A Fugitive Truth by Dana Cameron Read Free Book Online

down carefully to consider.
    My decision took less than a heartbeat. I would definitely read it through first. Although I would take notes as ideas came to me, I needed to begin my engagement with Margaret Chandler, learn who she was, react to her as a person, before I began to dissect and analyze her world. Wonderful woman, tell me how you lived! Surrender all your secrets! Prejudices, prayers, the cost of cloth, neighborly disputes, dinner menus—!
    A small cough from Sasha alerted me that my enthusiasm had animated me: unwittingly, I had left my seat and was doing a little victory dance in front of the desk.
    Ah, but it can’t be the first time she’s seen such behavior, not in a place like this! I nodded an unfelt apology, resumed my seat, and got down to the engrossing task of reading someone else’s diary.
     
    The only reason I stopped two hours later was because I was in desperate need of a biology break. I found that Sasha also was in the ladies’ room.
    “Any luck with the missing manuscripts?” I asked, as I finished drying my hands.
    “No, but Harry’s on it,” she said. “He’ll get it sorted out, I’m sure, I’m just jumpy right now, about everything, it seems. There’s so much going on—what with the way that Mr. Whitlow is reorganizing the structure of the library this year—adding more administrators all the time—and keeping up with the collections management, and all. I can’t afford to even think about losing this job; you know how it goes: last hired, first fired. And it always seems that there’s money for administrators, but never any for librarians. It’s tough.”
    “Especially with the economy the way it is,” I agreed.
    “Tell me about it.” Sasha dug out an orange stick and cleaned under her nails, quickly and efficiently. “And what with the alarm systems and all, well, you can see why I’d be worried about the state of the collections, especially the things we can’t locate—”
    And perhaps that is the reason the security staff is acting like a bunch of angry apes, I thought.
    “—but we’ll sort it out. Harry and me.” Sasha smiled without explaining anything more, gave me a little wave, and went back to work.
     
    Although I would have bet heavily against it, I was hungrier than I imagined possible when dinnertime came later on that evening. I would have stayed in the library all night if Sasha hadn’t come by to chase me out at the five o’clock closing time, and it was only then that I realized I hadn’t bothered to eat lunch. The Chandler journal was so engrossing that the hours flew by, but my questions also mounted. As with the first entry in the journal, others that came after it were detailed, and they also sometimes contained a series of numbers. In some cases, the numbers appeared in the middle of the text. I finally decided that the numbers did not represent dates or verses from the Bible—none of the numbers went higher than the mid-twenties—but were possibly part of some sort of code, perhaps alphabetical. I made a few halfhearted attempts to play around with the numbers, but got nowhere with them. So I simply resolved to keep my eyes open for more clues and continued to read.
     
    Although I enjoy eating, I am by all accounts, and especially Brian’s, a miserable cook, preferring to dump my dinner out of one or more cans rather than going to a lot of trouble to create something really tasty. So it was with some surprise that I found, while making my dinner, that I was in fact the gourmet of the house. I figured beans and rice would at least get some vegetables and low-fat carbos into me and wouldn’t take more than a few minutes away from work. My housemates, however, had even more efficient solutions to the evening meal than me. Although I saw him eat an orange during the early news, Jack’s dinner consisted solely of three or four trips to his Cutty cabinet throughout the early evening. Each time he nearly filled his lowball glass. He had