The Silver Bough by Lisa Tuttle Read Free Book Online Page B

Again.
    Driving in the rental car from Glasgow to Appleton, her first time in Scotland, she was immediately seduced by the scenery, but it was when she set eyes on the library building that she fell in love. It was a weird, architectural fantasy, with its golden dome, carved stone, and the sort of imposing, pillared front that had been popular on early “Picture Palaces,” suggesting that through these portals all your fantasies would be met. It would have been completely unremarkable in Las Vegas, but in a small Scottish seaside town it was an astonishment and a perpetual wonder. She understood perfectly why a local mythology would have grown up around it, stories of ghosts and secret rooms and madwomen in the attic. She wanted to work here; she wanted to make the library her own.
    Replacing
Megalithic Enquiries in the West of Britain
on the shelf, she decided to do just one more task before going home. She would look for Alexander Wall’s journal. Overtime was only onerous when you were forced into it, and personally there were few things she loved more than treasure-hunting among shelves of old books.
    So, through the door with the map on it into a chilly stone antechamber, past the fire door (painted red, with the sign THIS DOOR IS ALARMED — EMERGENCY USE ONLY ) and up the high, wide, sturdy staircase to another locked room she went.
    The smell of lavender beeswax and old books welcomed her in. Officially, this was the “meeting room,” with a large, highly polished wooden table and matching chairs in the center ready to accommodate any passing committee. In practice, it had not been used in many years for anything but storage. Cardboard boxes had been stacked as neatly as possible beneath and on top of almost a third of the table. Much of their contents was withdrawn stock, either waiting for its turn on the sales table in the foyer or put aside as “reserve,” by Mr. Dean—reserve stock without reserve stock shelving. At some point it would be her job to go through them all with a ruthless hand. She didn’t expect to find any treasures there; it would be a lot of once-popular fiction long past its sell-by date. And yet, although the books had to be removed to make space for new acquisitions, and book culls were a necessary part of a librarian’s life, she had been putting the task off. Libraries should be about conserving and preserving books; selling them off cheaply went against the grain. She guessed the late Mr. Dean had felt the same, and felt a little more kindly toward her predecessor, even if he had left her with a mountainous backlog to sort out.
    Far more interesting than the boxed books were the glass-fronted cases that covered one wall from floor to ceiling. They contained the Wall collection, and other books, which had been donated years ago. Some appropriate volumes had been integrated into the local collection downstairs, but the rest had been left here to languish out of sight. That would soon change. Kathleen’s boss had told her that there was a plan to sell the collection and use the money to fund improvements to the library. Most of the books were probably of little value—there were an awful lot of collected sermons and memoirs of long-forgotten worthies—but there were bound to be a few treasures among the dross. The first step, now that the sale had been agreed to by the local authorities, was to bring in an expert to assess the value of the books. But, as usual when Appleton needed something from outside, the expert was taking his time about getting here.
    From the huge bunch she carried, Kathleen isolated the stubby little key that unlocked the bookcases, and allowed herself the fantasy of discovering a first edition of Darwin’s
Origin of Species,
or something beautiful, hand-lettered and illuminated on vellum by some long-ago monk. In fact, she knew how far-fetched her fantasy was, because the contents of these bookcases had been listed in a small, hard-backed notebook by an