The St. Ambrose School for Girls(102)
To escape my spinning mind, I’d walk even faster, but then I would be jogging. And besides, what is that saying? Everywhere I go, there I am.
I’m breathing heavily as I enter the Mercer Memorial Library’s glass doors, and I pull them closed behind me, like they’re a cloak of invisibility that will shield me from prosecution.
In spite of the fact that I am guilty of nothing. And Detective Bruno was the first to know this.
I need a moment before I can recalibrate and absorb my environment. When I am able to form an opinion about where I am, my first impression is that the library is over-warm, like an elementary school room where the teacher is worried her charges will come down with spontaneous pneumonia if the temperature goes below sixty-nine degrees Fahrenheit. The carpet underfoot is a speckled brown that coordinates with the seventies-era harvest gold and avocado green décor, and on this main floor, there are big windows all around, letting in gray light. The aroma is pure book, something on the nose spectrum between oatmeal and fresh paint.
The front desk is unmanned—or unwomanned, more likely—and I am glad, even though it means I’m going to have to hunt and peck for what I’m in search of. Beyond the gatekeeper station, the children’s section is right up front, along with popular fiction. There’s also a newspaper station, the hanging rods slung with various pulpy editions like wash that is drying in a yard. These dailies are close to what I’m looking for, but they’re too recent.
After all, I already know what the current articles are saying about Greta. And yes, the murder did hit the national news. There’s nothing about Nick Hollis in any of the reports yet, and I wonder how long that will last. The media are being very persistent. There are a dozen TV newscasters and reporters at the gates of Ambrose, and I don’t think the school is going to be able to keep a lid on something so germane to the murder as what that man did with the student who was killed.
Especially if he becomes an official suspect. Or is it when? Even though I can’t really imagine him killing anybody.
Which is why I’m here.
Refocusing, I find a helpful list of the library’s sections and services on one of those felt signage setups with the white letters you push into soft slats. The display is mounted on the wall by the elevator, but I take the stairs down into the basement. It’s a whole different world underground. The stacks here are gray metal and squeezed in tight, and the flooring is black and gray linoleum, like the gold and green up above is something that has risen to the top of a liquid suspension by virtue of its lesser, and therefore more buoyant, molecular weight.
Down here is the meat of the enterprise, home of reference volumes and the dusty, annotated scholarly stuff that I doubt gets much use. I find the microfiche stations straight ahead, and I am surprised that, again, no one is around making sure that things aren’t tampered with or stolen. But maybe the library knows its clientele can handle with competence and respect whatever is under its roof.
It takes me a while to understand the cataloging of the films, but soon enough, I make some choices from the archive of the New Haven Register. It’s a surprise that a small Massachusetts town like Greensboro stocks the paper’s past issues in its library, and I feel lucky at the show of New England solidarity.
With a flutter in my chest, I sit down at the farthest of the three microfiching machines. At first, it is exhilarating to whip through the columns and pictures of previous issues. Then the whirling makes me queasy—but that could also be because I feel like I’m doing something sneaky.
The article I’m searching for is from back in early September last year, and I have a thought that I am in a needle-in-a-haystack situation. Reversing the flow, I wonder whether I’ll have to consult the next reel and am frustrated that I’m going to have to wade through—
“—what Jerry said. Do you think he’d lie? And don’t tell anyone this, okay.”
I look up from the light box. Two women are emerging from a door marked Staff Only, the kitchenette behind them neat as the rest of the library. As my view of the pristine counter is closed off, I have a random thought that no one would ever reheat cod in that microwave or leave a mug in the sink.
“They got the autopsy results fast, then,” the other one says.
“It’s an Ambrose kid. Like they’d take their time?”
They’re about the same age, fortyish, and dressed in the same version of serviceable skirt and blouse. Their hair is even similar: one’s maybe a little darker, the other showing roots that need a touch-up, but both have shoulder-length blunt cuts. I think of the two cashiers at CVS. Does the town have a rule about coordinating employees? I wonder.
The two cluster together, heads tilted in, voices low.
“And they’re going to keep this quiet, right? Ambrose will never let it out that the dead girl was pregnant—”
Both of them turn to me, startled. Clearly, I’ve made a sound.
I go back to the microfiche, afraid they’ll kick me out for my black clothes. For my eavesdropping, even though they were in the library proper. For the fact that they’ve guessed I’m a bipolar Ambrose student on a mission—
Oh, God. Greta was pregnant?
I think of all the times she went into the bathroom after meals with that toothbrush in hand. Maybe she wasn’t using it the way Francesca showed me.
She was pregnant? Did Nick Hollis know? Was that why he…?