Midbury Lake Incident

by Rusch, Kristine Kathryn

  Copyright Information

  The Midbury Lake Incident

  Copyright © 2015 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

  Published by WMG Publishing

  Cover and layout copyright © 2015 by WMG Publishing

  Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

  Cover art copyright © Dimdimich/Dreamstime

  Uncollected Anthology logo art © Tanya Borozenets/Dreamstime

  Uncollected Anthology logo design © Stephanie Writt

  This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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  Mary Beth Wilkins had the most perfect library, until one day, in the middle of June, the library burned down.

  She arrived at the two-hundred-year-old structure to find the roof collapsed, the walls blackened, and the books…well, let’s just say the books were gone, floating away in the clouds of smoke that darkened the early morning sky.

  No one had called her, even though she had always thought of the Midbury Lake Public Library as her library. She was the only librarian, and even though she didn’t own the building—the Town of Midbury Lake did—she treated it like her own, defended it like a precious child, and managed to find funding, even in the dark years of dwindling government support.

  She sat in her ancient Subaru, too shocked to move, not just because the firefighters were still poking out of the smoking building as if they were posing for the cover of next year’s Fire Fighters Calendar, but because of all of the emotions that rose within her.

  Grief wasn’t one of them. Grief would come, she knew. Grief always came, whether you wanted it or not. She had learned that in her previous life—a much more adventurous life, a life lived, her mother would say (and why, why was she thinking of her mother? Mary Beth had banned thoughts of her mother for nearly ten years). No one could avoid grief, but grief came in its own sweet time.

  No, the dominant emotion she was feeling was fury. Fury that no one had called her. Fury that the library—her sanctuary—was gone. Fury that her day—her life—had been utterly destroyed.

  She gripped the leather cover she had placed on the Subaru’s steering wheel, so that her hands would never touch metal or hard plastic, and she made herself take a deep breath.

  Her routines were shattered. Every morning she arrived before six, made coffee, put out the fresh-baked donuts whose tantalizing aroma was, even now, wafting out of the back seat.

  Her assistant, Lynda Sue, would arrive shortly, and then Mary Beth would have to comfort her, since Lynda Sue was prone to dramatics—she had been a theatah majah once, you knoow, deah—and then it would become all about Lynda Sue and the Patrons and the Library and the Funding, and oh, dear, Mary Beth would find herself in the middle of a mainstream maelstrom.

  Too many emotions, including her own.

  She had made a serious mistake, because her morning routine hadn’t been in her control. That meditative hour, before anyone arrived, would happen at the library, in what everyone called the Great Room, which was—had been—a wall of windows overlooking Midbury Lake and the hills beyond.

  Midbury Lake changed with the seasons and sometimes, Mary Beth thought, with her moods. This morning, the lake itself seemed to be ablaze, the reds and oranges reflecting on the rippling water.

  Then she realized that the colors were coming from the sunrise, not from the fire at the library, and she bowed her head.

  When she opened the car door, a new phase of her life would begin, and she would have to make choices.

  It had been so nice not to make choices any more.

  It had been wonderful to be Mary Beth Wilkins, small town librarian.

  She would miss Mary Beth.

  She could never rebuild Mary Beth.

  She would have to become someone new, and becoming someone new always took way too much work.

  ***

  She drove back to her apartment, and parked near the secluded wooded area near the two-story block-long building. She often parked there—at least she had kept up that old habit—and knew all the ways to the building’s back entrance that couldn’t be seen from the street.

  Then she glanced over the back seat of the car. The donuts. That little incompetent clerk at the local donut shop probably wouldn’t remember her, and as usual, Mary Beth had paid cash. She hoped if anyone saw her, they would think they’d seen her earlier than they had or maybe they would confuse the days.

  She hoped. Because she had stopped thinking defensively three years ago. Somehow, she had thought Midbury Lake was too remote, too obscure, too off-the-beaten path for anyone to find her.

  Better yet, she had thought no one remembered her. She had done everything she could to scour herself from the records, and she hadn’t used magic in what seemed like forever, so she wouldn’t leave a trail.

  The donut aroma was too much for her, or maybe she had just become one of those middle-aged women who ate whenever they were stressed. She didn’t care. She reached into the back seat, nudged up the top of the donut box, and took a donut, covering her fingers with granules of sugar.

  She couldn’t fix the library, not without someone noticing.

  She bit into the donut, savoring the mix of sugar and grease and soft, perfect cake. She would miss these donuts. They were special.

  At least she had already picked a new name. She needed to adopt it. Not Mary Beth Wilkins any longer. Now, Victoria Dowspot. Her identification for the new identity was in the apartment. She should have been carrying it. Yet another mistake.

  She also should have been practicing the name in her own mind. She hadn’t done that either. Victoria. Victoria Marie Dowspot.

  Another librarian. The kind of single middle-aged woman no one noticed, even, apparently, when her library burned.

  She swallowed the fury. That was Mary Beth’s fury, not Victoria’s. She needed to keep that in mind.

  Victoria finished the donut, wiped the sugar off her mouth, then sighed. The donuts, comfortable in their box, were just one symbol of all she had to do, how lax she had become.

  She stepped out of the Subaru, then pulled out the donut box, and put it in the trunk. No one would accidentally see them there. And there was nothing else in the car that would directly tie it to her, at least from the perspective of someone who didn’t know her.

  She had learned, three identities ago, to be as cautious about strange little details as possible. Too bad she had gotten so relaxed here in Midbury Lake. She had already made half a dozen mistakes.

  She hoped they weren’t fatal.

  She snuck up the back stairs, stepping around the creaks and groans, and quietly turned the key in her apartment door’s deadbolt. She pushed the door open and slipped inside. Magoo greeted her, concern on his feline face. He was a big orange male, battered when she found him, or, rather, when he found her.

  He had lived through two different identity changes, the only consistent part of her life. She always thanked the universe that librarians and cats went together like hands and gloves. No one thought anything of a librarian who had cat.

  Victoria was just glad she hadn’t brought him to the library of late. That had actually been his idea. He hadn’t liked one of the new patrons, a middle-aged man with an overloaded face—big forehead, small piggy eyes, heavy cheekbones.

  She hadn’t like him either, but unlik
e Magoo, she couldn’t bail on her job.

  Until today, that is. And she would bail because they would think her dead in that fire.

  She just had to do a few things first.

  She had a go-bag in the van she kept in the apartment’s parking area. She paid for the extra space, telling the management the van belonged to her cousin, whom she’d pretended to be more than once. She would use that disguise again today, after she grabbed some food and water for Magoo. Everything else would stay here.

  She wouldn’t mind leaving this apartment. It was dark, especially in the winter, but it was heavily soundproofed and, unlike the library, made of stone.

  Magoo looked at her, his tail drooping. He knew. He hated what was going to come next, but at least he didn’t run away from her.

  She scooped him under one arm and put him in the special cat carrier she had made. It was solid on the inside, but on the outside, it looked like a canvas carryall. And she had spelled it so no one could see a cat inside.

  Magoo made one soft sound of protest, but he went in willingly enough. She put one bag of his dry food in her real carryall, along with two extra cans of his wet food. Then she grabbed two of his toys, the ones he played with the most, and packed them as well.

  Her eyes filled with tears as she looked at the remaining cat toys, scattered on the hard wood floor. The toys were battered and well loved, and she had to leave them behind.

  Funny, how the emotion rose over Magoo’s things, and not her own. She had worked on staying unattached for so long that she didn’t mind leaving her possessions behind. She minded leaving his.

  She stood. She had hoped she could stay in Midbury Lake. After so many years, she had thought she could. But she should have known that disaster would follow her.

  It always did.

  She made herself take a deep breath, then ran a hand over her forehead. She went into the bedroom, smoothed the coverlet on the bed because she didn’t want anyone to think she was a slob, not that it mattered. It wasn’t her after all; it was Mary Beth.

  Then she peered out the bedroom window, with its view of the parking lot. She couldn’t see the Subaru, but the van looked just fine.

  No one else stood in the lot either. So, it was now or never.

  She clenched a fist and focused her ears on the Subaru. Then she slid her right fingernails along her thumb, mimicking the slow opening of a trunk lid. She heard it unlock, and squeal open.

  For the first time, she was happy she had never used rust remover. Sometimes it was the little things that allowed success.

  Always, it was the little things.

  Then she scooped her left hand downward. She could feel the donut box, even though it was far away. She levitated it, seeing it in her mind’s eye, and waited until it was over the trees before igniting it. Then she sent it to the library, as fast as the breeze could take it.

  If anyone saw the burning box, they’d think it sparks or debris from the library fire, or a figment of their imaginations.

  The box arrived, and she lowered it into one of the still burning sections, careful to keep it away from firefighters.

  Then she closed the trunk lid, and leaned on the windowsill.

  Her heart was pounding as if she had run five miles. She had trouble catching her breath. Sweat dripped from her forehead.

  She was out of practice on everything, and that wasn’t good. She really had become complacent.

  And she still had some magic to go before she could quit.

  She wiped off her forehead with the back of her hand, then crouched beside the bed. She removed a locked box with her many identities and two dental models of her mouth.

  Her hand was shaking as she removed one of the dental models. This was the tricky spell, and she was tired from the easy one. She had to make real human teeth out of one of the models. Then she had to send it to the library, and lower it into one of the still burning sections. If there were still-burning sections.

  She had been moving awfully slowly.

  She grabbed the glass of water beside her bed. The glass was smudged. Magoo had probably stuck his little face in it, just so he could touch the water with his tongue.

  Even so, she needed the refreshment, so she drank. The water was warm and stale, and she thought she could taste cat saliva. Probably her overactive imagination.

  She drank the entire glass, then set it down, and squared her shoulders. She held the dental model, squinched her eyes closed, and imagined it as bone, yellowed with age and tarnished with plaque.

  She opened her eyes. She was now holding a mandible instead of a model. It actually looked like someone had ripped teeth from her mouth.

  She shuddered just a little, opened the window six inches and stuck her hand—and the teeth—outside. Then she sent them to the burning library.

  Her mind’s eye showed her that one section still burned. She lowered the teeth there, snapped the mandible in half, and let it fall. It didn’t matter if it hit someone. They wouldn’t know what it was. They would think it was just debris.

  She shut off her mind’s eye for the second time, leaned back, and felt her legs wobble.

  If only she could sit for twenty minutes. But she couldn’t. She had to get out of here before someone remembered her, before someone decided to check up on her.

  That fury rose a third time—no one was thinking of her at all—and then she remembered that it played to her advantage.

  She wiped a shaking hand over her forehead, and turned around.

  That hideous man with the overloaded face was standing in the doorway, holding Magoo with one hand. If anything, the man looked even more menacing than he had in the library.

  And Magoo seemed remarkably calm. He hated being held without having someone support his back feet.

  And he hated this man.

  She held her position, as if she were frozen in fear. Her heart was pounding too hard. She hated it when someone snuck up on her, but that was her fault. She hadn’t retuned her ears.

  Even when she was trying not to be careless, she was being very careless indeed.

  “Making your escape?” the man asked. “You’re a little slow this time, Darcy, aren’t you? Complacent. It trips up escapees every single time.”

  Her heart pounded harder. He used her real name. She stared at Magoo, whose ears were flat.

  Then she made herself swallow against a dry throat.

  “Put him down,” she said, careful not to use Magoo’s name. She didn’t even have to work at making her voice quaver. “He didn’t do anything.”

  “True enough,” the man said. “He isn’t even a real familiar. And even though he’s lived in close proximity to you for—what? a year?—your magic hasn’t rubbed off on him.”

  The caveman’s numbers were wrong. She wasn’t sure if that was deliberate. She wasn’t sure if he had said that to get her to correct him. She wasn’t going to correct him.

  Because Magoo was a familiar, but she had cloaked him long ago. And he had clearly practiced his itty bitty magic more than she had. He had made a doppelganger, and that doppelganger was at least a year old. How often had Magoo used that doppelganger with her, so that he could do whatever it was he did when he didn’t want her to catch him? Enough so that this doppelganger had some heft and a tiny bit of catlike life.

  Good for Magoo, sending the doppelganger out when he heard the caveman come through the door.

  Or was the creature that the man held actually Magoo?

  Her heart rate spiked.

  She was going to have to use her mind’s eye to check, which meant magic, which meant even more doors opening, more people coming for her. Those tears pricked her eyes again.

  “What do you want?” she asked the man, even though she knew.

  “We need you back in Alexandria,” he said.

  How many times had she heard that answer in her nightmares? And for how many years? Ever since she had inherited the library. The real library and all of its knowledge, once though
t lost.

  Her stomach twisted. “And if I don’t go?”

  He raised Magoo—or the Magoo doppelganger—and shook him slightly. The cat made a mew of protest. Unless the man had magicked Magoo, that really was the doppelganger. The actual Magoo would’ve bitten the man’s fingers off.

  “Do you really want to test it?” the man asked.

  She clenched her fists. No, she didn’t want to test it. And no, she didn’t want to deal with the man either, because that would mean fire, and if she somehow set this place on fire, and the library was already burning, then that would draw attention to Mary Beth Wilkins, and Darcy (no, Victoria. She had to think of herself as Victoria) didn’t want any attention ever falling on Mary Beth.

  “What do you get paid if you bring me to Alexandria?” she asked, not willing to say, Bring me back, because that would imply that she had left, and in actuality, she had never been to Alexandria. The library had. The library was born there, and parts of the library died there. Her ancestors managed to save some of it—much of it—during the four different times it burned.

  But they had learned to never, ever put the books back on the shelves, because doing so brought out men like this one. And sometimes started fires.

  She took a deep silent breath, then flashed her mind’s eye for a half second, looking past the man, seeing what his powers were, and seeing if that creature he held was the real Magoo.

  The man had less power than he thought he did, and the creature wasn’t Magoo. Magoo was crouching motionlessly in his carryall.

  She retracted her mind’s eye, but the man had noticed.

  So she stood taller, and let her power thread up. Without planning it, she extended one hand and sent a ball of flame to the man so quickly that he didn’t have time to scream before it engulfed him.

  His mouth opened, then his face melted as his entire body incinerated.

  She stopped the fire before it destroyed him completely. The stench of burning meat and grease filled the air.

  Magoo sneezed.

  The man’s body had toppled to the hardwood floor, and the flames had left a serious scorch mark. She walked over to the body, and poked it with her foot.