Chapter 3 of 5E.S. Apothecary

Owen Pritchard set the page on her desk and laid a pen across it. "Sign the transfer," he said. "The Westwood Collection goes home to the Manor, where it belongs. Don't sign, and I'll raise it at the board. Along with the question of your position."

Marianne Abbott did not touch the pen. Past the archive windows, the fog had thinned off the roof of the Harmony Creek Public Library and left a Tuesday that could not decide between October and August. Downstairs, someone laughed, and a cart rolled across the tile.

"The collection is library property," she said.

"As a matter of fact, it isn't."

Owen took the chair across from her desk and squared his tweed cuffs, though the furnace had not been on since spring.

"It's here on loan. My grandfather's arrangement, renewed by my father, and now by me. The room carries my family's name."

"The rooms carry everybody's names. That's how a building works."

"Don't be clever with me. This is a settled issue."

"Settled by whom?"

He looked at the window instead of at her.

"Your predecessor understood the arrangement. Eleanor and I got along perfectly well."

"Until the afternoon she asked you to come and see something."

"She got excited. It happens to people who spend too much time alone with paper. She pulled a box of ledgers and decided she had found a scandal. I came over. I looked. I told her what I'm telling you. Farm diaries."

Owen did not look up from the form.

"The journal has remedies in it. Names. Weather. Planting."

"Farm diaries."

"There's a line in it I can't parse."

"Then don't parse it."

He tapped the transfer form.

"The Colonel's letters are the real work in this room, and nobody has touched them properly since I was a boy. Letters he wrote home from camp. That's history with a spine in it. You want to make a name for yourself here, catalog those before Founder's Day. That's the assignment I would support."

"I wasn't aware you assigned the work."

"I fund the work."

He stood, and the chair scraped back.

"One more thing, since you're new. There's a fashion lately for revisionist nonsense. People dig up old grievances, dress them in footnotes, and call it scholarship. Harmony Creek doesn't need it. This town knows who built it."

"Does it?"

Owen looked down at the pen lying across the form. Then he picked it up and put it in his jacket pocket, which told her more than anything he had said out loud.

"The display cases come out today. I'll send someone for the boxes."

"Which boxes?"

"Everything with the family's name on it. Including the ledgers Eleanor was so taken with."

At the door he paused, one hand on the frame.

"You have a good reputation in this county. Don't spend it on a farm diary."

He was gone. The latch made its small final sound.

Her hands were cold. She polished her glasses on her cardigan, which did nothing for the handwriting on them. In the bottom drawer of her desk the journal still lay where she had left it, under a stack of unsorted Friends of the Library envelopes. Cracked leather, a spine split halfway down, a catalog card in the back reading 973.7 WESTWOOD PAPERS. Not Sparrow. Never Sparrow. Inside it was all comfrey and frost and a chickadee she could not place.

A knock, and Daniel Murphy came in backwards, hauling a cart stacked with the 973s and a can of Diet Dr Pepper wedged in the crook of his arm.

"Sofia told me he was up here." He parked the cart against the shelf and set the can by her elbow. "How bad?"

"He took my pen."

"That's not a number."

"He wants the collection moved to the Manor, in writing."

Daniel whistled through his teeth.

"Right, but that transfer needs Sofia's name on it too."

"Does it?"

"Everything out of special collections does. I typed that form myself last week, before—"

He stopped and went to work straightening a row of spines that did not need straightening.

"Before what?"

"Before Eleanor died."

He said it quickly, as though he had been carrying it around since morning.

"She had me print a transfer form the morning of that meeting. She said she needed to show him something first."

Marianne looked at the cart.

"The boring old books," she said.

"That's what she told me. The boring old books are the ones that tell the truth." He fiddled with the earbuds around his neck. "I asked her what she meant. She told me to finish the shelf list."

"Then finish the shelf list."

He left. The desk phone rang before her hand was off the drawer handle.

"Okay, so." Sofia Navarro's voice came down the line warm and quick. "Tell me he didn't leave with a signature."

"He left with my pen."

Sofia laughed once, without much in it. "Good. Because I'm not signing anything this week. He knows it needs my name, and he's hoping I'll be a good girl and do as I'm told."

"And will you?"

"I'll be extremely busy for a while."

A chair creaked.

"But understand me, Marianne. I can't say any of this where he can hear it. He sits on the board. He is the reason half that board sits on that board. What I can do is lose a form."

"Then lose it carefully."

"What did you find up there?"

"I don't know yet."

"Then find out quietly. And if you take anything home, photocopy it first and write down the box number. Eleanor didn't, and now nobody can prove what she was holding when she—"

She stopped.

"When she what?"

"When she went home that afternoon."

A drawer opened and closed.

"I'll talk to you tomorrow."

The dial tone came back.

Marianne locked the archive door and took the journal to the reading table under the lamp. She started at the back this time. The pastedown inside the rear cover had lifted along one edge, the old glue giving up in a building with no air conditioning to speak of. She slid the corner of her library card beneath the paper, and a fold of something thinner came free.

The paper was thin as onion skin and soft along the creases. She opened it on the table and held the corners down.

A map. Not a surveyor's. No compass rose, no scale. Whoever drew it drew it from the middle of the street or from memory: the creek as a wandering stroke, the mill with its wheel drawn in as a small circle, a spring marked with quick dashes, a meeting house with a cross on the roof. The streets did not match the streets outside. Squares held names rubbed nearly away, and at the corner where the main roads crossed stood one small square, circled in ink gone brown at the edges, with words beside it.

E.S. Apothecary.

Marianne knew that corner. Everyone in Harmony Creek knew that corner. The oldest building in town stood there, stone below and clapboard above, a porch sagging in the middle, a chalkboard out front where the day's soup got written before the first customer came down for coffee.

An apothecary, on the exact lot where The Settler's Inn stands today.

She said the word aloud, softly, to the empty room. "Fascinating."

Then she copied the map on the workroom machine that charged a dime a page and never collected it, and clipped the copy into a folder marked with the journal's call number. The journal went into her tote bag. She took the back stairs down, past the display cases already stacked by the workroom door with the Historical Society's brass labels turned to the wall, and out into an afternoon that smelled of cut grass and diesel from a delivery truck idling at the curb.

In the morning she would stand on the porch of The Settler's Inn and find out what an apothecary had been doing on the corner lot of a town founded, according to every history book she had ever read, by a man named Westwood.