A Girl, a Raccoon, and the Midnight Moon

by Karen Romano Young

  “Oh, I get it,” snapped Pearl. “Somewhere funny like that!”

  The cops smiled because Pearl was a bratty kid. But just a kid. “We’ll do what we can,” they told Mom and Bruce, and they finally got professional on their way to the police cars and examined the driveway for tire tracks, but found none except the ones from Ramón’s pickup. “Think he’s got a head in the back?” the pink policeman joked.

  Pearl said, “Ramón wouldn’t take the head! He’s from the library.”

  “Just a joke, young lady,” the mustached policeman said.

  “Not funny,” Bruce said, so Pearl didn’t have to. Bruce waved the police officers away. “Keep us informed,” he said to them, but it was plain that the library was on its own with its vandalism problem.

  1 The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (George Allen & Unwin, 1937). Features hobbits, humanoid creatures that always go barefoot.

  3: AFTER THE SCREAM

  STILL AUG 28

  Mr. Gulliver was the last one to leave the garden, chuckling to himself in a not-nice way. He was a graying, balding, skinny man who always seemed to be wearing brown (even though, as Simon said, his favorite color had to be green, for money), and his expression at the moment was half laughing at someone, and half smelling something stinky.

  “What’s so funny, Gully?” asked Mom.

  Gully laughed as if anything could happen now. “That head being stolen is probably just the start,” he said.

  “The start of what?” asked Pearl.

  “The start of the end,” said Gully, loving the attention.

  “The end of what?”

  “This business.” He waved his hand toward the library. “If you can call it that.”

  Mom got a steely grip on Pearl’s elbow. “Thank you, Mr. Gulliver,” Mom said, and pushed Pearl toward Bruce to make sure she didn’t say anything else. Over her shoulder, Pearl watched Gully scuttle across the street.

  Pearl would have liked Gully’s Buck-a-Buy if it wasn’t for Gully. The store was big and bright and tacky and grungy, one of those stores that had everything cheap and junky, from pencils to hair curlers. It was a good place if you only had a buck and wanted something for it, so Gully did a decent business—but not decent enough to suit him. In Gully’s opinion, a library did not attract spenders. And Gully wanted only shoppers parading up and down the street, not people who liked free books. He thought he knew what was good for America, for New York City, for Lancaster Avenue, and, apparently, for Pearl.

  Bruce was staring at the statue as though it really was the end of the library, to have such a landmark vandalized. He seemed frozen until he reached for Pearl’s hand. “There’s more to the library than—” he began. He trailed off. “The garden’s what I’ve always loved about this place,” he said. “Other branches don’t have this kind of space, this kind of artwork, and trees that shield it from observers with criminal intent. And maybe it’s better if they don’t. But maybe—”

  “Maybe the garden came with the building!” said Mom. “Maybe the statue came with the garden! And maybe it’s up to us to preserve it!” Mom was red-hot with action. “Have the newspapers been called, Bruce?”

  Bruce stared at her. “No, Patricia,” he said. “That actually wasn’t the first thing I did when I saw we had been victimized by vandals.”

  Mom strode off through the back hall, her phone already to her ear. “Yes, this is Mrs. Patricia Moran, of the Lancaster Avenue branch library. I’m calling to inform you that our landmark statue of the New York poet Edna St. Vincent Millay has been vandalized. I think the Moon should cover the story. Yes . . . Lancaster Avenue. Yes, I’ll hold.”

  Bruce followed her. “Trish, why do you want them to know?”

  “Don’t we get enough bad press on Lancaster Avenue?” asked Alice, coming along.

  “Too true,” said Bruce. “No doubt they’ll write about how the library can’t protect its own property, falling apart at the seams, bleeding money.”

  “It is not!” said Pearl, feeling more hopeful than certain. She didn’t know what to make of the idea of “bad press” or the fact that Bruce and Alice seemed sure the library would get it.

  “It is, though,” Simon said gently. “We don’t even have a gate.”

  Bruce tapped his fingers against his lower lip. “It could mean attention. Funding for better security. I’ll send another email about our budget to the board. Or maybe the mayor.”

  “The mayor, who’s never even been here?” Pearl added. She felt bad news sinking into her heart. “The mayor, who only goes to new libraries?” Her Honor the mayor had cut the ribbon at the opening of the new Knickerbocker branch.

  “Vandalism is just going to expose us as being undervalued by the neighborhood,” said Ramón.

  “The mayor already knows the library is old. We don’t want her to think it’s risky to operate, too,” said Alice.

  “Old is historic,” Pearl insisted. “Not risky.”

  “It’s both,” said Bruce. “So why would we want to tell the newspaper?”

  Mom ignored them all: Someone at the paper had finally picked her call back up. “Yes, I’m calling to report a crime against the city,” she said into the phone. “This is Mrs. Patricia Moran from the historic branch library in the old Lancaster mansion on Lancaster Avenue—with the statue of the beloved New York poet Edna St. Vincent Millay—whose head has disappeared in the night! No leads at all yet, but . . . fine!” She hung up with an expression of mixed surprise and satisfaction. “They’re sending a reporter.”

  “Swell,” said Bruce unenthusiastically.

  “Wait and see,” said Ramón soothingly.

  The girl with the braids was still standing in the circulation area. As if she had any business poking her nose in! The girl gave a loud sniff, and that drew tenderhearted Alice’s attention. Alice always reached out to any kid, even ones she’d never seen. “What’s your name?”

  “Francine,” the girl said. “I live across the street.”

  “Well, I’m sure we’ll find our Vincent, Francine,” Alice said.

  To get the attention back, Pearl said, “You’re such an optimist, Alice.” It was what Mom always said to Bruce when she hoped to console him, in her good moments, when she gave him a glass of wine and a kiss on the top of his head, when he came over after the library closed. Unlike the times, more frequent lately, when she’d told him his management skills needed improvement or he was going to get himself fired, and didn’t ask him over after work.

  Alice took Pearl’s hand. “We have to try.” Pearl let go of Alice’s hand because Francine was watching. But then Alice asked Francine, “Coming to story hour?” and gave Pearl one of her invisible nudges, and together they went up to the children’s room.

  In summer Pearl always listened to Alice’s story hour every morning, hanging around the edges because it was actually for little kids. Francine eyed Pearl, who stood by the window, and plopped down in a beanbag chair so she could see the pictures. The book today was Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel,1 which ought to have been popular enough in their neighborhood, where so much was being demolished and other stuff being built. But only four little kids came, all with one mom.

  On the first page of the story, Francine leaned toward Pearl and said, “A steam shovel named Mary Ann?” (As if there was something wrong with the name Mary Ann!) Then, “This is for babies.” Pearl stood there steaming as much as the shovel. Picture books were for anybody! When Francine said, “Dig a basement in just one day? That’s unrealistic!” Pearl stomped out. She ignored the sad face Alice made at her. Let Francine sit there and challenge the best book ever! So much for new visitors.

  Pearl went downstairs. There was more traffic in the library than usual, people traipsing through the building to get to the garden to see Vincent’s sad statue with their own eyes. Pearl saw them pass and tried to pretend they didn’t exist. She kept her head down and scooted into the reference room, where she tucked herself into her own personal nook, on
the floor beside the globe and the shelf of atlases, which shielded her from the room. Mr. Nichols, a homeless man, not scared like lots, not scary like some, with graying brown curly hair and glasses, who came there nearly every day, sat in the chair beside the atlas shelf with the newspaper up in front of his face, eyes shut. He did this often, and Pearl knew that when he began snoring, she should jiggle his sleeve gently—not enough to wake him, but enough to make him quit snoring, because if he snored, Ramón would have to come bump the table nearby to wake him. You weren’t allowed to sleep in the library.

  A Sidebar About Stories

  A story should start at the turning point, the moment when everything changes. A scream is as good a change as any, if it means something new happens. The reason for the change can come after and add a little to the mystery, simply by being late.

  Also, just because the scream changes things, that doesn’t mean it’s a straight path after that. There might be another big change, another turn in the road, maybe a turn that comes right after another scream. Wait and see.

  —M.A.M.

  Pearl realized Mr. Nichols must have slept through her scream and all that came after it. He alone did not know what had happened to the library. She crept away quietly. She didn’t want to have to tell anyone. That would make the theft seem more real.

  Sometimes in this neighborhood, there were burglaries. Robbers got in through the windows, down from the roof, up from the fire escape, and made off with computers and TVs and phones and anything else good. You couldn’t expect to ever see your stuff again. Someone had broken into Ramón’s apartment at the beginning of the summer and taken his Bose sound system with the wireless headphones, and his microwave. “I don’t miss the microwave much, but boy, do I miss that Bose.” He was saving up for another one. What had bothered Ramón most, even more than the Bose, was the idea that somebody with criminal tendencies had been in his home. And now someone with criminal tendencies had been in the library garden.

  Well, if the police weren’t going to take the crime seriously, someone was going to have to, thought Pearl, even if the prospect of confronting a criminal made her stomach curl.

  She wished she could be in some other situation than this. But where else would she, could she be? The library was Pearl’s home.

  Almost eleven years ago, she had been born here, right here, in the Lancaster Avenue branch of the New York City Library, and she had been here practically every day since.

  Pearl’s mother, Patricia Moran, the circulation librarian, told Pearl the true story of how she was born in the calm, book-lined, window-bright Memorial Room, coming too fast for Mom to make it to the hospital. Mom shook her finger at Pearl when she told this part, meaning: Always in such a hurry!

  Pearl had the same light brown skin as her long-gone father (Mr. Michael Moran, whom she’d never met) and Mom’s green eyes and fluffy hair (though Pearl’s was brown, not red like Mom’s), but mostly she was her own self. For the first few months of her life, Pearl lived in a basket that Mom carried every morning from the apartment around the corner on Beep Street. A pillow cushioned Pearl’s head, and a quilt made by the old library director, Mrs. Abramo, kept her cozy. Mom tucked library books around Pearl, to transport them.

  Now Pearl slept in a pull-out chair-bed with Frances the stuffed badger2 on her pillow, Strega Nona the witch doll under her arm,3 and a poster of the boy from the book In the Night Kitchen4 on the wall. The boy, Mickey, visits a giant bakery and falls into a bottle of milk. He drinks some, then says, “I’m in the milk and the milk’s in me!”

  But even their cozy apartment wasn’t home, it was just a place to sleep. It was just the place where Pearl and her mother went at night. Home was—would always be—the narrow, tall, three-story brick building with 41,134 books, a book elevator, two straight staircases, and one spiral staircase. It had a display case full of old-time photographs of the city, some slow computers, a giant papier-mâché giraffe made out of a folding ladder, and in the back garden, under some of the rarest pines in New York, the statue of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

  Pearl felt like Mickey in the milk: She was in the books and the books were in her. The library was home, and the staff was her family.

  Alice always said Pearl was born with her nose in a book. Alice had just graduated from library school when Pearl was born. Now she was the children’s librarian, and had been here long enough to watch some of her first regulars bring their own kids. Since Pearl was a toddler, Alice had found her books, read to her, and helped her to read on her own.

  Simon Lo, the teenage page who came when Pearl was eight, said Pearl was a bookworm that had turned into a real girl, a book butterfly. Simon had started as a volunteer when he was 13, brought moo shu pancakes and fantail shrimp from his mother’s restaurant in Chinatown, bought mozzarella veggie burgers and Funny Bones from the Cozy Soup and Burger, and made grilled marshmallow and peanut butter sandwiches in the toaster oven in the staff room. Pearl had never not loved Simon Lo.

  Ramón Cisneros, the reference librarian, had run up both flights of stairs to bring the paramedics, who told Mom what she could already see for herself: Pearl was quick, she was healthy, and she was loud. As the reference librarian, the smartest, oldest person in the place, Ramón helped her with her homework, improved her vocabulary, and showed her old Top Cat cartoons on the computer—a show about a gang of ragtag city kitties. Ramón looked like a rumpled owl awake in the daytime—short and strong with black-and-gray hair like feathers.

  Bruce, who had never wanted to run a library and prided himself on his management skills (despite what Mom said), not his literary ones, had started Pearl on reading reviews of children’s books when she was eight. While they still had a budget to build the book collection, she’d put a check mark in the catalog next to the books she thought they should request. When the books came, Pearl got to read them first.

  And Mr. Nichols, who had arrived one day last spring—“from all around,” he’d said; Bruce had said, “He’s some kind of professional, look at his hands”—and who spent the day behind the atlas shelf in the reference room—Mr. Nichols listened to Pearl. “I’m all ears,” he’d say. He listened to every word, held the books by the edges respectfully, reading a paragraph she pointed out here and there, and tucking books she was midway through in her nook’s secret hiding place under the Historical Atlas of New York State.5 He never told any stories of his own, but he was happy to listen to Pearl’s.

  All these people watched over Pearl, and if anyone asked what a kid was doing behind the official-looking circulation counter or in the staff-only area along the roped-off mezzanine of the elegant reading room, one of them would answer, “That’s Pearl. She’s the librarian’s child.”

  People would say, all jokey, “The librarian’s child? Bet she never makes a peep!”

  Bruce said drily, “Not exactly.”

  “Paradoxically, no,” said Ramón.

  “Kind of the opposite,” Alice would say with a grin.

  “Yeah, right,” Simon said.

  Mr. Nichols, if anyone ever asked him, would simply answer that Pearl had plenty to say.

  Pearl’s mother made up a poem about her, starting with an old rhyme:

  The shoemaker’s child goes barefoot,

  The toymaker’s child has no toys,

  The dentist’s child has loose teeth,

  And the librarian’s child makes noise.6

  “I do NOT,” said Pearl in protest.

  Yet Mom’s poem was true enough. If someone was making a noise, it was usually Pearl. She was the one running down the steps in her flip-flops, singing in the book elevator (where grown-ups didn’t fit), making squeakers with her sneakers on the wet marble floor. It was Pearl who kept spinning the summer reading roulette wheel in the children’s room until Alice told her to quit. She’d play “Chopsticks”7 on the piano in the Memorial Room until Simon closed the lid. And once a day she’d open the window to air out Bruce’s rat’s nest of an office on
the third floor and sing out to the stone statue in the garden:

  “Ah, sweet mystery of life . . .”8

  or

  “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah! Zip-a-dee-ay . . .”9

  or

  “Hey, now! You’re an all-star!”10

  or some other song.

  The last loud song—ever?—had been a scream.

  And now Vincent was gone, or the most important part of her was. Pearl thought about all the mystery stories she’d ever read, and how the characters solving the mysteries had sat down and figured out all the clues they had. She guessed that was Job One.

  1 Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel by Virginia Lee Burton (Riverside Press, 1939).

  2 A character in the Frances books, starting with Bedtime for Frances by Russell Hoban (Harper, 1960).

  3 Strega Nona by Tomie DePaola (Simon & Schuster, 1975).

  4 In the Night Kitchen by Maurice Sendak (Harper & Row, 1970).

  5 Historical Atlas of New York State by William P. Munger (Frank E. Richards, 1941). It’s rare and out of print, like lots of wonderful books in our nation’s libraries.

  6 Lesley Keogh, then of Bethel Public Library, now of Wilton Public Library (both in Connecticut), long ago altered this old rhyme to fit her son Jack.

  7 “Chopsticks” was originally named “The Celebrated Chop Waltz” by Euphemia Allen under the pseudonym Arthur de Lulli, 1877.

  8 “Ah, Sweet Mystery of Life” by Victor Herbert, lyrics by Rida Johnson Young, from Naughty Marietta, first performed in 1910.

  9 “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah” by Allie Wrubel, lyrics by Ray Gilbert, for the 1946 Disney movie Song of the South.

  10 “All Star” by Smash Mouth, 1999, from the album Astro Lounge.

  4: A VISIT FROM THE MOON

  AUG 29

  On the day after Vincent lost her head, Mom gave Pearl an assignment. “I ought to know this by heart,” she said to Pearl as they waited to pick up the morning coffee at Cozy Soup and Burger. “But I’m going to need a refresher if I’m going to talk to the press.”