How Not to Guard a Library

Elusive. Be pragmatic. Be calm. Stop the screaming in your head. Not here. Yes, here. YES, HERE! Convince yourself. The manuscript is here. Somewhere here since Edison had brought her to this part of the stacks. Elusive manuscript.

“I am too old for this,” Maizy said to the library cat. She let go of her walker and stretched her arms up past her white hair towards the ceiling. Dressed in old blue jeans and a t-shirt announcing that cats rule, she was fastidiously made up and had red painted nails that complemented her lip color.

Edison yawned before strolling towards the shelves where she stood. He unsheathed his claws and swiped just as Maizy swooped him up, tottering a bit under his weight. He growled in protest, but sheathed his claws and his tortoiseshell body went limp. Maizy stooped to look at the book Edison had chosen on the bottom shelf, shuffling her feet slightly apart to help keep her balance,

Setting Edison on the floor, she gripped the third shelf from the bottom and leaned even farther over. Sigh. A reference guide to rodents. False alarm. He just wanted to look at the pictures. Then, peering closer, she saw a wad of paper lying across the top of it and the surrounding books. Maybe? She pulled the mice book out and opened it for Edison before reaching for the crumpled papers.

Maizy gently tugged until the papers slid from the bookcase. Breathing heavily, she pulled herself back upright, carefully turned around, and set the papers on the seat of her walker. Grabbing the bars, she walked, thump and step, thump and step, to the table where she had left the stolen keycard and her tote. Sliding gratefully if not gracefully into a chair, she picked up the crumpled wad of papers and smoothed them out. Disappointment. She looked reproachfully at the cat.

“And just why would you want me to read a selection of short stories cut from a book?” Maizy demanded. “All the words on one edge have been cut off so I can’t read it anyway,” she added petulantly.

She sighed. Looked toward the shelf. Looked at her walker with distaste. That elusive manuscript. Looked at the wad of paper and, swiveling around, looked towards the shelf where the book the pages belonged to should be. Even farther than the shelf the manuscript should have been on. Her eyes narrowed in contemplation. She thought. Thought long and hard about hiding places.

Pushing herself up, Maizy grabbed the walker and thump stepped her way over to the distant bookshelf. Took a minute to find the slightly misshelved book, balanced carefully to free her hands, pulled it out and opened it. She gasped. Not the manuscript. Not paper of any kind. A knife. A bloody knife about four inches long in the cavity made by removing the pages. Great. Now she had two tasks. Find the manuscript. Find the bloody body. She turned and stared woefully at the cat who was still perusing his new favorite book. She watched as he delicately licked a paw and turned a page.

Maybe the manuscript was with the body. Worth hoping. Worth doing. Yes, this was worth doing. She glanced at Edison as she thought. He had stretched out across the book and was eyeing her.

“I haven’t given up,” she assured him. The tip of his tail vibrated. Then he bolted up onto four paws, scampered across the laminate floor that separated them, and joined her in scanning the shelves in front of them. Misshelved book? What was in its place? What should be in the place she found it? Edison meowed, stretched up, and butted his head against a book on the second shelf from the floor. Maizy pulled it out.

“A guide to gardening?” she mused questioningly.

The cat strolled over to the windows and jumped up on the sill. Thump and step, thump and step. She joined him in the moonlight pouring through the panes. The Wi-Fi Garden was eerily lit with small lights along the passage between benches. Moonlight threw trees’ shadows menacingly over a playscape. The spinner had a figure hunched over on the bench. Maizy sighed. Probably the dead body. Why was there always a dead body? Well, this would be the last one she would find. She hoped.

“We need to see if the manuscript is there, too,” she told the cat, who seemed to nod in agreement.

She looked at the door to the garden and then over at the desk where the alarm panel was hidden under the return shelf. Thump and step, Thump and step. Repeated until she reached the desk. She should have turned off all the door alarms when she came in. Not just the front. Done now.

Thump and step, Thump and step, Passing the window on the way back to the door she glanced out. The spinner was empty.

“Oh my,” she said to the cat, who was looking expectantly at the door. “I guess that wasn’t the dead body after all.” Unless it was an undead body. Maizy really didn’t want to deal with zombies tonight. The cat was enough of a challenge. And there was the bloody knife, too. There was a knock at the garden door.

Should she unlock the door? First, she decided, a cup of tea. “Let them know I’ll be a minute, please,” she asked the cat, who jumped up to the window and tipped its head.

Thumping and stepping back behind the counter and into the staff kitchen, she heated water in the microwave and made two cups of tea. She set them on a tray and put the tray on her walker seat. Making her way slowly—more of a glide than a thump—back to the garden door so as to not spill, she unlocked the door. A silver haired woman a few inches taller and about twenty five years younger than Maizy held it open for her and she and the cat made their way to one of the benches. Maizy would never drink in the library proper.

The woman sat on the bench next to her and Maizy beamed. “Lorna, what a surprise.”

“Long time, no see,” Lorna said. “I’ve missed you, Aunt Maizy.”

Maizy passed her a cup of tea. “Do you know anything about a bloody knife?” she inquired politely.

“Here?” Lorna asked, with a lifted left eyebrow.

“Yes, here,” Maizy answered with a sigh. Edison mewled softly. Lorna tipped her head forward to stare at him.

“Edison?” she asked. He jumped in her lap in answer.

“Oh my,” said Lorna softly, “You must be looking for the manuscript.”

“Yes,” Maizy said sadly. “But it isn’t where I thought it would be. Only the pages cut out of a book. That book had the knife in it. How did you find this library?”

“Michael told me he had seen Edison here,” Lorna said as she stroked the cat.

“Really?” asked Maizy. Her eyes narrowed. Her lips pursed.

“Yep. He’s been visiting libraries non-stop.” Edison purred and nodded.

“Did he mention a dead body?”

Lorna shifted uneasily. She glanced over her shoulder at the dumpster just visible over the fence in the back of the parking lot. Edison jumped down and padded over to the fence.

Maizy sighed, “Did Michael take the manuscript?”

“Yes,” admitted Lorna. “He told me I had to take care of the body before he would give it to me.”

Maizy was irritated. Having a serial killer in the family was an annoyance she could have lived without. Especially one as careless as Michael. Even though he usually had a good reason to pick his victim. Lorna was always having to clean up after her cousin if Maizy wasn’t around to do it. Why hadn’t Michael called her?

“He wanted to read the manuscript to make sure Edison was the last,” explained Lorna, reading Maizy’s mind. “I don’t think he realized that you had already identified the library Edison was at.”

“Social media has made my job so much easier,” murmured Maizy. “As soon as I saw a picture of the cat they call Monster on their webpage, I knew it was Edison. You and Michael and all the rest were so much harder to find.”

“What next?”

“I need the manuscript,” Maisy informed her. “That is the last step. Then Edison will be free to live his life.”

“Then let’s take care of the body and go tackle Michael,” Lorna suggested. Edison crooned a feline agreement. All three turned to face the dumpster.

Michael let Lorna into his room at the hotel nearest the library. The manuscript had been shredded, but he didn’t tell her that. Once he had read it and understood the ramifications of Maizy getting her hands on it, he knew he was going to have to run from her for the rest of his life. But first, he wanted to hear whether he would be running from the law, too, if Lorna hadn’t taken care of the body.

“The manuscript,” she demanded as soon as the door started to swing shut behind her. Thumping and stepping sounded from the hall and Lorna caught the door and held it open. Maizy entered the room, her gaze fixed on her son.

“Hi Mom,” Michael said uneasily, running a hand over his almost bald scalp before hitching his pants up from where they had slid down under his pot belly.

“Where is the manuscript?” she asked sweetly. “Edison needs to be freed from the library.”

He couldn’t stop himself from glancing at a shredder by the desk in the corner.

“Shredded?” she asked. He nodded.

Thump and step. She made her way over to the shredder, sat down on the walker bench, and took the lid off the thing. Pulling a book of matches from her tote, she struck one and dropped it in the thick plastic bin. The paper would burn up before the plastic melted down. She looked at Lorna.

“Bring me a cup of water from the bathroom, please.” Lorna complied and, after stirring the ashes of the burned manuscript, Maizy poured the water over them.

“I had no idea that writing down the spell would send every one of you to a different library. It’s just that my memory isn’t as good as it once was, and I wanted to make sure that our family tradition of taking turns protecting the books at our library branch continued after I was gone. I certainly wasn’t going to reactivate the manuscript.” She looked reproachfully at her son.

Michael shook his head like he would never have thought that. Maizy sniffed. 

Lorna diffused the tension by opening the door. “Let’s head back to the library.”

Edison was waiting for them. A small child of about six, he immediately hugged Michael. “Gramps!” he exclaimed. “I did my job keeping the mice out of the books!”

Maizy smiled at them both fondly as Lorna looked on. She turned to Michael. “Just what did the person whose body ended up in the dumpster do to become the focus of your wrath?” she asked.

“She was tearing pages out of a recipe book. A library recipe book!”

Maisy sighed. This from a man who had hollowed out a book to hide a bloody knife. Maybe she should limit him to digital library book protection in the future.