was doing a marathon between the circulation desk and the table they had preempted.
Being asked to help find books on period costumes she took in her stride, but a casual request for the original Hollywood sketches of the Rogue’s Hour costumes made her eyes pop. She would never have suspected that the Sinnett Harbor Library owned them and she had no idea where to start looking. Then when she did locate them, Sandys Winter’s longhand manuscript of Rogue’s Hour was stowed away in the same file drawer! And to top that, the men who had asked for the costume sketches turned out to be Broadway’s famous Sam Runner and Joe Harne, in town because they had done a musical version of the Winter book for Bold Dick Week. The Lady and the Pirate they told her it was called.
Back on her perch behind the circulation desk for a few minutes, Judy grinned to herself. She was suddenly imagining her college roommate’s face if she walked in and discovered Broadway in the reference room. According to Babs, working in a library was the equivalent of sealing yourself in a tomb, and she thought Judy was crazy to plan to go to library school.
“Why spend your life among fossils while the world wags by?” she argued. “Me for an office. I want to see something that at least looks like a date once in a while!”
Judy glanced at the playwrights across the room and grinned again. Mr. Runner and Mr. Harne might not qualify as dates, but Babs would certainly never classify them among the fossils. With her passion for the theater, she’d be standing on her ear in excitement.
Eventually even the theater people drifted out the door, though, and Judy promptly tackled the job of getting reference books back on the shelves. It was already twenty minutes of nine and she was not aching to stay overtime. The thought of Miss Leonard and Miss Addison stuck in the new wing with their committees troubled her, however. Obviously she could not walk out and leave them holding the bag. They must be dead on their feet. Still, twenty minutes were twenty minutes. They might all get out of the building on time yet. At least no one else would come in now.
Actually Judy cherished that comforting idea for less than seven minutes. The door latch clicked again, and she spun around to start back to the circulation desk, trying to look like a welcome mat and a time clock simultaneously. But she dropped the welcome part of the act in a hurry. Thirteen minutes to closing and she had to cope with Assistant Ranger Timothy Wade!
3 • Lipstick and Lobster Rolls
JUDY LOOKED POINTEDLY FROM RANGER WADE TO the clock. “This library closes at nine sharp,” she informed him. “You’ll have to hurry if you want a book. Snakes are classified under 598—over there in the stacks at the back of the room.”
Her tone was as warm and cordial as an icicle, but Ranger Wade chose to ignore it.
“Thanks,” he said blandly. “I’ll have a look.” He held out his palm with a cylinder of lipstick on it. “I thought I’d better stop by with this. You dropped it at the Station yesterday.”
Judy hastily thawed several degrees. “Oh swell, thanks,” she said happily. “I’ve been moaning over it all day.” Just the same she still had no intention of letting him keep her overtime. There was no sense in encouraging people to stroll in at the last minute or nobody’d ever get out of the place. “Don’t forget you have only seven minutes,” she said over her shoulder as she headed back to her books. “Please call if you need help.”
But when Miss Leonard hurried across the room five minutes later, Judy had finished her replacement job uninterrupted.
“Time to close shop,” the librarian said. “Just leave a light on the desk and put the latch on the door as you go, please, will you, Judy?”
“What about you and Miss Addison?” Judy asked. “It won’t kill me to stay if you need me, you know.”
But Miss Leonard shook her head. “Miss Addison’s already shooed one committee out the back door and escaped,” she told Judy, smiling. “The other may be around for another half hour, but I’m a member of it anyway so that’s my funeral. You trot along.”
Then, hearing footsteps in the stacks, she raised her eyebrows. “Some one still here?” she asked in surprise.
“One of the rangers,” Judy said.
“Well, don’t let him hold you up,” Miss Leonard advised her, and Judy laughed.
“Don’t worry, he won’t,” she said cheerfully as she settled behind the desk with both eyes glued on the clock, and Miss Leonard vanished, chuckling.
One minute to go. Half a minute. Nine! Judy banged three card drawers shut in rapid succession. That ought to do it, she thought with satisfaction.
It did. Ranger Wade dutifully reappeared with a book clutched in his hand and strode over to the desk.
“Anything in the regulations against my taking out another?” he asked. “You brought me three yesterday.”
“Nothing at all,” Judy said briskly, “the quota’s four. If you’ll just sign the cards, I’ll check it right out.”
But when he handed her the Nature Guide to Reptiles and Amphibians, she was annoyed again. Only this time it was herself she wanted to kick. She had meant to stick that away in the bookmobile at lunch hour for her snake-minded cub.
“Isn’t this a little elementary for you?” she asked in her best professional tone. “I was thinking of taking it over to a cub scout in the Park.”
“To the towhead with the grin?” the ranger asked. “He’s the one I’m getting it for. He’s working on a reptile badge.”
“Oh,” Judy said, and did another mental about-face. If she’d had any brains, she’d have known yesterday. This was a man she had to work with all summer! “Then if you’re the ranger who’s taking those kids on for nature badges, you’d better show me what books you want me to bring over there. Besides, I promised that towhead two snake books. Just wait till I find a pad and you can come pick them out for me.”
She rummaged hastily in the top desk drawer, and Ranger Wade looked up at the clock. “My ears are going back on me,” he announced. “I thought you said I had to be out at nine o’clock sharp!”
“Under normal circumstances,” Judy said calmly as she steered him toward the stacks. “But these aren’t normal. Once you get back in Junior’s clutches, you’ll probably never show up again. I’m surprised he let you out tonight.”
“Junior,” the ranger repeated, puzzled. “Junior who?”
“The slithering serpent,” Judy explained. “That pine snake or whatever you called him. How is he, by the way?”
“Doing as well as could be expected considering the scare you gave him,” Ranger Wade retorted, and Judy hoisted storm signals again.
The ranger, however, refused to be intimidated. “Look,” he said plaintively, “why don’t you declare a truce? I practically never carry serpents coiled around my middle. We could even go fifty-fifty: I forgive you for picking on Junior and me, and you forgive us for existing. Then we could go eat lobster rolls in peace and practice first names. After all, we have to work together.”
He sounded so absurd that Judy laughed in spite of herself. Maybe he wasn’t
