Adam and Evil by Gillian Roberts Read Free Book Online

shirt, who became even more agitated at the sight of him.
    “The newspaper center has papers going back to the seventeen hundreds,” I read from the handout. “Braille books. And the print and picture collection has enormous possibilities, as does the theater collection, which’ll help you with motion pictures, TV, and radio. There’s a map collection, which willtell you how the world looked whenever, or how people imagined it. Or how about information on the occult in the children’s books from the last century or earlier, or …”
    We would tour the potential sites, then set the kids free to forage, to stumble over something worthwhile, discover a bit of the value and possibilities of research, and even have a good time. Plus get a day off from school. In exchange, they’d get credit from their art and history teachers, and also from me.
    The security guard had calmed the plaid-shirted man enough so that the woman, looking grateful to be freed of him, headed toward us. The man in the flannel shirt started to follow her but was gently detained by the guard.
    “Hi!” Her voice broke in the middle of that single syllable, like a pubescent boy’s. She coughed, then repeated herself. “Sorry!” she said in an overbright, hard tone. She looked as twitchy facing us as she had while dealing with the bearded man. She was not going to be fun.
    She glanced at a paper in her hand. “Let’s see—you’re Philly Prep, right? Seniors?” My group nodded glumly. “I’m Ms. Fisher and I’ll tour you around, but first let me tell you a bit about the Free Library.” She spoke quickly and without enough inflection, had obviously memorized her lines, and was interested in something besides us. She wasn’t a particularly good actress, but I hoped the kids didn’t notice.
    Which showed how deluded I was trying to be. Of course the kids would notice. Kids’ radar is astounding, a survival mechanism. It’s only when we age that we dumb down and pretend clear evidence isn’t so.
    We followed Ms. Fisher to the base of the stairs. “Originally libraries were by subscription only. That meant you had to pay in order to borrow books.”
    A blond man in a pinstriped suit race-walked through the entry hall toward us and detoured at the last moment around the group and up the stairs, double time.
    Ms. Fisher gasped and moved sideways, as if to clear a path for him, although he’d been nowhere near her. He half turned, then shrugged and continued up. The man was in too much of a hurry to care why someone had gasped.
    Ms. Fisher behaved as if she’d been accosted. She inhaled fiercely, fussed with her hair, smoothed her skirt, double-checkedthat her blouse was tucked in all around, and finally pointed at a bronze statue on the landing above us.
    “I—I was saying, um … I’ve forgotten. I lost track and …” She blushed, put her hand up to her mouth. I realized that she wasn’t much older than I was—thirty-six, thirty-seven, max, only five years ahead of me—and that she’d be pretty if she’d loosen up. Even the muscles of her face were straining, each and every visible one. In fact, all of her looked too tightly strung, about to pop.
    “About how people used to pay for books. That’s what you were saying.” That was Cassie, one of the sweetest young women ever to grace a desk. Not the sharpest, by a long shot, whose combo of sweet, trusting, and dim put her in my kids-to-worry-about category.
    “Thank you,” Ms. Fisher said. “Yes. I was going to point out Dr. William Pepper, there.”
    A bronze statue of an unsmiling man in judicial-looking robes sat at the top of the flight of stairs, on a landing that was lined on each side with another flight of stairs.
    “He was provost of the University of Pennsylvania in the 1880s,” Ms. Fisher said, “and he convinced his uncle, Dr. George S. Pepper, to provide funds for a free library. His uncle bequeathed a hundred fifty thousand dollars plus some of his estate to