by Chant, Zoe
"WE HELP OTHER PEOPLE!" the kids bellowed, then screamed in delighted satisfaction as the dragon's phone roared in triumphant agreement.
"Great! Okay, the dragon librarian says everybody back to the kids' section now, now go, shoo shoo shoo!" The dragon pulled its head off, revealing a sweaty, laughing Sarah, who jolted guiltily when she saw Matthew. Piles of children went running by him, returning to their stated area. He stood where he was, a little afraid to move, swaying with the momentary impacts of small bodies misjudging distance and making contact as they crashed by him, as Sarah called, "Sorry, these are Library Day Care hours and sanity rarely prevails!"
"Library...day care...?" Matthew edged forward cautiously once the kids were piled in their area, playing, reading, and sacking out on bean bags. "I didn't know there was one?"
"One of my bright ideas," Sarah said cheerfully. "The older kids go to school early, you know? And trying to get the little ones herded and everything, and so many people have limited incomes, and I thought, why not just open up the library a little early? I've been doing it for a couple of years now."
"As a dragon."
"I have a wide variety of terrifying monsters," Sarah replied with her nose in the air. "Don't put limits on me, mister."
Matthew laughed. "Right. And also maybe don't show up for work early?"
"That's up to you, of course. I'll give you a key to the employee entrance, though, so you don't have to wade your way through Heroes vs Monsters every morning."
"Tell me, do monsters manage to get their morning coffee before terrorizing the heroes?"
"Oh, almost never," Sarah said wistfully, before going behind the check-out counter to take her dragon costume off. "I usually get one around mid-afternoon, if I'm lucky. I have to survive on adrenaline and sheer willpower before then."
"I don't think I could," Matthew said in admiration. "What's your poison? I'll go get us both something. If you'll tell me where the nearest or best coffee shop in town is, at least."
"Mmmm. Coffeeeeee. If you go to Maid Marion's and get me a single shot mocha with extra chocolate I'll love you forever."
Do it! Matthew's bear said, eagerly enough that Matt laughed at it, as much as Sarah. "That, while flattering, seems a little over the top."
"I don't know, last night you were trusting me with your life over a bowl of chili. It seems about proportional. Maid Marion's is down the block about five minutes, it's just a coffee cart, but it's the best coffee on this side of Virtue. And I promise I'll be a librarian, not a dragon, when you get back." Sarah waved the dragon head at him, and Matthew, grinning, went to buy coffee.
* * *
The sound Sarah made when he brought her back the mocha was worth an hour-long trek through the snow, Matthew reckoned, never mind a five minute walk up the street on a pleasant summer morning. After a couple of grateful slurps, she said, "I have to wrangle the kids into their reading hour," regretfully, and put the coffee down to do just that.
They responded to her like sheep to a herd dog, settling down just as a volunteer came in to do the reading. Sarah said, "I'll be in back with Matthew, our new archivist," and the woman waved a greeting as they headed into the back.
"That's Rachel," Sarah informed him. "She does voice over work for cartoons, so she's the best reader we've ever had for story hour. They'll be mesmerized for the next forty minutes, so hopefully I can get you started on this mess...."
Although the archives room was really just a back room of the library, nothing with specially controlled humidity or anything, 'mess' did not describe it in the least. Boxes were tidily stacked on shelves, neatly labeled, and organized by collection. Matthew actually stopped at the door, looking down the staff-only hallway like he might find an actual disaster waiting for him somewhere else. "I thought you needed help!"
"It's only promising on the surface," Sarah said. "Inside each box is its own particular horror. For example." She pulled a box off the shelves, saying, "Mabs just donated this and a bunch of other stuff. It's from her great-aunt, who was about 97 when she died, and kept journals and clippings and everything about Virtue for most of her life." She pulled the lid off dramatically, as if preparing for a reveal of pure chaos.
The box was filled with tidily stacked journals, each of which had the date span on both the spine and the front. Sarah stared at them a moment, then at Matthew, who tried not to laugh. "Okay," she said, "okay, maybe this box wasn't a good one to start with."
Matthew did laugh, unable to help himself. "Let's say you're trying to start me off easy. You wouldn't want to overwhelm the new archivist with an impossible pile of work."
Sarah's gaze brightened into laughter, too. "Right. That's it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Look, it does get worse, I promise...." She pulled another box off the shelves, and in her defense, the paperwork in that one was much less organized. "Like this," she said in a tone that wasn't so much helpless as wearily grim. "A lot of this is newspaper clippings that we don't need, because we've got an actual archive of the local paper going back to the broadsheets. But there are personal photos and maybe letters buried in there that need to be found and cataloged..."
"Right." Matt took the box, smiling. "I do have some idea of what's supposed to happen with archive materials, you know."
Sarah wrinkled her whole face in an adorable acknowledgement. "Right, right, I know you know, I just..."
"You're used to doing it all yourself." Matt, hoping he was reading Sarah's personality correctly, said, "Shoo! Shoo! Let someone else do the work for a while."
To his relief and delight, her face smoothed into smiles. "Right. I'll try. In fact, I've got to go over to the sheriff's office to check up on how things are going with the development, so I'll get totally out of your hair for a while. That'll probably help us both."
"Probably. Except—" It was Matthew's turn to screw up his whole face. "Except...can I come with you? It's not that I'm trying to skip work! It's just...you've just been introducing me to people, so I thought..." Mostly he thought he didn't want to spend a single minute away from Sarah's side if he could help it, but he wasn't sure what she would think if he said that aloud.
It wasn't, after all, like he was staying in Virtue, and having a weirdly clingy short-term boyfriend might not be her style.
Sarah's smile flashed. "Sure. Everybody wants to meet you anyway."
A nervous jolt went through Matthew. "They do? Why?"
"You're the new kid in a small town." Sarah winked. "Everybody's already been talking about you for weeks. Might as well show them the real deal."
CHAPTER SEVEN
People walked in Virtue, if they could. Not in the winter, when there could be two or three feet of snow on the ground, but the rest of the year, if they lived or worked in the town center, they walked. It was one of the advantages to living in a place old enough to have been settled before the Europeans had realized how much space they had available to them in the new world. Virtue had been built with people and horses in mind, not vehicles, and people needed to be able to walk across town easily.
So they walked to the sheriff's office, with Sarah pointing out landmarks. "Over there is Kate's Cafe, they do lunches, and up there around the corner, you can't see it, is the bar I told you about, the one somebody just bought and is reopening, that side of the square is where Mabs is going to put her massage therapy studio but I'm not sure which storefront, this is the best toy store in town, their family has been hand-making toys here since the early nineteenth century..."
Matthew paused to look in the toy store window, his gaze so delighted Sarah didn't mind lingering. There were trucks and trains and dolls, but Sarah's favorites among the toys were innumerable carved animals. "I love the bears," she said to Matt, who gave her a genuinely startled look. "Well, look at them! They look so sure of themselves. Whether they're angry or sleeping, they just look like they're good with who they are."
"And you?"
"Am I good with who I am? Yeah, I am, b
ut look at them. They just...bear. That's what they do. Nothing more, nothing less. I'm always running around doing a thousand things."
"Well, maybe that's what Sarahs do. Bears bear, Sarahs run around doing a thousand things."
"I suppose I'd have to take a poll of all Sarahs. C'mon, the sheriff's office is right up there."
"The toy store is next to the sheriff's office," Matt said with deadpan disbelief, and Sarah laughed.
"To be fair, most of the businesses and main political offices in town are built around the square. Courthouse," she said, pointing toward the clock-topped building that dominated the square, "sheriff's office next to it, city council offices on the other side, church across from it, all the oldest businesses around the perimeter. There are more businesses along Main Street, and some along Church Street, but they start mixing with residences on Church Street especially, and—I'm rambling."
"How did the library end up around the corner up there?"
"It started in the square," Sarah admitted, "but about seventy years ago they decided to invest in a purpose-built library that would serve the community better. One of the old town families had a field around the corner there that they donated. It was a big deal when it opened."
"Old town families, huh?"
"Ooooh yeah," Sarah said, hurrying so she could open the sheriff's office door for Matthew, in exchange for him holding the diner door for her last night. "Virtue's lousy with families descended from the original settlers. They still have a lot of the money and businesses in this town, and some of them are really stand-offish blue-blood types. My friend Jake, he's the guy Mabs is gonna marry, his family is one of the old ones, although he's the last one and I guess maybe they weren't rich three hundred years ago, 'cause they're not now, either. Did you know the richest families in Florence have been the richest families there for seven hundred years? So much for trickle-down economics."
"I did not know that," Matthew said, amazed, as he hurried past Sarah into the sheriff's office. "How do you know that?"
"I read it a few years ago. Sheriff, hi, this is Matthew Rojas. You might have seen him at the protest yesterday? He's the archivist I've got for the month. Matt—is Matt okay, or do you prefer Matthew?—this is Sheriff Brown."
"Matt's fine. Nice to meet you, Sheriff." Matthew smiled and shook the sheriff's hand.
Sheriff Brown—a tall man whom Sarah had always thought looked like a cowboy, despite him never wearing any cowboy-like clothes in her memory—gave Matthew a pleasant smile before turning to Sarah. "Let me guess. You're just happening by to check up on whether there's been any movement on stopping that development for good."
"Am I that transparent?"
"Do you really have to ask? As it happens, there's no motion on it yet, exactly, but Judge Owens was by a few minutes ago and said she wanted to talk to you about it. I can call her."
"She knows where to find me anyway, but sure. Can I show Matthew the cells?"
"He's not seven," the sheriff said. "He might not be as impressed with them as you were."
Matthew, bemused, said, "Do you usually give newcomers a tour of the local jail? Is it to warn us to stay out of trouble? Does it work?"
"Worked on me," Sarah said.
"You were a law-abiding child at heart anyway," Sheriff Brown told her. "Not like Jake. I never actually arrested him, but Lord, that kid liked to find trouble. Go on, if you want to show off the town jail." He nodded them toward the back of the office, and Matthew, obviously amused, followed Sarah down the hall.
"Jake who's marrying Mabs was a troublemaker, have I got that connection right? Why are you showing me the jail?"
"Because I was very impressed with it when I was seven," Sarah admitted. "It's a little more institutional now, but when I was a kid—"
"Oh," Matt said, stopping in the door to the cell area. "Oh, I see."
"See?" Sarah stepped aside, grinning wildly.
The Virtue jail, which didn't see a lot of traffic, had barely changed in the two centuries since it had been built. Massive, ancient oak doors, lined with iron spikes, hung on tremendous hinges. Diamond-shaped windows, lined with iron, let light through, and Matthew, as if against his will, went to peek through one. Sarah went to look through the other, even though she'd done it at least a dozen times in her life. The interiors of the two cells were oak, too, and each had one narrow bunk that folded up against the wall. Large back windows, also lined with iron, but criss-cross barred, made both cells strangely light and airy, for jail cells. "The windows are new," Sarah said. "They put them in a hundred and twenty years ago."
Matthew laughed. "'New.'"
Sarah grinned at him. "Yeah. And that door," she said, pointing to one in the wall, "leads directly to the courthouse through a spooky torch-lit tunnel." She paused. "Well, it was spooky and torch-lit back in the day. There are electric lights now, but they've still got the sconces. Honestly, one of my childhood goals was to get arrested and be marched from the jail to the courthouse, but Sheriff Brown isn't wrong. I'm basically law-abiding. Anyway, it's cool and I like showing it to people."
"I take it that's the only way these rooms see much traffic?" Matthew asked as they headed back into the main office.
"Some drunk-and-disorderlies, but yeah, mostly it's a pretty peaceful little community. Although, I don't know, Sheriff, are you going to cram all of us into the jail if we get arrested protesting?"
"Well, first there'd have to be an active protest going on, and second, I'd have to arrest you, and third, as long as you're peaceful on public land, I don't see any need to do that," the sheriff said as a brisk, roundish woman in her late fifties swept into the office. "Here you go, Judge Owens. I pinned her down long enough for you to talk to her."
"All you had to do was lock her in the cell," the judge said. "She'd have been thrilled. Hi, Sarah. And you must be the new archivist. Karen Owens, I'm the judge here in Virtue."
"Matt Rojas." Matthew shook her hand and the judge nodded.
"Nice to meet you. Sarah, I'm wondering if I can steal your archivist."
"No," Sarah said much too loudly. "He's mine and I'm not sharing." Everyone, including her, laughed, but somewhat to her dismay, Sarah realized she kind of meant it. She didn't want to share Matthew Rojas. She didn't want anybody else to catch his eye, or more importantly, for him to catch anyone else's.
Not that Judge Owens, married for 36 years and the mother of six, was very likely to actually run off with the town's temporary archivist. Sarah, trying to sound like she'd been light-hearted and kidding, said, "No, of course, Judge. What can we do for you?"
"I'm looking for the town charter. The historical society is supposed to have the original public copy, but I've been through the whole premises and I cannot find it." Judge Owens snapped the words off, clearly annoyed. "We have copies of it, but the original is our best line of defense against the developers. It dates back to the royal decree for the settlers here to have this land, and has been updated with state and federal acknowledgments since. I know there's a lot of undocumented material in the archives, and I'm hoping you can prioritize looking for the charter. It must have ended up in there during the move."
"The move," Matthew echoed. "The move from the old library to the new one? Seventy years ago?"
Admiration swam in Sarah again. Matthew listened. There was never such a sexy thing in the world as a man who listened.
Even Judge Owens looked impressed. "That's right. The library used to be housed in what's now the historical society building, just up the street, and I suppose when the library got moved, so did the town charter. It's not like we have a regular need for it."
"You know you didn't even have to ask," Sarah said to the judge, who gave her a rather dry look in return.
"I know you'll help, but if I didn't ask you wouldn't know how to."
Sarah opened and shut her mouth while Matthew, the traitor, snickered.
"We need the original, though," the judge went on. "The oldest surveys, the on
es that laid out Virtue's boundaries and its protectorate area, are going to give us the most leverage."
"Even though they're probably not as exact?"
"Because they're not as exact. They grant Virtue the largest swath of land, and we want to use that to our advantage. Also," and the judge's blue eyes suddenly sparkled wickedly, "they're signed and stamped by George III, and even Americans get nervous about messing with documents signed by monarchs. If we can find the original sealed charter, the emotional impact is incredibly powerful."
Sarah raised her eyebrows at Matthew. "Looks like we have our work cut out for us."
"Honestly," Matt said, "this is already turning out to be a much more exciting summer job than I'd anticipated. I can't wait."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sarah, having an actual library to run, left Matthew alone in the archival room for most of the afternoon, only sticking her head in around two to say, "I'm going for coffee. Can I get you something?"
"Espresso macchiato, please?"
"Ooh," he heard her say as the door closed behind her, "a man who likes his coffee strong but tiny. I dig it."
He was still giggling over that when she came back with his coffee fifteen minutes later. Giggling, which wasn't at all manly or dignified, but giggling anyway, because that had just been really, really cute, and he loved it. Sarah's eyebrows rose to find a giggling archivist in her back room, but he couldn't figure out how to explain himself without sounding ridiculous, so he only grinned and said, "Thanks."
"You're welcome. Any luck so far?" Sarah gestured at the—
—at the absolute mess he'd made of the archives room, if Matt were to be totally honest with himself. He'd spent most of the morning moving all the newest collections to one side of the room, gradually unearthing material that obviously dated from before the 1970s. If the library had been moved into this building seventy years earlier, he still had another twenty years' worth of stuff to move before he was in any danger of finding what he was looking for, but, "It's a start," he offered. "I think I'll at least get the oldest stuff out from the lowest, darkest, farthest reaches of the stacks by this evening."