I CAN’T believe it. I cannot believe what I am seeing.
This is not my library. It can’t be. This is like some secret hidden chamber from an old Nancy Drew mystery. But here it is. We walked through the door behind the checkout counter, the door I’ve seen hundreds of times, and it’s like we’ve stepped into another world. I’m standing in the middle of it, astounded. Gazing at all the books. Stacks and shelves of them.
“This used to be the whole library,” Mrs. Thompson says from beside me. “It was like this when it was first built. Wasn’t very much back then.”
“But it’s beautiful,” I say, staring at the wooden walls and the beams that reach to the ceiling. As I look up, a “wow” escapes my lips.
“Isn’t it amazing?” Mrs. Thompson says.
“Yeah,” I answer, our heads tilting upward. There’s a huge painting up there. Right on the ceiling. And even though the room isn’t especially large, the mural is. It dominates, with its white clouds and green countryside. Its old-timey train station. The horse-drawn wagon. The man with the reins in his hands. The girl with the red hair sitting beside him. “Is that Anne Shirley?” I ask.
“Yes, it is.” I can tell she’s proud of me for knowing that. “Anne of Green Gables was still a big deal when this library was built.” She pauses. “For some of us, it’s still a big deal.”
“Who painted it?”
“I don’t even know. Mrs. Parsons could tell us if she were still alive. She was the librarian back then. For years and years and years. I remember her from when I was a girl. Children were afraid of her because her mouth turned down in a rather permanent frown. But she wasn’t mean. She loved books. And she loved readers. She showed me this room when I was about your age.” She turns to me and smiles. “There weren’t as many books in here then.”
I peel my eyes from the ceiling and let them linger over all the volumes—old books on shelves and piled in tall stacks all around us.
“As a librarian, we’re trained to cull the old books that are too delicate for general usage. But Mrs. Parsons had a hard time with that. She gave away hundreds of old books but there were some she couldn’t part with. Ms. Lincoln, the librarian after Mrs. Parsons, kept up the tradition. And then there was me.”
“These are the old books?”
“Not all of them, of course. This room would be bursting twenty times over if we kept everything. Just certain ones.”
“I’m looking for A Wrinkle in Time,” I say resolutely. “An early one.”
“An early one,” Mrs. Thompson says, thinking. “That was before my time here but … maybe … why don’t you look over there?” She points to the corner of the room, at a spot under the old-timey train on the ceiling.
The buzzer rings. “That’s for me,” she says.
“This is where the buzzer goes?”
“This is where the buzzer goes.” She grins. “Now, go find your book.”
As she leaves the room, I make my way through the maze of books to the corner under Anne Shirley’s train. There are so many books here. I search up and down the stacks, recognizing some but not many.
After having no luck in several stacks, my eyes shift to the shelves. There are mostly kids’ books in this corner but there are some adult ones, too. And forget about anything called alphabetical order.
I’m never going to find it, I think as my eyes get lost in the titles and authors. And how do I even know this is one of the books Mrs. Parsons or Ms. Lincoln saved? I’m searching for the long shot of long shots.
Instead of bending down to the bottom shelves, I sit on the floor so I can more easily see the low ones. I lean in close and examine title after title. After title. To the end of the row.
Nothing.
No A Wrinkle in Time.
No Meg.
Hmmmm. I stare at the ceiling, at Anne Shirley, heading to her new life at Green Gables. Things must have been so much simpler back then. Turning, I lean forward to stand—and stop cold. Between The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and The Wind in the Willows, in the stack I haven’t searched yet, I see it.
A Wrinkle in Time. By Madeleine L’Engle.
Waiting patiently for me.
I begin unstacking like mad. The first handful of books goes on one stack. The next handful onto another. Until I’m staring down at a blue dust jacket with white words written on it that say: A Wrinkle in Time, next to three white silhouette figures surrounded with circles. I recognize these fictional figures to be Charles Wallace Murry, Calvin O’Keefe, and Meg Murry. My Meg.
I lift the book like it is a sacred tome and it falls open in my hand. The pages are yellowed, some of them torn. I rest it on top of a book stack and carefully turn the pages. When I reach the end, there is a sinking feeling in my stomach. Because nothing’s there.
Looking up at Anne, I whisper, “Little help, please.” But Anne has very little to contribute, so I turn back to the book in my hand. I hold it up and inspect it from all angles. I open it again and examine the inside of the front cover. Then, I search the inside of the back cover.
The stamped checkout card is there. Mrs. Thompson told me that before the computer checkout system, library books used to be checked out using a card that lived in a little pocket on the inside back cover of a book. The card was stamped with the date the book was due back so it became a record of when a book was taken from the library.
I pull the card out of the card slot and scan down, looking at the dates until I get to the last stamp: JAN 3 ’74. That must have been the last time the book was checked out before it was pulled from circulation and ended up here.
Scanning up the card, I stop at JUN 24 ’73. That would be about the right time. Soon after the Allman Brothers Band concert. Soon after Ruthie didn’t show up at the Omni Coliseum.
Girl Detective was here. I can feel it. I find myself inspecting the front cover again and realize something isn’t quite right. The inside paper lining appears somehow wrong. Like someone carefully glued in a piece of blue card stock to make it look like the real inside cover when it really wasn’t. But why would somebody do a thing like that?
With my fingernail, I scratch at the top corner of the blue card stock. Because there’s only one reason someone would do that. To hide something.
Once I get it started, the fake panel begins to peel away easily. Slowly, what’s hiding behind it is revealed.
A photograph. An old black-and-white one. Not a Polaroid but a real picture about the size of a 4×6, but not exactly. Gently, I lift it from its hiding place.
It’s a picture of a rather large brick house with a chimney and wooden shutters. The lawn in front is mostly bare with only a couple of small trees.
I flip the photo over, and written on the back in blue ink is the next clue:
Good work, detective.
You’re almost home.
The evidence you need
Lives where I used to
Upstairs. Second on right,
Creaky floorboard by the bookshelf.
Thank you.
Holy smokes! This is where she lived. This is Girl Detective’s house. Find the house and I find her.
And just like that, in the middle of this insane room with all these books, I know what I want. I want to finish the mystery. I want to meet Girl Detective, dead or alive, and find out what happened. I want to know why she asked me to Open If You Dare. And why she led me to find dead Martin and alive Ruthie.
I want to know what it’s all been for.
While slipping the old picture inside my copy of James and the Giant Peach, I whisper a small good-bye to Anne Shirley. As I turn to go, I hear the words form in my head:
Girl Detective, I’m coming for you.