Bait and Witch

by Angela M. Sanders

  I relaxed. “Horrible,” I said, certain she’d like the direction this was going.

  “That’s life. You work your hind end off for a community, and they go and bulldoze your life’s work before your eyes.”

  “Couldn’t be worse,” I agreed. “Positively heinous.”

  “Couldn’t be worse unless you’re trapped at gunpoint by an evil man,” Roz said.

  “Or you confess your love, and the object of your affection runs off like someone put a rocket in his shorts.”

  Roz snorted, then smiled.

  I smiled, too, then laughed. Then I laughed so hard that my throat seized and I teared up. Roz got weepy, too, and hugged me, smelling of roses and baby powder. Rodney popped through the cat door and flattened himself against the opposite wall, which made me cry even harder.

  Finally, I pulled away and blew my nose on a paper towel. “I’m sorry, Roz. I should have minded my own business. You were happy, and I wrecked it.”

  “No, you didn’t. I needed someone to push me to take a risk. I spent years putting my emotions into novels instead of giving them air. Now maybe I’ll be able to move on.”

  “Whatever happens,” I said, “I want the best for you. You’re wonderful. A man with any sense would adore you.”

  With that, the kitchen door opened, and Lyndon entered, carrying the hugest bouquet I’d ever seen.

  * * *

  This seemed like a good time to slip into my office and give Roz and Lyndon privacy. Between the moments I sidled to the door and pressed it closed, Roz gasped repeatedly, but didn’t reach for her fan.

  I checked the clock and texted Sam. At library. All fine here, I tapped.

  Great, he texted back immediately. Not exactly an armload of exotic blossoms, but I’d take what I could get.

  Then I ripped open the envelope my old boss had sent me. She’d included a note on Library of Congress stationery, driving a stake into my heart. How I missed that place, even if my job had been limited to cataloguing. Still, what fascinating documents to catalogue.

  “Hi, Josie,” the note read. “We all miss you. I’ve always appreciated you as a steady, reliable worker, but now that you’re gone, I realize how much we’ve lost. I’m so sorry how things turned out. Please keep in touch. Enclosed you’ll find the materials you requested. Sincerely, Lori.”

  I fished a gray flash drive from the envelope. I glanced at the door. Was it safe to open it yet? I didn’t want to take the chance of interrupting a love connection. I plugged the flash drive into my laptop and called up its contents.

  My boss had named the folder simply “witch narratives” and had included some documents plus a few sound files.

  I clicked on one labeled “Appalachia 1942.”

  “Folks used to warn that Aunt Pretty was a witch,” a woman’s voice said with a rich country twang.

  I relaxed into my chair. How I loved these oral histories. I’d spent more time than I should have listening to them when I might have been slapping on subject and collection codes.

  “Now, I don’t know, but she did have folks coming to her back door late at night, and she did have that birthmark.”

  My own birthmark twinged. I pressed it with an index finger and turned up my laptop’s volume.

  “Tell me about her,” the interviewer said. “Did you ever ask her about being a witch?”

  “Ask her?” the voice replied. “Nobody asked her nothing. But once in a while, if you was working with her, say, she might tell you something.”

  “Such as?”

  “She might start humming a bit. She might tell you something like the things you love, they’re the things that trap your magic.”

  “Explain that to me.”

  I flinched a bit at the interviewer’s staid tone, but it didn’t seem to dampen the interviewee’s responses. I hung on her every word.

  “She told me, for instance, that I like babies. That’s true enough. I do love babies. Anyone’s babies, not just my own. Would I be a nursemaid otherwise? She told me the babies could talk to me, sure as I’m talking to you.”

  “You mean babies old enough to speak?”

  “No, I mean nursing babies. She said if I paid attention, they would tell me things.”

  “Did they?”

  “Once I was holding a little girl with hair as red as blood, and I was tempting her to eat. You know, sometimes those babies don’t want to take the breast.”

  “Go on.”

  “Finally, she was eating real good when I heard clear as day the words, ‘Take care of Jesse.’ Jesse was our horse.” She lowered her voice. “The voices are all around us, you know, talking all the time. We just can’t hear them.”

  As the narrator prodded her, I reflected on my own situation. I understood. I’d always loved books, and they became the conduit for my magic. They talked to me. Or, at least, they did. Or used to.

  I clicked to the next file. It was a song, low and melodious, punctuated with a woman asking someone to “put your money down.” Zora Neale Hurston, Lori’s printout said, recorded by a WPA worker during the Depression. Amazing.

  I should have been getting the library ready for the day, but I couldn’t help opening one more file. This one was scratchy and hard to make out.

  “It’s a gift to be a witch,” a woman’s voice said. Her accent placed her in the rural South. “You can’t be selfish with this gift, or it will sour and poison you. No, I was wrong to call it a gift. It’s a responsibility. If you’re chosen, you must respond. It’s the rooster’s job to wake you when the sun rises, and the honeybee has to spread pollen, or the apple trees won’t fruit. Same thing with us witches. We’re a quiet part of the working of the world.”

  Maybe magic was a public trust, but my experience showed it could be a public hazard, too. I paused the oral history. I wanted to hear more, but not now. The library would open any minute, and I had a job to do.

  The books counted on me.

  * * *

  That afternoon, the oral histories I’d listened to played in my mind as I sorted files. What could those documents teach me now, now that I’d tamped down my magic? I had to rely on my brain these days. I’d let Richard White slip through my fingers last night. Was there something I knew that could help bring him into custody?

  When Richard wasn’t after information to help the senator’s staff research whatever bill he was drafting, I remembered he’d ask Anton to pull special files for him.

  I leaned back in my chair and clasped my hands on my lap. What were the files? Anton made a special point of mentioning it, because it was so unusual. I’d never done any work directly for Richard or the senator, but I’d seen him perusing the stacks, something congressional staff rarely did.

  I picked up the phone and dialed my old boss. She answered on the first ring.

  “Josie, I really shouldn’t be talking to you. I was taking a risk making all those copies to send.” She lowered her voice. “How are you?”

  I couldn’t really say “fine.” “Thank you for sending the package. I really appreciate it. I see you even mailed it at your own expense.”

  “I couldn’t let it go through the mail room.” She cleared her throat. “The patron relations team is stopping by for a meeting in a few minutes.”

  I got her hint to get down to business. “This is important, or I wouldn’t have called.”

  “What is it?”

  I imagined her, a finger tapping the desk, an eye on the little crystal clock she kept near her computer. I closed my eyes and went ahead with my request. “Can you get me Richard White’s circulation records for the past year?”

  Privacy was a big deal among librarians. If I’d been at work, with a few keystrokes I could have accessed his records myself, but I never could have shared them.

  “You know I can’t do that.” Now she was whispering, even though no one could have heard her. “You’re not even an employee anymore.”

  “But I am. I took two weeks of vacation, remember? It�
��s not up until the day after tomorrow.”

  “After which your job—and you—vanish from the payroll.”

  “For now I’m still an employee.” I scooted forward on my kitchen chair as if she was across the table. “Richard White was here.”

  “What?” Her fingers drummed rapid-fire.

  “Here in Wilfred. The night before last he trapped me in a room in the library at gunpoint. He wanted me to write a confession that I’d never overheard anything, then he was going to kill me and make it out as a suicide.”

  “No kidding.”

  I gave the news a moment to sink in. “He’s on the run now. I thought if he had an interest in a particular place, say, it might help the FBI find him.”

  “Why doesn’t the FBI request the records directly?”

  She was going to need to massage those fingertips when the phone call ended. “You know how long that would take. Every minute counts right now. They’ve tracked him toward Seattle.” I bit my lip and waited.

  “All right,” she said finally. “I’ll look up his records. But I’m not emailing you anything, and I won’t give you titles. I’ll just see if there’s something suggestive. The rest the FBI will have to request themselves.”

  “Thank you,” I said, letting out my breath at the same time.

  Lori’s keyboard was silent, but I knew she was typing, and I could picture the screens she scrolled through.

  “Here it is,” she said. “Lots of history. A political thriller. But this . . . oh.”

  “Yes?”

  “Boating. He’s checked out a few books on sailing and two how-to’s on preparing for long trips. You might—” Lori’s voice rose and turned cheerful. “Come on in, I was just finishing up this call. Bye, Mom. Hope your knee heals up soon.”

  She hung up. I didn’t care—she’d given me the information I needed. At any point along the coast, Richard could easily skip to an island, or even Canada.

  I reached for the phone Sam had given me. “Look for a boat,” I said when Sam answered.

  He sounded distracted. “Boat? Oh, for Richard White?”

  “Who else?”

  “Something isn’t right with Craig Burdock’s testimony. I keep thinking—”

  “Listen, Richard White has done a lot of reading on sailing. He hasn’t shown up at the Seattle airport, has he?”

  “No.” Now he was back to normal. “Nice lead. I’ll pass it along right now.”

  I’d done it. I’d given the FBI information I felt confident would help them find Richard. And I’d done it all with my brain. No magic at all.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Darla was as good as her word. Over the next day, she’d filled the library’s kitchen with pies. She’d also dropped off several bundles of flattened bankers boxes, which I’d been filling with library records stored away in the house’s old laundry.

  She’d kept up a uniformly cheerful attitude, telling patrons things like, “What a wonderful library this has been. Remember when Roberta had the idea of turning Wilfred into a Bavarian town and did all that research? I swear, she spent the better part of the early 1970s in the parlor.”

  Darla even made a point of patting my back a few times through the day, saying, “They’ll find that dirty Richard White, don’t you worry. I have a good feeling about it.”

  I caught her once, though, leaning against the doorway of one of the upstairs bedrooms, the one with the natural history collection. She was having a memory of her own, and it was clearly bittersweet.

  She wasn’t the only one mourning the library. I’d heard scores of stories from Wilfredians who trooped through the rooms for the last time and told me how they met their wives looking for a cookbook in the upstairs bathroom or used to sit under an oak tree outside and read Agatha Christie.

  At the same time, Roz had found a book upstairs on the language of flowers, and she was busy dissecting Lyndon’s bouquet.

  “Carnations can mean ‘fascination,’ ” she told me. “Or ‘divine love.’ Which one do you think he meant?”

  The bouquet was beautiful yet otherworldly with its queer mix of blossoms. Roz had told me that Lyndon had pressed the bouquet into her arms and taken off. No wonder he had disappeared for a while. It would have taken time to gather lilies of the valley and blueberry branches in October, just to name a few of the bouquet’s components. Roz was right—Lyndon had meant to tell her something with them. Meanwhile, he was nowhere to be found.

  Neither was Sam. I’d continued to send my hourly texts along with the good night and I’m up now messages, and he responded with curt OKs.

  Tonight was the library’s grand closing party. Darla cheerfully called it a “celebration,” but Mrs. Garlington’s continuing dirges on the organ upstairs made the town’s real emotion clear.

  At 6 p.m. sharp, Ilona’s heels clacked through the atrium, and Sita and Ruff Waters, the library’s buyers, followed. Today Ilona wore a white jacket with blue vertical stripes over a short white skirt with horizontal stripes. The ensemble formed a sort of optical illusion, and I had to blink after looking at her. A few days ago, I would have scoffed at her outfit. Now I imagined her getting ready in her mother’s dingy bathroom, and my feelings softened.

  Sita and Ruff Waters looked as if they’d been lifted from a photo in a 1970s book about communes. Classy communes, I amended, noting Sita’s chandelier earrings dangling what looked like real rubies.

  “It’s a sweet old building,” she said. “You hardly ever see them in such good condition, except as museums.”

  “Maybe you’d like to keep some of the light fixtures for the retreat center?” Ilona said. “Or sell them? I can hook you up with a demolition team that specializes in salvage.”

  Ilona pushed past me to the windows and lifted the curtain to let in a quickly darkening twilight. “The view is unbeatable. If you take out a few of those oaks, you’ll be able to see the river.”

  “What happened there?” Ruff Waters pointed toward a window boarded up after my magical disaster.

  “Accident. Hoodlums, you know. The retreat center will be good for the town,” Ilona said.

  The three of them left the room without even acknowledging my presence. Roz, sorting books behind me, said, “Orange lilies, oleander, and nuts.”

  “What?”

  “That’s the bouquet I’d give Ilona. It means dislike, caution, and stupidity.”

  Upstairs, the organ started in on a mournful version of “Ain’t We Got Fun?” The tearful vibrato rattled the windows. I would have asked Mrs. Garlington to turn down the volume, but what was the point?

  “You should follow them,” Roz said. “Make sure Ilona doesn’t pinch the doorknobs.”

  I rolled my eyes at her. It was depressing enough without having to listen to them exclaim about how nice things would be in Wilfred when the library was demolished.

  “Seriously,” Roz said. “Maybe they have questions.”

  “About what?” I said, but rose anyway.

  I found them upstairs in the business collection. Here, Mrs. Garlington’s flourishes on the organ were almost deafening. It didn’t seem to bother the student at the desk near the window. He was examining a chart of constellations and dragging his finger from star to star while he took notes. I pretended to straighten some old shorthand manuals.

  “This will be the level of the rooftop lounge,” Ilona said. “The view from here is even better.” She angled her way past the desk to the window and in the process nearly knocked the student’s book to the ground.

  “Lovely.” Sita Waters turned to the student. “What are you studying?”

  “Astronomy. I’m applying for earth sciences camp,” he said.

  “Very nice.”

  “The application’s not due for another month, but today’s the last day the library will be open.”

  “You can study at the high school in Gaston,” Ilona said.

  “They don’t have these books.”

  The student was likely r
ight. Wilfred had a terrific science collection. The school could request books like them through interlibrary loan, but it was so much easier to browse through shelves and let it spark further investigation. I’d done the same thing as a girl. Stumbling over a book on Walt Whitman had led me to the history of the Civil War, which led me to books on nineteenth-century fashion.

  “Josie,” Sita said. “That’s you, right?”

  I nodded and almost dropped Top Tips for Dictaphone I was pretending to examine.

  “Could you move Wilfred’s book collection to the high school? At least some of it?”

  “Their library’s too small. The trustees have already looked into it. Plus, it would all have to be catalogued, and the school doesn’t have the resources.”

  “A shame,” Ruff said.

  “A new library will be built soon enough. Anyway, it’s too loud up here,” Ilona said, eyes shooting daggers at Mrs. Garlington’s back as it swayed on the organ’s bench across the atrium. “Let’s go down to the conservatory.”

  I took the service staircase and came out near the kitchen just as Ilona and the buyers reached the ground floor.

  “What’s going on here?” Ruff said, taking in a table of pies.

  “Party,” Ilona said. “Don’t worry, we’ll clear out before then.”

  “Why?” Darla emerged from the kitchen drying her hands on one of the library’s old cotton dish towels. I supposed those would have to find a home, too. “Why not stay and celebrate? This old house has meant a lot to Wilfred. We want to say good-bye with style.”

  Upstairs, the organ had moved on to a bass-heavy dirge of “La Cucaracha.”

  “We’ll let you celebrate in peace,” Sita said. “We know the library has been important to the town. We hope the retreat center will be equally important. Once it’s open, we’ll throw another party for everyone. Another reason to celebrate.”

  The couple buying the library really did seem nice. They certainly meant well. I touched the banister’s polished wood and ran my finger up the newel post, carved into a fist-sized acorn.

  The group left to check out the conservatory, no doubt to lay out where the retreat center’s parking lot would go. I hoped they wouldn’t disturb the English as a second language class.