The Grimm Legacy by Polly Shulman Read Free Book Online Page B

brother’s room when he can’t find his sneakers. Let’s take this mess up front and sort it out where there’s better light.” He piled the tangle of garments on a hand truck and pushed it to the work area by the dumbwaiters.
    “Try to find labels for these things,” he said. “I’m going to see who took these out last.” He started flipping through cards in the circulation file. He snorted. “Thought so!”
    “What?” I asked.
    “The last request for II T&G 391.4636 B37 was run by MM—Marc Merritt. Same with II T&G 391.413 A44.”
    “That doesn’t mean he put them back wrong,” I pointed out. “They could have been returned weeks later.”
    “Well, they weren’t. They were returned the same day.”
    “Does it say who reshelved them?”
    “No, we don’t record that.”
    “Then why do you assume it was Marc?”
    “Why do you assume it wasn’t? He was on this stack that day.”
    “Somebody else could have been with him.”
    “Could have been. There’s no evidence they were, though.”
    “There’s no evidence they weren’t, either. And somebody could have scrambled the stuff later too. Who knows when it happened? Maybe it was that page who got fired.”
    “The evidence points where the evidence points.”
    “What do you have against Marc?”
    “I don’t have anything against him personally. I just don’t get why everybody melts around him just because he’s a basketball star. It’s like you think he can’t do any wrong. You ignore all the squirrelly stuff he does.” Aaron was clearly getting upset.
    Well, so was I. “What squirrelly stuff ? And who’s everybody? You mean Anjali?”
    “No, I mean everybody! You girls are the worst, but the librarians are almost as bad. I don’t like the way he’s always sneaking around the Grimm Collection.”
    “No?” I asked. “So what’s in the Grimm Collection?”
    Aaron looked even more upset. “Forget I said that!” he snapped. “I should have kept my mouth shut. I’m taking my break now. Leave this stuff. I’ll get a librarian to come check it out.” He stalked off through the fire door.
    I thought about what he’d said. In fact, the business with Marc and the boots had been kind of squirrelly. And if Marc had been careless about filling out a call slip for the boots, couldn’t he have been careless about reshelving the leggings and chaps too?
    On the other hand, he’d brought the borrowed boots back right away, which was pretty responsible of him. Probably this was all about Aaron’s jealousy.
    That was understandable. I would be jealous too if I were a guy.
    But what was this Grimm Collection, and why was it making Aaron so upset?

    The stack door opened and an unfamiliar librarian came in. She was tall and skinny, with glasses and hair in a bun; she looked like a stereotype of a librarian. She was the first one I’d ever seen who looked like that.
    “Elizabeth, right? I’m Lucy Minnian,” she said. “Aaron tells me you have a mess to sort out.”
    “Yes, I was sweeping the shelves and I found all this.”
    She poked at the tangle, then whistled under her breath. “I’d better send Lee down,” she said. She went out.
    After a while, Dr. Rust came in. “What’s the trouble here?”
    “I found all this stuff misshelved.”
    “Hm . . . looks like the work of that Zandra Blair. She left a trail of chaos wherever she went. It took us a while to figure out she was the one doing it—she was great at shifting the blame. I’m glad to have seen the last of her! Let’s see, were there any labels with these?”
    “Not that I could find.”
    Dr. Rust began sorting through the chaps, separating the tangled straps. “I wish we could use something more up-to-date, like radio tags. Then we wouldn’t lose things on the shelves for years when they get misshelved.”
    “Why don’t you, then?” I asked. “Too expensive?”
    “No, we could probably find the funds for it. But the board of governors is conservative about