by Deanna Chase
“Jane, you know there aren’t any shortcuts. No magic wands in the real world.”
“Of course not,” I sighed, glancing at my clock. 10:30 sharp. “Sorry, Gran. I really do have to run to that meeting.”
As I hung up the phone, I wondered what other promises I’d make before the month was over. I shook my head and crossed the floor to Evelyn’s office. She sat behind her desk; it was half-buried beneath the piles of important papers that had cascaded across its faux-leather surface. I glanced at the prints on the walls—the regimented gardens at Mount Vernon and the colonnaded porch of Monticello—and I wondered once again how my disorganized boss could have chosen to work in a library collection based on order, harmony, and the rational strength of the human mind.
“Jane,” Evelyn said as I stopped in her doorway. “Good news and bad news.” She waved me toward a chair.
I always felt vaguely guilty when I sat across from her desk, as if I were reporting to the principal of my elementary school. It didn’t help that Evelyn looked exactly like the Mother Superior in The Sound of Music. You know, the one who looks like John Wayne in a nun’s habit? Poor thing.
I smiled as I sat down. “The board decided that we should hire three new reference librarians, and I’ll be in charge of the department?”
She shook her head ruefully. “I’m afraid not.”
Unease curled through my gut. This looked serious. “I’ll take the good news first, then.”
She blinked at me, and I realized that she was a bad-news-first person. She’d be the one to eat her pickled beets before anything else on her plate, holding her nose if she had to. I never understood that—what would happen if you filled up on pickled beets? Or got sick on them? Or had to leave before dessert? What if you didn’t have any room left for chocolate cheesecake parfait?
“The good news, then,” she said. “The board has authorized a special fund for a new project.”
I smiled in anticipation, but Evelyn looked away. All righty, then. The good news wasn’t actually all that good. I braced myself mentally and asked, “What sort of project?”
“You know that we’ve been trying to increase walk-in traffic. We want to be more a part of the neighborhood.”
I nodded, but I bit my tongue. It wasn’t like we had a treasure trove of novels and picture books. The Peabridge and its grounds might occupy a city block in Georgetown, in Washington D.C.’s most historic neighborhood. It might be nestled amid Federalist townhouses and cobbled streets, still looking like the colonial mansion it once had been. It might have grounds that were the envy of city gardeners up and down the East Coast.
But the Peabridge contained the world’s leading collection of books, manuscripts, incunabulae, and ephemera about life in eighteenth-century America. Not precisely after-school fare, and hardly a draw for a Mommy and Me book club.
Evelyn went on. “The board decided that we should expand our base by taking a page from Disney’s book. You know how they set up Epcot– each European country in its own special ‘land.’” I nodded warily. I couldn’t see any good place that this idea was heading. “Well, we’ll do the same thing here. We’ll turn the Peabridge into colonial America.”
“Turn it into….” I trailed off, bracing myself for the hit.
“Yes!” Evelyn exclaimed, with the enthusiasm of a parent explaining the joys of drilling and filling cavities. “We’ll wear costumes!”
“You have got to be kidding,” I said before I could stop myself. I felt guilty, though, when Evelyn’s face dropped. “Costumes?” I glanced toward Jason’s now-empty table. What sort of Imaginary Boyfriend would be attracted to a woman in hoops, a bodice, and a mob cap?
“The coffee bar just isn’t enough, Jane. We still don’t have the foot traffic that the board wants. Dr. Bishop has already made arrangements with the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; they have some extra stock just sitting in a warehouse. The costumes will arrive by next Monday. You’ll see. This will be so much fun!”
Fun. Evelyn might look forward to new clothes. She could set aside that boxy pink and brown suit that was designed for a woman two decades younger. Me, though? I’d feel like I was dressing up for Halloween, every day of my working life. Where was that magic wand when I needed it?
I settled on a logical argument: “Evelyn, we’re supposed to support serious scholarship!”
“And we do. We will. But there’s nothing that says we have to be sticks in the mud while we’re doing it. After all, we don’t want anyone to think of us as ‘Marian the Librarian,’ do we? We don’t want to be boring and fussy and….” She trailed off, searching for a suitably terrible word.
I swallowed hard and realized that the worst bit of news remained untold. After all, the costumes had been the good news. I braved her gaze. “And the bad news?”
Evelyn answered in the grave tone of a physician diagnosing a fatal disease. “The board discussed salaries.”
No one became a librarian because they wanted to be rich. And absolutely no one took a job at a small private library—a library that had to dress its librarians in eighteenth-century embroidered silk just to get patrons through the door!—because they thought they’d retire early. I’d originally come to the Peabridge on an internship while I was studying to get my masters’ degree, and I’d stayed because I liked the people—Evelyn, the rest of the staff. The patrons. I wasn’t expecting to become a millionaire.
Still, I wasn’t prepared for Evelyn’s next words. “We’re going to have to cut your pay by twenty-five percent.” She rushed on. “I argued against it. I really did. But you know that there are still board members who don’t think that we need a reference librarian at all, that we only need an archivist.”
I couldn’t say anything.
I’d already reduced my vacation budget to a one-week car trip to the beach. I brought my lunch every day (or snuck a gigantissimo latte from the bar). Breakfast was a Pop-tart when I bothered at all.
Well, at least I wouldn’t need to waste money on a professional work wardrobe any more. But twenty-five percent? Not possible. Not even in my worst nightmares.
“Rent,” I croaked. “If you take a quarter of my pay, I can’t pay my rent. I’ll be out on the street, Evelyn. I’ll be living beneath Key Bridge, pushing a shopping cart to the library’s front door every morning.”
“Now, Jane,” Evelyn said, moderating her tone as if she were talking a jumper down from the top of the Washington Monument. “I told the board that twenty-five percent was too much, that we couldn’t do that to the staff. We especially couldn’t do that to you—I know that you’re already relatively underpaid, even in our field.”
Well, it was nice to hear her say that, at least. In fact, she actually looked pleased as she prepared to make her grand announcement. “Jane, I came up with something better. I’m offering you a home. Free of charge, for as long as you work at the Peabridge.”
“A home?” I blinked and wondered if I’d slipped into some alternate universe. I resisted the urge to glance around for hidden cameras, for some signal that this was a wacky new reality show.
“It’s perfect!” Evelyn raised her chins from her chocolate-colored blouse and gave me a broad smile. “You’ll continue to work for us, we’ll make the salary cut, but you’ll live in the guest house, in the garden out back!”
The guest house. What guest house? The Peabridge gardens were extensive, but there was no guest house. There was a gazebo, and a pagoda, and an obelisk, and…. Then it hit me, like an icepick to my belly.
“Do you mean the old caretaker’s shed?”
“Shed?” Evelyn’s laugh was a bit forced. “You’ve obviously never been in there. It’s practically a mansion!”
Sure. In someone’s sick nightmare. Every time I walked by the ramshackle building, it gave me the creeps: The hair on the back of my neck literally stood on end, and the walls seemed to create their own clammy drafts. “Evelyn, I can’t live in a dusty tool shed.”
“It’s not a tool shed! It us
ed to be home for a gardening professional, for a trained specialist in colonial horticulture! It has a kitchen. And a separate bedroom.”
“And a toilet? Is there even running water out there? Electricity?”
“Of course! Do you think that we’re barbarians?”
I stared down at my black slacks and my favorite silk blouse, cut to show off my, alas, minimal décolletage. The outfit was my “Monday best,” chosen to lure Jason’s attention right at the start of the week. This would be the last time I’d wear it to work. Starting next week, I’d be dressed like Martha Washington.
Barbarians? No, but I thought the Peabridge board was entirely out of line with reality.
What else was I going to do, though? Move back in with Gran? Park myself on the floor of Melissa’s one-room apartment? How was I ever going to move Jason from the Imaginary Boyfriend category to the Real, if I lived in a cardboard box under Key Bridge? If I was arrested for defaulting on my student loans?
“Rent free?” I asked.
“Rent free.”
“Utilities included?”
“Utilities included.”
I was tired of fighting with my landlord to fix the leaky ceiling in my current apartment. Thieves had broken in twice in the past year (not that I had anything worth stealing). My commute by public transportation was nearly an hour, each morning and each afternoon.
A one-minute commute.
I could sleep until 8:00 and still make it to work on time. I could dash home during the day and whip up a quick lunch. I could offer to help Jason with a research project, stay up late working beside him at my kitchen table, then suavely offer him a nightcap.
I could have it all—a real boyfriend, a successful library job, a home of my own, Scott Randall and missing magic wand be damned. I held out my hand, smothering my flash of embarrassment when I saw my chewed fingernails. Hmmm… Another goal, breaking that lifetime habit. “Done,” I said.
Evelyn’s fingers were cool on mine, and her smile was encouraging. “Done.” She smiled.
There. My job was secure. I had a new home. I was going to be spared wear and tear on my admittedly-limited wardrobe.
Then why did it seem as if I was about to tumble headlong over a precipice?
Chapter 2
“This might be the craziest thing you’ve ever done,” Melissa said on Sunday as we clambered out of Gran’s black Lincoln Town Car.
She would know. We’d been inseparable since the second week of third grade, when we went stomping through puddles during one waterlogged recess. We were wearing identical peacock-blue knee socks that day, and our feet and legs were stained for weeks. It’s amazing how closely bonded two girls can become when they’re laughed at by every child in their P.E. class. The experience wouldn’t have been so scarring if Mrs. Robinson hadn’t chosen that week to introduce our science class to the fauna of the Galapagos Islands. Especially the blue-footed booby.
“Thanks for the vote of confidence.” I was already wrapping a bandana around my hair, trying to lasso my curls. As I often did, I wished that I’d been blessed with Melissa’s perfect hair. She wore it shoulder-length, so that the honey waves framed her gamine face. Everything about her was petite; she was only five foot two. But she packed more energy into her overalls than I’d ever imagined having.
Case in point: she was already emptying the trunk, fishing out dozens of bags filled with the finest cleaning supplies that Target had to offer. If a chemical shined, sparkled, or wiped, we had purchased it, relying on a grandmaternal grant for funding. I collected my share of the loot.
Even in the full light of a spring Sunday morning, I felt the chill of the cottage’s strange power as we approached the front door. A cool finger walked down my spine, making me unable to resist the urge to look behind me, to be certain that nothing was looming over my shoulder. “There!” I said. “Don’t you feel it?”
“You still think the place is haunted?”
“Not haunted,” I said, feeling slightly foolish. “It’s just that there’s a power here. A…presence.”
Melissa whistled the theme from Twilight Zone before lowering her voice to a Rod Serling rumble. “Jane Madison thought that she was moving into an ordinary cottage in an ordinary Georgetown garden.”
I couldn’t help but laugh. Of course it was cold, even clammy, next to the building. I was standing in the shade. How silly could I be?
I dug the keys out of my pocket and selected the new one that Evelyn had given me. She had been as good as her word; a locksmith had come out during the week and installed a solid deadbolt on the door. I hadn’t had the nerve to try it alone. Now, the brass key glinted, bright as gold as I slipped it home and turned.
I took a deep breath before pushing the door open. “Ready?” I asked Melissa.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” She stepped forward, Gran’s mop and broom looking like pikes in her hands.
The door opened without squeaking. The locksmith must have seen to the hinges. The rest of the cottage, though, looked as if it hadn’t been touched by human hands in more than a century.
Billowing white sheets clumped over furniture in the parlor, disguising shapes that might have been couches or chairs or massively mutated ottomans. Dust was thick on the floor, and the front windows were so fly-specked that they looked like some rotten form of stained glass. A braided-rag rug was rolled up against the far wall, and the hardwood floor looked dull and diseased. By craning my neck, I could just make out the appliances in the kitchen, and I thought they might once have been white.
“I don’t even know where to start,” Melissa said, even her spirit daunted.
“Might as well tackle the worst bits first,” I said grimly. “Do you want the kitchen or the bathroom?”
“I spend enough time in a kitchen at work. I’ll take the bathroom. Besides, it’s smaller.” She grinned.
We split up the cleaning supplies and activated our divide-and-conquer strategy. I asked myself how bad one kitchen could be, when it hadn’t even been used for decades?
The answer was, bad.
I started by sweeping, figuring that it made sense to get rid of the dry dirt before I tackled the wet. I disturbed enough spiders to repopulate every farm this side of Charlotte’s Web. I discovered that my new home had mice—or at least it had hosted them in the past, back when there was some semblance of food around. I learned that contact paper detached from shelves when the glue was old enough. And it left behind a gold-colored dust that made me sneeze if I peered at it too closely.
Even as I swept though—and scrubbed and scoured and mopped—I couldn’t help but be pleased. This was my home that we were cleaning. This was my pied-a-terre, my escape from the hustle and bustle of the workaday world. With every squeeze of a spray-bottle, I was beating back the cottage’s chilly atmosphere. I was subduing that Twilight Zone specter, pushing away my whispering fears.
Some time well after noon, I glanced out the kitchen window (newly glinting from a liberal application of Windex). I couldn’t help but laugh out loud. The cottage lined up at the end of a garden path. While the yellow cowslips and deep pink candytuft had died back at the peak of the summer’s heat, I could still make out the bright white stars of foamflower stalks.
Endless volumes of colonial horticulture had not been wasted on this librarian.
And Gran’s housekeeping lessons weren’t wasted either. When Melissa and I folded back the dust-covers on the furniture in the living room, we were pleasantly surprised to find a pair of deep, overstuffed couches covered with hunter green fabric that looked untouched by time. In the bedroom, we discovered a four-poster with an actual feather mattress. My own clean sheets fit it perfectly.
We rolled out the rug in the living room and admired its tight braided pattern. Gran’s vacuum cleaner worked like a charm, sucking up the last stray evidence of the cottage’s abandonment. After I coiled up the vacuum’s power cord, we collapsed on the couches and surveyed our handiwork. “I don’t believe i
t,” I said.
“Still feel your Ghost of Christmas Past haunting the place?”
“Any ghost who was living here has been asphyxiated by ammonia.” I brandished the nearest spray bottle. “Fairies, begone, and be all ways away.”
“Titania. Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
It was an old game that we played. Smiling to acknowledge Melissa’s Shakespeare skills, I glanced over her shoulder. “What’s that door?” I asked, gesturing toward the hallway.
Melissa followed my gaze and shrugged. “The basement? I tried it and it’s locked.”
Just as well, I thought. There was no telling what creepy-crawlies lurked down there. I sighed and pulled myself to my feet. “So, are we going to reward ourselves with burgers?”
“And fries. Your treat.”
Neither of us could bring ourselves to shower in the sparkling new bathroom; we wanted the fruit of our labors to remain unblemished for just a while longer. I did take a moment to splash some water on my face at the kitchen sink, and I removed my grimy bandana, allowing my hair to sproing out around my ears. Taken together, Melissa and I looked like refugees from a stowaway’s convention, but that was going to have to do.
Besides, Five Guys Burgers and Fries did not exactly require the height of fashion to set foot inside its doors. The counter was already three deep when we got there, and we took a moment to stare up at the menu, red letters stamped on a broad white board. Simple: hamburgers, fries, toppings (extra charge for cheese and bacon.) Cold soda. Peanuts to munch on while we waited. The smell of hot grease made me salivate like one of Pavlov’s dogs.
It was a sign of how long I’d known Melissa that I could order for her without confirming what she wanted. I stepped up to the counter and asked for one good burger (cheese, bacon, grilled onions and mushrooms, lettuce, tomato) and one pitifully flawed burger (mustard, ketchup, nothing else at all in the world, poor bare thing), along with a large order of fries for us to split. Before I could finish giving Melissa grief over her denuded choice of lunch, we found ourselves at a Formica-covered table.
