“And this one,” I said, pointing to the three initials. “You didn’t even make him sign his full name.”
She leaned in again and looked at the sign-in. “PJS,” she said, and gave out with a hearty laugh. “BookBeast. What a silly name for an e-mail.”
“Is that what you’re laughing about?” I asked.
“That, and because I’m relieved actually, Ms. Quick.”
“Relieved about what?”
“You’re searching for an evildoer while at the bottom of your list is another friend,” Ms. Bland said. “Why, your grandmother knows him practically as well as I do.”
Lulu’s back stiffened, and she swiveled to face that librarian. “Who might that be?” she asked.
“PJS,” Ms. Bland answered. “Preston J. Savage, Mrs. Atwell.”
My grandmother practically gasped. “Lovely man, Ms. Bland. A great friend of this library, you’re quite right.”
“Why, I’d leave him alone with the Gutenberg Bible,” the librarian added, glaring at me across the wide table.
I, on the other hand, wouldn’t trust him as far as a stolen skateboard could carry me.
19
“What makes Mr. Savage a friend of the library?” Liza asked. “I’d like to be one, too.”
“Oodles of money,” I said, practically growling my answer.
“Nonsense, Devlin,” my grandmother said. “That sourpuss is not the least bit becoming to you, either.”
“Mr. Savage is not a wealthy man,” Ms. Bland says. “He’s very intelligent, and he’s devoted to the history of mapmaking and charts.”
“But what does he do?” I asked.
“He’s an academic. A professor, I believe.”
“And just where does he profess to profess?”
“Preston Savage,” my grandmother said, enunciating each syllable of his name distinctly, “had an affiliation with Yale University, last I knew. For several semesters, he was visiting faculty at Vassar.”
“I knew it!” I said, way too loud for a library. The baby steps we had followed from the first minutes were growing larger. The path from this room in the NYPL across Fifth Avenue down the ramp inside Grand Central Terminal to the train to Poughkeepsie was becoming easier to follow than the Yellow Brick Road.
“What you think you know, Devlin, would barely fill the inside of a thimble,” my grandmother said. “Listen to what Ms. Bland has to say about Preston before you jump to any conclusions.”
I was beginning to feel like a lesser royal in the Holy Roman Empire that we’d studied last semester, watching family allegiances shift as rapidly as the tides. Why had Lulu suddenly gone cold on me?
“But Lu—”
“Listen to her, Devlin.”
My grandmother had pushed back her chair, signaling her readiness to move on.
“Mr. Savage spends much of his time doing research for map collectors,” Ms. Bland said. “When a prominent alumnus of Yale bought the private library of an old English family, it was Preston who catalogued the collection for him.”
I held the ends of the hair that covered my ears in my hands and twirled them while she talked.
“Inside a very old atlas that probably hadn’t been opened in years, he found one of the rarest maps in the world, all folded up and stored there for safekeeping. Many maps and charts don’t live that long because—”
“I know,” I said. “Most of them didn’t survive because they were actually used by ship captains or soldiers in medieval times. They didn’t make it home from the voyages and wars.”
“What do you think Mr. Savage did?”
My first instinct was to say that I thought he stole the precious thing, but her question suggested a happier ending for both Preston and the map. “Something noble, I’m sure.”
“Sour and snide, too, Devlin,” my grandmother said. “Double whammy. I’d advise you to lose them both, young lady.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. When my grandmother was right, she was right as rain.
“Preston convinced the man he worked for to show the map to us, here at the library. He knew it would be our best acquisition of the twenty-first century,” Ms. Bland said. “Without Preston Savage, the purchase would never have happened. It’s our greatest coup, girls.”
“So there’s nothing in it for Mr. Savage, either?” Liza asked.
“Our friends are well known to us,” Ms. Bland said. “On Tuesday, the very date you’re speaking of, Mr. Savage had spent the morning lecturing to some of our curators, upstairs in the boardroom. He was sharing his knowledge with our staff, giving freely of his time.”
“What about?” I asked.
“A donor gifted us with a 1680 Thornton map of New England and New York. We displayed it for two days in the boardroom, so that our staff could get to see it first, before the public, and to learn of its importance in our collection.”
“Grand idea,” Lulu said. “Builds morale when the entire library system is going through so many cuts in funding.”
“It is we who benefited most from Preston Savage and his willingness to enlighten us,” Ms. Bland said. “I was happy to have him browsing among our treasures when he finished his talk.”
“Lovely of you,” Lulu said.
“Like Mr. Blodgett—the man from Atlanta who left a while ago—Preston Savage is welcome here anytime he’d like to come,” Ms. Bland said.
“Here and at Yale and at Vassar,” I said. All places that had collections of rare maps and atlases. “He has access to all your rare books.”
“He certainly does,” Lulu said.
My own grandmother had turned on me.
And the only difference I could figure so far was that Ms. Bland and her colleagues had no need to hover over Mr. Savage the way she had glued herself to me and my friends on Wednesday afternoon.
Lulu stood up and thanked Ms. Bland for her time. There was also a gracious apology wrapped into her farewell. Then she turned back to me. “More research, Devlin? Staying or going?”
“We’ll stay a while,” I said. “I like it here. Liza and I want to be friends of the library, Lu. We’ll try to think of something good we can do to help here. Isn’t that right, Liza?”
Liza just nodded her head, seemingly as perplexed as I was.
Before my grandmother could say her good-byes, Booker Dibble came through the door. Lulu lit up like a Christmas tree when she spotted him.
“Booker! It’s been ages,” my grandmother said, accepting the hug that he bent down to give her. “Since when have you started wearing spectacles, young man? What’s gone wrong with your peepers?”
“All good, Grandma Atwell,” he said. “Just trying them out on the fine print.”
There was no more hiding this operation, this conspiracy of three, from Ms. Bland. Her eyes widened as Booker addressed Lulu as grandmother. She loved the Dibble boys as much as my mother did and encouraged them to consider her family.
“How come you’re so dressed up?” Liza asked as Ms. Bland took her log and returned to her desk. Liza was admiring Booker’s navy blue blazer and gray slacks.
“Debate club met this afternoon,” he said. “I got here as fast as I could, so I didn’t change my clothes.”
“Well, you might stay and keep these girls in line, Booker,” my grandmother said. “How would you like to put me in a taxicab before you get to work?”
“I’ll do that, Lulu,” I said. “Happy to do it.”
“I’d rather be escorted by a handsome young gentleman any day of the week, Devlin,” she said, taking Booker’s arm.
I knew she just wanted the opportunity to make sure he understood that Liza and I were walking on eggshells.
“Give me a minute, Grandma,” Booker said. He lifted her arm so he could remove his blazer and put it on the back of the chair. “It’s really humid outside.”
Then he gave Lulu his Dibble-dazzle of a smile and they walked off together, out through the heavy doors of the Map Division.
“I think
I’ve got it, Liza,” I said, snapping my finger.
“Got what?”
“The clue that was staring me right in the face this whole time. Lulu’s right. All she could do for us is open the door, and now we’ve got to take it the rest of the way,” I said. “Don’t you remember what she asked me before we sat down to eat lunch?”
Liza screwed up her face to try to think.
“She wanted to know what secret I was hiding from her, what we were there at her apartment to tell her.”
“Yes, I remember that.”
I grabbed Booker’s jacket from the back of the chair, held it up in front of me, then folded it over my arm, and headed to the exit. “The question Lulu asked was what I had up my sleeve, Liza.”
“So?”
“Of course the map thief had a way to smuggle his treasure out of this room,” I said. “No briefcase and no backpack. But he was wearing a blazer just like this one, and I’ll bet he had something very valuable up his sleeve.”
20
“Over here, Booker,” I whispered when I saw him walking down the long corridor to us. “Don’t go back in the map room.”
“What are you doing with my jacket?” he asked. “What’s going on?”
“Look, we’ve had our suspect and seen his opportunity, and we learned that his motive is either financial or the sheer selfishness of possessing something rare and beautiful,” I said. “But up until this minute, I didn’t think we identified his ability to carry out the theft from the library, and that’s why nobody believed that Liza saw him steal something.”
“And now you know more?” he asked.
“You bet,” I said. “Where could you conceal a big piece of paper?”
“You mean right now?”
“Yes.”
Booker held up an imaginary sheet of paper and started to fold it in quarters. “I’d downsize it and stuff it into one of my pockets.”
“No, no! Suppose it’s really old and only worth something if it isn’t folded up like an origami bird.”
He put his hands on his hips and cocked his head to think.
“Pretend that it’s the size of that poster on the wall,” Liza said.
“Right,” I said. I had one arm in Booker’s jacket and ran across the wide corridor. “This says the lecture was last weekend. They won’t need that announcement.”
I reached up with one hand, letting the arm of the blazer sweep the floor. The moment to sign up to attend WOMEN IN CRIME FICTION: NANCY DREW TO JANE MARPLE had passed. I pulled the colorful poster board from the tape that held it in place, certain that the turnout for the session had been impressive.
The poster was about the size of a large folio page, the size of a medieval atlas.
“Here, you put your jacket on. You’re closer to the height of the tall man than I am,” I said, tossing it over to Booker.
Then I kneeled on the floor and carefully rolled the poster, from the bottom toward the top, into a small round cylinder, no more than an inch in diameter. I stood up and firmly handed it to Booker, like it was a copy of the Magna Carta.
“Now what?” he asked, fidgeting with the buttons of his jacket.
“Well, now, where would you hide something you wanted to get out of this library, without being stopped by Ms. Bland?”
Booker grinned at me. “Right up my sleeve.”
Liza clapped her hands together, and I prompted my friend to give it a try. “Do it, Booker. See if it fits.”
He pinched one corner of the poster with his right hand, keeping his left arm as stiff as a board. Like a magician, he guided the cylindrical tube into his sleeve. It went up his arm as smoothly as my grandmother’s fur coat slipped over one of her silk dresses.
It didn’t look like Booker could bend his arm, but he held both hands out in front of him. “Now you see it, now you don’t.”
“Let’s go,” I said. “We’ve got everything we need from this place.”
“You’d better put the poster back on the wall,” Liza said.
I rolled my eyes. “Really? Do you think Nancy Drew let every little thing scare the daylights out of her? If I’d known about last weekend’s lecture, I would have insisted you attend. Learn from the ladies who are masters of caper-solving. Backbone, Liza de Lucena. Stiffen up.”
I started marching toward the lobby of the library. We weren’t stealing a poster. We were tidying up the place, the way I saw things.
Booker waited for Liza to fall in line behind me and he brought up the rear.
There were always two security guards at the front door. One sat next to the entrance, inside the lobby, checking bags of incoming visitors. The other was perched on a stool near the exit door, stopping people on their way out.
I started to lift my book bag onto the table next to the guard, but he just waved me on. “Thanks,” I said. “Have a good weekend.”
“It’s only Thursday by my watch,” he said. His eyes were half closed, and I thought he might fall asleep midsentence.
I stepped into the revolving door and pushed against the brass bar. Grumpy guy, I thought. Glad he didn’t stop me. As the door moved, Liza followed me into the next section, and Booker into the third.
“Hold it!” I heard the guard yell.
I was on the front steps, ready to come to Booker’s aid, as he just kept revolving to go back into the library.
“Not you, young man,” the sleepy guard said, patting him on the shoulder. “Young lady, take off your backpack and show me what you’ve got.”
Liza practically froze, caught between two arms of the door. Booker pushed again so she moved on through.
Her hands were shaking as she opened her bag to reveal the contents—only her summer study books for classes at the Ditch.
“Calm down,” I could hear the guard say as he escorted her through the door. “I just stopped you ’cause you look as jumpy as a cat on a hot tin roof.”
Of course even the security guards at the library were literary.
I took Liza’s hand and we ran down the broad steps to the street.
“We’ll have to grow you a poker face, Liza,” Booker said. “You need nerves of steel to be a detective.”
“I—I thought the guard was talking to you, Booker,” she said. “That worried me.”
Booker stood in the bright sunlight on Fifth Avenue and straightened his arms against his sides.
“Watch this,” he said. “Abracadabra.”
With his right hand, he reached inside the lip of his left sleeve and slowly pulled the poster board out. It was still curled tight and appeared to be unwrinkled.
He let the thick paper unroll. It was in perfect condition.
“What a great souvenir,” I said. “I’d like to hang that in my bedroom, for career inspiration from Nancy and Miss Marple.”
“Your mother’s the real deal, Dev,” Booker said. “What more do you need?”
“She doesn’t want me to follow in her footsteps, I don’t think. Or else she wouldn’t try to stifle my talent for detecting.”
“Good point,” Booker said.
“Besides,” I said, “we’ve got our suspect, a motive, and now his modus operandi. How’s that for Latin, Liza?”
“Preston Savage,” she said in her quiet voice. “Now we know how he operates.”
21
My mother, Sam, Liza, and I had dinner at Serendipity. It had been my favorite go-to place as far back as I could remember, kid-friendly and mega-sized portions. Everybody there had to play with their food, no matter what your ordered, ’cause there was so much of everything it ended up slopping all over the plate. I wasn’t an outcast at Serendiptity.
The cheddar burgers were spectacular, and I knew Liza would like the cinnamon-fudge sundae as much as I did. We didn’t get interrogated about Lulu until we were all upstairs in the apartment, since Sam had volunteered to come up so he could walk Asta.
“Is your grandmother okay?” my mother asked. “I really owe her a call.”
&nbs
p; “She’s good. Yeah, she said you do. And she wants to accept your challenge about the Red Sox–Yankees matchup.”
“Game on,” she said.
“Hey, Sam. You’re not too tired to walk my pup, are you? Don’t want anyone creeping Asta out, like Jack Williams did to us.”
“Even when I’m off duty, Devlin, I’m on the job,” Sam said. “Eyes wide open all the time. Every good cop knows that.”
“Did you happen to remember, Sam, that Louella Atwell is on the board of trustees of the library?” my mother said, turning around to lean her back against the sink.
I kneeled down to put Asta’s leash on, stroke her back, and avoid my mother’s line of sight.
“Now that you remind me, Commissioner.”
“So I’m guessing that the fact that my one and only daughter paid a visit to her beloved Lulu today might have something to do with the stolen book.”
“Stolen page, Mom. We never said it was a book.”
“With the stolen page that nobody knows is missing. What’s your vote, Sam?”
Liza had seated herself at the kitchen table. Her toes were tapping nervously on the floor, about a foot from my hand. I wanted to grab one of her shoes to make it stand still.
“You got to give it to Devlin,” Sam said. “She gets twofers on that one. She lights up her grandmother’s afternoon and probably gets some inside info on the big book house at the same time.”
“Better than that,” I said, getting back up. “Lulu took us to the library.”
Confession was supposed to be good for the soul. I wasn’t convinced of that fact, in the moment.
“What? Your grandmother knows what’s been going on and still took you there?” my mother said, holding her glass of ice water against her forehead.
“We didn’t want to go, Mrs. Quick,” Liza said. “We told her we didn’t want to go.”
“Don’t tell me she used deadly physical force to get you there?”
“You know the drill, Mom. Can’t be rude to Louella Atwell,” I said. “What was I supposed to do? Wrestle with my grandmother?”
“And because you think I’m not doing enough to help you with your case, of course, she would jump right in on your side,” my mother said, taking a sip of her drink.
“No. Not really. I’d say she’s totally allied with you now on this one. She just wanted to hear things from the librarian’s point of view.”
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