“Who was the Realtor?” asks Bailey. He’s still running his agenda, while I’ve veered off course some, drifting into the past. All of this is not so much about you as it was at first. I feel like I’ve stepped into quicksand.
“I keep a log of visitors,” she says, rising. She walks over to her desk at the end of the room, her heels clicking purposefully. A few taps on the keyboard and she looks up, over her glasses.
“Rick Javits,” she says thoughtfully.
The name rings a bell; he was probably one of the Realtors who called me and whom I ignored. There’s a woman, too, Barbara something or other. She called only recently. Maybe I should call her back.
“Did he come alone?” asks Bailey.
“No,” she says. “He had his client with him, wanted to show the place off. You know how people like to think they’re buying a piece of history.”
“Do you have a name there?” I can tell he’s getting annoyed, having to drag every piece of information out of Joy.
“I’m sorry, no,” she says stiffly. “I entered Rick Javits and client.”
“That seems odd,” says Bailey. “You’re so meticulous about everything else.”
He sweeps his arm around the library to make his point.
Joy peers at him over her glasses, annoyed, imperious. “If I thought he’d be moving into town, I might have paid more attention to him.”
“But he was looking to buy property, so wasn’t that a reasonable expectation?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because the Carson property is not for sale and never has been. Robin won’t sell that land.”
Won’t I? How does she know that?
“Is there a way for us to reach Rick Javits?” asks Bailey.
“He’s a Realtor, Mr. Kirk, I promise you that he’ll be easy to find. You have heard of Google, right?”
“Wow,” he says. “What’s your problem with me?”
“I don’t like people who ask questions thinking that they already have the answers.”
Bailey raises his eyebrows and blows out a breath. “You’re a librarian, right? Aren’t you supposed to live for people who have questions?”
“When they’re honest, when the agenda is clear.”
I’d wonder what Joy has against Bailey Kirk but I already know. Joy is the keeper of history, of the story of this town and how it is told. Bailey Kirk is an outsider and an interloper. He doesn’t speak the language of this place. As someone with a foot in both worlds, I can see why the two would never be compatible. You can’t be a part of the world out there, and understand people like my father who wanted to leave it behind.
Joy comes to sit beside me.
“This is about you right now,” she says, taking my hands. “You’ve been through a lot. What have you come home to find?”
What have I come home to find? I thought I was looking for you. But maybe I am really looking for myself.
“Can you tell me what you remember? About the property, about my father, about the raid? Not just what’s here in the records. But what you know to be true about all of it?”
She regards me over her glasses for a moment with stormy gray eyes. She nods to Bailey, indicating that he can take a seat, which he does with a sigh.
Opening the first of the binders, she tells me what she knows, and she starts at the beginning.
PART THREE
i am the storm
You are the future,
The red sky before sunrise
Over the fields of time.
Rainer Maria Rilke
thirty-six
bonnie
Even though we can’t always have affection for every person we meet, we can always treat every person with kindness.
How many times had Bonnie’s mother said that? A hundred. A thousand. And that was the reason why Bonnie never made fun of Doug. The other kids in their class, when they weren’t actively teasing him—an enterprise usually reserved for lunch or PE when supervision was light—kept their distance.
The truth was that poor Doug wasn’t always clean; often he smelled, and his hair hung greasy and stringy over his eyes. He wasn’t always nice; he had a bad temper and when he got frustrated, he turned an awful shade of red. Even though he was smart, no one wanted to be his lab partner in science class.
But Bonnie kind of liked him, in a strange way. She always made a point to choose him, when it was left up to the chemistry class to pick their groups. And even though Jessica and Evie, her two best friends, were in the class, too, and they were a ready-made group, and they groaned and rolled their eyes when she picked him, Bonnie hated how sad he looked when he thought no one was watching. And he was a good lab partner, even Jessie and Evie admitted that. They were nice to him, too. Bonnie and her friends were the opposite of the “mean” girls—which always seemed like kind of a silly thing. She didn’t really know anyone who was mean all the time.