ones that tell the truth."

"And she was re-cataloguing the whole Westwood Collection."

"All of it. Land grants, church programs, the Ladies' Auxiliary minutes. She kept the long table covered, and whenever I offered to help she'd say, 'Not this one, Daniel.'"

"Did she ever tell you what she was hunting for?"

"No. And if I came near the screen she'd turn it. Politely."

Marianne moves the index card a little to the left and then puts it back where it was.

"There's one more thing. She had a meeting on her calendar. The afternoon she died."

Daniel's hand stops on the handle of the cart. "Yes."

"With whom?"

"Owen Pritchard."

"Do you know what it was about?"

"She needed him to see something before anyone else did. Those were her words."

"Did you tell Sofia?"

"The day after the funeral."

"How did she take it?"

"She said, 'Okay, so.' Then she didn't say anything for a while."

Marianne looks at the sayings on the card and at the small slanting hand on the page underneath, and she thinks about a woman who shut a door every evening and turned a screen every time a pair of footsteps came up behind her.

"Daniel."

"Yeah?"

"I need the rest of the 973s. Every volume that ever came out of that collection."

Daniel writes a note on the back of his hand with the pen he keeps behind his ear. "All of them?"

"All of them. And don't put a single title up on the catalog screen where somebody walking past can read it over your shoulder."

"That's what she said." He straightens and takes the cart by the handle. "Word for word."

After he leaves, she stands at the window and watches men in orange vests string fall banners between the lampposts on the square, where the Friends of the Library have already chalked out their table for the Brunswick stew sale. The fog is off the creek now. She has read the town's official history all the way through — the Founder's Day pamphlet, the plaque copy, the county heritage book — and nowhere in any of it is there a Sparrow, not a birth, not a marriage, not a deed. Eleanor asked at the circulation desk whether anyone in town had ever heard the name, and the answer was a shrug.

Marianne goes back to the desk and puts her hand on the cover of the ledger, and for the first time since she walked into this building she wishes there were a lock on the door.

A man fills the doorway.

He is tall, wide through the shoulders, white-haired, in a tweed jacket on a morning that does not call for one, and he is not smiling. He comes into the archives and pulls the door shut behind him, which nobody in the building has done all morning.

Marianne closes the ledger. "Mr. Pritchard."

"I'm told you're the new keeper of my family's history," Owen Pritchard says. He steps to the desk, stops beside her lamp, and reads the index card taped above it.