Looking For It by Michael Thomas Ford

Author:Michael Thomas Ford
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington Books
Published: 2012-07-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 23

The Cold Falls Public Library had once been a grand building. Now it was a faded, tired, old lady, the victim of a shrinking budget and a decline in interest on the part of the very people she had been built to serve. Still, Simon loved her. Every Monday for the past fifteen years he had arrived there shortly after ten o’clock, carrying the three (or sometimes four) books he’d taken away the previous Monday. These he returned at the library’s enormous wooden front desk before venturing into the stacks in search of new reading material.

Until her death in October, the head librarian had been a woman named Millie St. John. She’d held that post during all the years Simon had been coming to the library. Ancient even to Simon’s aging eyes, Millie had been a small, shriveled woman with the face of an applehead doll and a mind that contained the whole of the universe. Not surprisingly, she’d read voraciously, and on each of Simon’s visits she’d had one or two suggestions as to books he might enjoy. Only rarely had she been mistaken.

Millie had passed away in her sleep. She’d been discovered, according to local legend, with a copy of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying open on her chest. Whether this was or was not true, what was true was that Millie had somehow during her lifetime amassed a small fortune, all of which she’d bequeathed to the library with the stipulation that it be used to renovate the building and pay the salary of her replacement.

Although the renovations had yet to begin, the replacement had been found. Alistair Wainwright had arrived in November from Potterton, Missouri. Not as small as Millie St. John, he was nonetheless not a large man. Compact, Simon had called him when describing him to Russell. Buttoned-down. He wore sweater vests over starched white shirts and oiled his hair. Despite his age (he was perhaps in his early fifties, Simon guessed), he seemed to have stepped out of a 1940s black-and-white film into the real world.

Alistair’s taste in reading material was not as extensive as Millie’s had been. More refined, he favored the classics, where Millie had been far more egalitarian, as likely to recommend the latest John Grisham novel as she was to suggest To Kill a Mockingbird or Cannery Row. Alistair accommodated the tastes of his clientele by purchasing the latest best sellers, but his interest in their reading habits stopped short of encouraging their interests in Anne Rice and Danielle Steel.

Simon had introduced himself to Alistair on his first Monday visit following the new librarian’s arrival. Alistair, looking at the books Simon deposited in the return box (Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers, a volume of Virginia Woolf’s diaries, and a battered copy of Mark Twain’s The Innocents Abroad), had sensed a kindred spirit and marked Simon as someone to watch. Simon, in turn, had been relieved that Millie had not, as he’d feared, been replaced by someone right out

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