Great Day for the Deadly by Jane Haddam Read Free Book Online Page B

point, she had had to admit it. It really did look as if Brigit had run away. She had disappeared so completely, into nowhere and never been.
    Now it looked like something else might be going on, something Scholastica was having a far harder time admitting to. She seemed to have sent one of her postulants out into dangerous weather, and that could mean—anything.
    Scholastica thought of feet slipping on mud, heads cracking on pavement, bodies sucked down into swelling waters—and told herself she was crazy. She still had no reason at all to think that Brigit Ann Reilly had done anything but take off for parts unknown.
    On the other hand, before she told Reverend Mother General about it, she did ask Reverend Mother General to sit down.

[6]
    I T WAS ONE O’CLOCK by the time Glinda Daniels managed to get her life put together well enough to be operating at anything near her ordinary efficiency, and by then it was obvious that all she had left to be efficient about was leaving. The one weather report she’d heard on her racing drive into work had dismissed the possibility of another flood out of hand. Forty-five minutes later, as sirens and church bells began to ring noon all over town, the storm had kicked into double time. Glinda had seen weather like this once or twice in her life, but never in Maryville. It might have been like this here during the last flood, but Glinda didn’t remember. She had been only two years old at the time, and asleep. What this reminded her of was the kind of storm they used to get before the tornadoes came when she was at the University of Nebraska, picking up her master’s degree in French. Glinda Daniels had a bachelor’s degree in archaeology from Bryn Mawr, a master’s degree in French from Nebraska, a master’s degree in Far East Asian Languages (Chinese and Cambodian) from Michigan, a master’s degree in classics from Columbia, and a doctorate in library science from Simmons College. She and Father Doherty had a standing joke that they got on so well together because they were the only people they knew who had spent so much of their lives in school.
    At the moment, she didn’t want to joke about anything. The weather out there had gone from bad to impossible to positively dangerous. She wanted to lock up, get out and make her way up to Iggy Loy. She could have done it, too, except for the fact that the library wasn’t empty. She had sent Shelley and Carl, her full-time paid assistants, home at once—almost as soon as she’d walked through the door. They had gone, too. Like most people with jobs they weren’t particularly interested in, they were happier than not to be sent home from work. She had sent old Tommy Douver up to Iggy Loy, assuming that he’d been evicted from another rented room. Since he was drunk and that was the only reason he came into the library anyway, it was a safe assumption. She hadn’t had any patrons to send anywhere. The general population of Maryville had been up, awake and nervous long before she had. A lot of them had been in town during the flood of 1953, and the rest had heard the stories. No, it wasn’t any of these usual categories of people who were giving Glinda trouble. It was that puzzle of puzzles, that confusion of confusions, The Library Lady.
    Glinda had packed away everything on the checkout desk except for the rubber stamp. She had even put her extensive notes on what the library was doing to celebrate St. Pat’s and honor the Blessed Margaret Finney in her tote bag, so she could carry them up the hill and be sure they weren’t ruined. Now she put the stamp in the desk’s center drawer and slammed the drawer shut. The Library Lady was Mrs. Barbara Keel, and technically she should be called a Community Volunteer. Like the other Community Volunteers, she was supposed to walk around the library putting abandoned books into a cart, make posters, decorate for holidays, and generally do the million and one pieces of small work the paid