href="#u3a531932-8545-5b79-8d96-3c564d7f4580">9
All our yesterdays neatly shelved, time catalogued in drawers: News grows brittle and yellow under the library, in catacombs of paper.
The killer had learned that the Snow County Gazette had for more than a century stored their dead issues here in the subbasement, two stories under the town square. They called it a “priceless archive of local history.” Preserved for the ages in the Gazette morgue were the details of Girl Scout bake sales, school-board elections, and zoning battles over the intent of Sugar Time Donuts to expand the size of its operation.
Every issue from 1950 forward could be viewed on microfiche. When your research led you to earlier dates, you were supposed to fill out a requisition form for hard copies of the Gazette; a staff member would oversee your perusal of the newspaper.
If you were a person who shot librarians for no reason, standard procedures were of no concern to you. The maniac prowled the archives and took what he wanted to a study table. He handled the yellowing newsprint with no more consideration for its preservation than he would have shown for the most current edition of USA Today.
He had parked Lorrie Lynn Hicks and me in a pair of chairs at the farther end of the enormous room in which he worked. We were not close enough to see what articles in the Gazette interested him.
We sat under a barrel-vaulted ceiling, under a double row of inverted torchieres that cast a dusty light acceptable only to those scholars who had lived in a time when electricity was new and the memory of oil lamps still fresh from childhood.
With another set of handcuffs, our captor had linked our wrist shackles to a backrail of one of the chairs on which we were perched.
Because not all the archives were contained in this one room, he paid repeated visits to an adjacent chamber, leaving us alone at times. His absences afforded us no chance to escape. Chained together and dragging a chair, we could move neither quickly nor quietly.
“I’ve got a nail file in my purse,” Lorrie whispered.
I glanced down at her cuffed hand next to mine. A strong but graceful hand. Elegant fingers. “Your nails look fine,” I assured her.
“Are you serious?”
“Absolutely. I like the shade of your polish. Looks like candied cherries.”
“It’s called Glaçage de Framboise.”
“Then it’s misnamed. It’s not a shade of any raspberries I’ve ever worked with.”
“You work with raspberries?”
“I’m a baker, going to be a pastry chef.”
She sounded slightly disappointed. “You look more dangerous than a pastry chef.”
“Well, I’m biggish for my size.”
“Is that what it is?”
“And bakers tend to have strong hands.”
“No,” she said, “it’s your eyes. There’s something dangerous about your eyes.”
This was adolescent wish fulfillment of the purest kind: being told by a beautiful woman that you have dangerous eyes.
She said, “They’re direct, a nice shade of blue—but then there’s something lunatic about them.”
Lunatic eyes are dangerous eyes, all right, but not romantic dangerous. James Bond has dangerous eyes. Charles Manson has lunatic eyes. Charles Manson, Osama bin Laden, Wile E. Coyote. Women stand in line for James Bond, but Wile E. Coyote can’t get a date.
She said, “The reason I mentioned the nail file in my purse is because it’s a metal file, sharp enough at one end to be a weapon.”
“Oh.” I felt inane, and I couldn’t blame my dunderheadedness entirely on her stupidity-inducing good looks. “He took your purse,” I noted.
“Maybe I can get it back.”
Her handbag stood on the table where he sat reading old issues of the Snow County Gazette.
The next time he left the room, we could stand as erect as a chair on our backs would allow and hobble in tandem and as fast as possible toward her purse. The noise would most likely draw him back before we reached our goal.
Or we could make our way across the room with stealth foremost in mind, which would require us to move as slowly as Siamese twins negotiating a minefield. Judging by the average length of time that he had thus far been absent when extracting additional issues from the files, we would not reach the purse before he returned.
As if my thoughts were as clear to her as the lunacy in my eyes, she said, “That’s not what I had in mind. I’m thinking if I claim a female emergency, he’ll let me have my purse.”
Female emergency.
Maybe it was the shock of living out my grandfather’s prediction or maybe it was the persistent memory of the librarian being shot, but I couldn’t get my mind around the meaning of those two words.
Aware of my befuddlement, as she seemed to be aware of every electrical current leaping across every synapse in my brain, Lorrie said, “If I tell him I’m having my period and I desperately need a tampon, I’m sure he’ll do the gentlemanly thing and give me my purse.”
“He’s a murderer,” I reminded her.
“But he doesn’t seem to be a particularly rude murderer.”
“He shot Lionel Davis in the head.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s incapable of courtesy.”
“I wouldn’t bet the bank on it,” I said.
She squinched her face in annoyance and still looked darned good. “I hope to God you’re not a congenital pessimist. That would be just too much—held hostage by a librarian killer and shackled to a congenital pessimist.”
I didn’t want to be disagreeable. I wanted her to like me. Every guy wants a good-looking woman to like him. Nevertheless, I could not accept her characterization of me.
“I’m not a pessimist. I’m a realist.”
She sighed. “That’s what every pessimist says.”
“You’ll see,” I said lamely. “I’m not a pessimist.”
“I’m an indefatigable optimist,” she informed me. “Do you know what that means—indefatigable?”
“The words baker and illiterate aren’t synonyms,” I assured her. “You’re not the only reader and thinker in Snow Village.”
“So what does it mean—indefatigable?”
“Incapable of being fatigued. Persistent.”
“Tireless,” she stressed. “I’m a tireless optimist.”
