“The Library Book”
Antonio Roman Campos
FICTION
Despite what you might have read in the morning papers or seen on the evening news, Elaine Thisbe was not just an ordinary librarian before the events of that fateful April day in 2016. Sure, she worked at a historical branch of the Spokane Public Library, where you could usually find her thumbing through old card catalogs or trolleying books back to their proper locations in the stacks. Sure, she knew how to wrestle with the copy machine from the ’80s, and she knew how to reboot the computer system from the ’90s when it inevitably crashed on a weekday afternoon. Sure, she could direct you to the books about Celtic history, or Japanese theatre, or medieval mysticism with a silent sigh, Don’t they teach the Dewey Decimal System in schools anymore? And, sure, she could show you where to find the latest manga comic books with an unspoken smirk, Why don’t you try some real literature?
Sure, her nametag read Librarian in clear, black capitals, but the world always guessed that she was just a little bit more than that, and Elaine Thisbe knew it.
One thing that made attractive, 25-year-old Elaine Thisbe stand out from other librarians was her car, which did not match the commonplace sedans of the older library ladies, all clustered in the parking lot dripping oil. Elaine’s vehicle, admittedly, was used… but more specifically it was a used, iris blue 1960 MG A convertible that she had restored herself using more than a little bit of elbow grease. In its now perfected condition, the zippy, classic sportscar was worth a cool fifty thousand dollars.
Another way in which Elaine dissented from banality was in her choice of wardrobe, which contrasted markedly with her colleagues’ mostly drab sweaters with blue jeans or black leggings. Instead, she chose to wear some festive frock or snazzy skirt suit almost every day, usually vintage, with eyepopping color schemes torn from the pages of 1950s Look or 1960s Glamour magazines. Elaine looked exquisite in these retro outfits equally inspired by Jackie Kennedy, Audrey Hepburn, and Marlo Thomas, and patrons commented on them frequently:
But do you wear such bright, high heels every day? “Of course.”
And hose too, doesn’t it run? “Sometimes.”
Do you buy all of it vintage? “Most of it; some things I have to order custom.”
But, how do you afford it… I mean, as a librarian? “I try to be frugal elsewhere.”
It was true that Elaine Thisbe tried to be frugal, but she really didn’t have to save money. It was a little-known fact that her father, Albert (“Big Al” professionally), had been a successful used car dealer in town, and, predeceased by his wife, he had left most of his money, along with the company, in a trust for his daughter when he passed away from diabetes. This left a lonely Elaine, barely nineteen at the time, all of a sudden a millionaire—or almost a millionaire—with no other major interests than reading and writing mid-century murder mysteries and spy thrillers. She had finished a B.A. in English at Gonzaga in only three years, having come in with credits from high school, and, disengaged from the world, she had decided “to retire” to write. Still, she figured that she could use a day job to help organize her schedule, and she could not think of a better place to work than the old, brick-columned library that she had so loved as a youngster.
In short, Elaine Thisbe was more than just a librarian. She was secretly a wealthy used-car-baroness who had published a half-dozen short stories about post-World War II murder and mayhem, each under a different pseudonym derived from ancient Greco-Roman mythology. In fact, even “Thisbe” was not her real name, though she did collect her biweekly library checks under it, and she did see herself as the kind of woman who would not mind peering through cracks in walls to meet clandestine lovers in ancient Babylon. Elaine’s real surname was Gullickson, which sounded a lot more fitting when blasted over a loudspeaker telling “Big Al” to get to the office than when whispered in the library’s poetry section. The “Elaine,” part, at least, was real… so far as can be told.
This brings us to that fateful Thursday in April, when Elaine the librarian was manning the desk of the Spokane Public Library, stamping some newly arrived books with the library’s name and address. “Property of…” now shown on almost every title page from a stack of adventures and romances, and, through a fateful slip of the rubber stamper, it now also stained Elaine’s thumb—thank goodness she had not been wearing her new silk day gloves at the time.
Forgoing the easy access drop-off box on the front of the building, an older woman approached the desk with a small stack of items to return. She was a grandmotherly regular, with dark grey hair and a face that had been hardened by a life of toil, some of it in the former Soviet Union. When she spoke, it was with the thick accent of her native Brandenburg, East Germany, but slightly softened by many years spent studying English in the States. “Ach, Miss Elaine,” she caught her breath, “it is always so good to see you in your lovely old clothes. Ach, it takes me back to my first husband, Hans, and makes me feel young again! Are you having a good day today, my dear?”
“It’s never a bad day at the library,” Elaine responded, keeping her heavily lined eyes on her work. When she finished stamping the last new book, she accepted the German immigrant’s small stack of literature. “I can see that your American Lit. night class is keeping you busy, Mrs. Eichhorst,” the librarian was genuinely impressed. “Melville… Emerson… Cooper… Dickinson… I know many students who dare not tussle with these American Renaissance masters. Are you returning or renewing?”
“Returning,” the patroness nodded contentedly. “They were such good stories, Miss Elaine… all except for Moby Dick. Ach, it could not really hold my attention for eight hundred pages…”
“I understand,” the librarian grinned, “there is only so much one can say about a white whale.”
The patroness nodded gently and then indicated one of the smaller books with a bony finger. “This one was my favorite,” her accented voice crackled. “Ach, I loved Hepzibah’s character as she tottered around the old house, and, ach, the Curse of Matthew Maule… so curious.”
Elaine was familiar with the work. “Nathanial Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables. A classic Puritan haunted house story combined with a modern mystery plot. I read it in one of my college classes and found it thoroughly enjoyable.”
“Yes, a very fine read. Wunderbar! You know my favorite word?” Mrs. Eichhorst wheezed as she chuckled. “But I worry that you might have some bookworms in your library, Miss Elaine,” she pronounced the w in worms like a v. “Ach, some of the pages were not in very good condition. Holes, you see…”
“Holes?” Elaine frowned, sure that there were no worms in her tidy stacks. “But this is a fairly new book. Look—it is a school edition from 2006. The binding is clean, and…”
“But it has wormholes!” insisted Mrs. Eichhorst. “I show you,” snatching the new edition of the old novel, she flipped through the pages until she found a particularly large defect, “page seventy-three says something about money, but part of this sentence is missing. You see?”
Elaine read the somewhat archaic verbiage of Nathanial Hawthorne out loud:
It was far more probable, therefore, that the descendants of a Pyncheon who had emigrated to Virginia, in some past generation, and became a great planter there—hearing of Hepzibah’s destitution, and impelled by the splendid generosity of character with which their Virginian mixture must have enriched the New England blood—would send her a remittance of a _______ _______, with a hint of repeating the favor annually.
As Elaine put on her reading glasses to study the page more minutely, it became clear that there was, in fact, a hole in the paper, about the size of two words.
“You see?” the German repeated again, looking for some form of vindication. “Worms! Ach, my Opa used to have the same problem in the Old Country. They eat their way through Goethe and Playboy with the same alacrity, he used to say…”
“Yes, I see the holes,” Elaine responded in appeasement as she flipped through the novel. “But they don’t look like wormholes; the burrowing is always contained to a single page. It looks more like…”
“Worms, as I explained, are the only possibility,” Mrs. Eichhorst waved her hand. “I recommend fumigation before they spread. This is, of course, an old library building, and…”
“I will take it into consideration,” Elaine promised, though she knew the suggestion was far too extreme. “I am sorry about the condition of the book; I suppose it was still readable?”
“Ja, ja. Just a missing word here and there. I just wanted to let you know,” came the response, “and, now I need to check out a few new books for next month’s classes. We are moving on to Whitman and Thoreau.”
Impressive, Elaine considered as she checked out a pair of hefty volumes, at this rate she’ll soon know more English than me… and still have that quaint Old Country accent.
“Here you go, Mrs. Eichhorst,” Elaine nodded as she deposited the books in the toothless mouth of the old woman’s bookbag. “Happy reading.”
“Fumigation,” the old woman wiggled her bony finger as she turned to leave, “that is the only way to get rid of those worms!” She added, before stepping through the automatic doors, “And keep up the snappy dressing, darling, you look like ein Millionär.”
Elaine smiled, cheery as ever, and placed the returned books on her cart.
Leaving the front desk in the capable hands of a volunteer named Rachel, Elaine wheeled her trolley around the waxed pine floor of the old library, first visiting the New Books display to arrange her freshly stamped copies, and then depositing returned volumes back in their proper locations. She saved Mrs. Eichhorst’s books for last, because they came from the seldom-used Required Reading section towards the back of the building. Melville was soon returned to his spot at 813.3 on the Dewey Decimal System, and Emerson, Cooper, and Dickinson all found their homes nearby, thus leaving Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables alone in the cart.
The book was a random volume from a set of thirty copies owned by the library for use by the literature night classes; they were all bound in matching faux leather. Opening Mrs. Eichhorst’s copy once again and flipping through its contents, Elaine resolved that her earlier intuitions had been correct. The defects in the book did not appear to be the result of the random gnawing of worms or insects, but the purposeful scores of an Xacto knife, evidenced by squared corners and straight lines cut in the paper.
What monster would spend so much time cutting into a borrowed book?
Curious, Elaine retrieved a neighboring copy of Hawthorne from the shelf and brought both of the classroom copies to the nearest reading room table. Flipping to page seventy-three of the unadulterated volume, she read:
…would send her a remittance of a thousand dollars, with a hint of repeating the favor annually.
These particular missing words caught the librarian’s mystery-laced psyche with an eagle’s razor-sharp talons. Now, why would someone clip the phrase “thousand dollars” from a library book? Any answer to this question that the detective-story-enthusiast could formulate did not have a purely innocent motivation.
Having a few minutes to spare before being needed back at the front desk, Elaine pulled a small pad of paper and her 1952 Waterman fountainpen, tipped in 18-karat gold, from her scarlet handbag, and she set to work. The librarian was determined to make an exhaustive inventory of the missing words from the Hawthorne novel. It is probably nothing, she superficially insisted as she popped the cap from the valuable vintage pen, there could be a hundred reasons why someone might cut out words from a book, she thought as she sat down to work. But, then again…
As an oft-borrowed library book, The House of the Seven Gables was fairly worn for its age, but the pages were still bright enough that every snipped incision remained utterly obvious. Beginning her work at the start of the story, Elaine skimmed through the author’s introduction and preface for several paragraphs before noting the first anomaly in the recently borrowed edition. She compared the same line in the two versions and recorded the anomaly on her pad…
[PAGE 8] If he think fit, also, he may so manage his atmospherical medium as to _____ out or mellow the lights, and deepen and enrich the shadows of the picture.
“Bring!” Elaine whispered to herself, shocked by how easily things were coming together. “Bring” what? The “thousand dollars” of course! But this solution seemed too childishly simple. Elaine craved a mystery, but she needed more evidence. Luckily, the next clipped page that the librarian found yielded up not one, but two potential clues:
[PAGE 20] “Nay, please ____ worship,” answered the man, in much perpl____y, but with a backwardness that strikingly indicated the hard and severe character of Colonel Pyncheon’s domestic rule…
According to the intact copy of the novel, the complete missing word was “your,” while the book-cutting culprit had only extracted “exit” from the conveniently located diction, “perplexity” on the same line of the page. Bring… thousand dollars… your… exit. What did it mean, if anything? Elaine continued her investigation, dying to find out.
Page thirty-one yielded the word “husband” ending the clause, “His widow had recently taken another _______,” and, towards the end of Chapter I, on page thirty-two, the word “lost” had been stolen from the legend of the Salem wizard Matthew Maule, who had cursed the titular House of the Seven Gables. Leaning over the book with such intense singularity of purpose that she did not even notice the unrelenting passing of time on her manual-winding 1965 Seiko, Elaine proceeded through the book chapter by chapter. Rapturously, she skimmed the story of the haunted house, the corrupt Judge Pyncheon, the old spinster Hepzibah, and the tale’s unique couple—the bright young Phoebe, and the gloomy photographer Holgrave. “Page 121—” she whispered to herself, “wonders… Page 143—inside… Page 144—Valley… Page 160—bills… Page 171—time-being… Page 179—front door…”
“Valley” was capitalized because it came from the strange clause “but the Happy Valley had a cloud over it,” and two of the larger clippings had extracted two words at a time, much like thousand dollars from page seventy-three. Elaine was thoroughly convinced that someone had purposefully chosen to cut words from the book for a reason, but the reason was the thing that she still could not discern. Prospective answers to this question grew grimmer as she skimmed Holgrave’s famous tirade against traditional society on page one hundred and ninety-four, where the words dead man and dead had all been stolen from the same paragraph:
[PAGE 194] A ____ ___ sits on all our judgement seats, and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read ____ men’s books! We laugh at dead men’s jokes, and cry at dead men’s pathos! We are sick of dead men’s diseases, physical and moral, and die of the same remedies with which dead doctors killed their patients!
“Page 263—” Elaine read to herself, “alone… Page 267—come from the word become… Page 273—road from the word railroad… Page 289—fine from the word confinement… Page 324—small.”
There were several minor, two and three letter words clipped from the novel also, but they were generally harder to locate from rapid glances. So, Elaine had now recorded only the contents of the larger clippings: thousand dollars… bring… your… exit… husband… lost… wonders… inside… Valley… bills… time-being… front door… dead… dead man… alone… come… road… fine… small…
“This is nonsense! Why are you messing around with this?” Elaine tried to reason with herself. “This is strange stuff—what are you doing?” To her surprise, a voice in the real world echoed this latter sentiment just as the librarian made the realization that some of the book’s page numbers had also been cut from the corners of the leaves—100 and 67.
“Come on, Elaine, what’s going on? You left to shelve those few books almost an hour ago, and it’s past time for my break.” It was Rachel, the volunteer who had taken over desk duties for Elaine, and she was now standing over the professional librarian with her brownbag lunch.
“What are you working on? Some kind of code for the library’s Young Readers Fest next week?” Rachel wanted to know, changing her expression from irritation to interest as she eyed the tiny markings in Elaine’s notepad.
“Something like that,” the librarian said evasively as she held her place in the damaged book with her finger. She did not want to admit that she was actually… doing what? Trying to prove that someone had stolen words from a schoolbook? It sounded strange even in her head. There were only three kinds of people who checked out old books like this anyway—students, including adult students like Mrs. Eichhorst who read old novels for a class; rare historical enthusiasts who wanted to get the feel for another period of time; and earnest charlatans who wanted to look sophisticated by having copies of Hawthorne and Poe and Dickens on their nightstands. None of these people seemed particularly dangerous; some barely even qualified as interesting. But just before Elaine realized the silliness of her occupation and returned to the desk, Rachel made a comment that cast things in a different light.
“Hey, isn’t that The House of the Seven Gables?” the volunteer asked, adjusting her faded Read Banned Books tee shirt. “Can you believe that I caught some creepy guy trying to steal a copy of that book last week? Imagine!” she scoffed. “All of the brand-new top-sellers on display up front, and someone tries to make off with a cheap copy of a book that anyone could PDF from the Internet. Pretty silly, huh?”
“Pretty silly…” at first Elaine tried to ignore the obvious coincidence, but she still rose from her seat when Rachel began to turn and leave. “Wait, who was the guy?”
“What?” Rachel’s mind was already on her chicken salad sandwich.
“The creepy guy,” ironically someone made a shush gesture to remind the librarian to keep it down, so Elaine whispered, “who tried to steal the book? I, uh, think he might have damaged it.”
“I don’t remember his name,” Rachel shrugged. “Just some creep with long, black hair, like a skater dude or a rocker. He didn’t even have a card, so I had to sign him up. But, if that’s the book, and it’s damaged, then his name should still be in the system from last Tuesday. Now, can I go eat my lunch?”
“Of course,” Elaine nodded as her mind worked overtime with the seemingly random words clipped from the pages. “Besides, I need to use the front desk computer.”
***
Valley… time-being… your… husband… small… bills… leave… front door… wonders… lost… exit… 67… alone… inside… thousand dollars… 100… dead… road… fine… come… dead man.
There were twenty-one pieces to the puzzle; twenty-one clues to the mystery in all, and they spun around and around in Elaine’s mind like one of her favorite LP records, as she tried to log into the library’s website with her special access credentials. It was difficult, if not impossible, for her to keep all of the pieces in her brain at once, and she kept having to glance at her pad as she waited for the outdated computer to load.
your husband… inside [the] front door… lost wonders… Valley road…
It was easier for Elaine to remember the words if she put them into reasonable-sounding groups, but how could she know if any of these groups were correct, given the smaller words that she was still missing. Didn’t small wonders make as much sense as lost wonders? Or couldn’t there be a lost Valley, or, perceivably, even a [L]ost Valley [R]oad? And then there was the phrase come alone which seemed too eccentric to be real, combined, as it was, from random cut-outs from a random book. But didn’t the clippings have to mean something? If not, this was all just an elaborate thought exercise from an over-active imagination. The same imagination, you must recall, that made up a fake surname from an ancient Roman myth, and the same one that chose to dress and act like an haute couture model from some sixty years prior.
Your husband [is] lost… Leave [the] dead man alone… 67 thousand dollars…
What did it mean? What did it mean? Why did the computer from the ‘90s not load faster?
Come [to the] Valley [of] Wonders… Dead man inside [the] front door…
That was worse. Creepier. Yet still meaningless.
Your husband [is] fine… bring 67 thousand dollars [in] 100 [dollar] bills… Wonders Valley Road… Dead man exit[s] alone…
Elaine questioned whether that was better or worse. It used more of the available words, but the result was yet more eerie, and she could make no sense out of the remaining diction. Lost… inside… leave… dead… time-being… small… come… front door…
The computer had loaded, and Elaine had typed in her credentials, but she wanted to make one last attempt at what she assumed to be a solvable puzzle.
Your husband [is] fine [for the] time-being… Bring 67 thousand dollars [in] 100 [dollar] bills… Leave inside front door… Lost Valley Road… Dead man exit[s] alone…
Elaine knew that this was better still, and she was fully convinced that she was on the right track, but there were still words remaining. Words, words, words! And no punctuation to help arrange them. No capitalization except for “Valley.” There remained wonders… dead… small… come…
She considered pounding the table in frustration, but instead opted to search for recent check-outs of The House of the Seven Gables on the computer. There was Ingrid Eichhorst, as expected, and other members of her class. Only one name on the list was unfamiliar to Elaine—Tom Villard, who had no other current items. A glance at the due date sheet inside the damaged book by itself would have been of little help, as the penultimate name had been badly smudged to read something like “omVill,” but, thanks to technology, Elaine now confirmed exactly who had last handled the novel. Tom Villard. The same man, no doubt, who had crafted the potentially untraceable message that soon manifested on the writing pad as the librarian carefully rearranged the words in her mind, swapping numbers and sentence structures to arrive at the most plausible conclusions:
Your husband [is] fine [for the] time-being. Bring 67 thousand dollars [in] small bills [or he is] dead. Leave inside front door [on] Lost Road [in] Wonders Valley. Exit 100. Come alone [or he is a] dead man.
Not quite right, Elaine considered, mentally repositioning the puzzle. If it really was a ransom note, and she had not gone insane, then surely the kidnapper would want an even sum, whereas an exit along a road could be anywhere. She switched the “100” and the “67,” but she still had never heard of a place called “Wonders Valley.”
The message was not perfect, but, with a specific name and a convincing threat, the librarian felt that she had to go to the police.
***
“I know that you fancy yourself to be a mystery novelist, Elaine, but you have to admit that this one is pretty far-fetched. I mean, people do not really carve death threats out of library books, and little old German ladies do not happen to stumble upon extortion plots. That’s only for the suckers who buy books at the convenience store or tickets for the movies.”
These sage words of profound wisdom came from Police Sergeant Julian Myers, the only policeman whom Elaine Thisbe knew personally, and not exactly the best officer in the city. Known to his troopers as Sarge Myers, to his friends as Jumping Jules Myers, and to his lovers as Juicy Jules Myers, the police sergeant counted his mother and Elaine as the only people on Earth who actually called him by his untruncated Christian name, Julian. At six foot, four-and-a-half inches and carrying 230 pounds of (mostly) muscle, 26-year-old Julian Myers considered himself to be more of a babe magnet than a beat cop. He had always been interested in Elaine Thisbe, though he admitted that she was not his usual happy-go-lucky, all’s-well-that-ends-well type. There was something about that crazy girl in her retro clothes and her retro make-up and her retro hairdo that strangely fascinated—and really appealed—to him. He didn’t want to admit that he had the hots for a librarian, but her car—well, that beauty somehow made it all acceptable.
Julian had exchanged numbers with Elaine a few months ago, when she wanted to do some story research into the inner workings of the police department. He had mentally added an assumed “wink-wink” after her word “research,” and popped her digits into his smartphone, not knowing whether or not she would ever actually call. But she did call. A lot actually. And, despite his best efforts at firing up the old charm machine, she had only ever called for research. So, obviously, she was a lesbian. There was no other explanation for such behavior.
Sergeant Julian Myers answered his cell phone that Thursday afternoon hoping that his luck had changed with the beautiful, young librarian. Coffee would be nice… dinner would be better… at seven, no eight o’clock, somewhere overlooking the Spokane River…
“Julian, we need to talk. I think that there may be a crime in progress.”
When the conversation began that way, even Juicy Jules Myers knew that romance was out of the picture. In five minutes, he was walking through the doors of the library and up to the spitting image of Miss Spokane 1961, prepared to read a threat, the origin of which bordered on the outrageous:
Your husband is fine for the time-being. Bring 100 thousand dollars in small bills or he is dead. Leave it inside the front door of the Lost Road, Valley of Wonders. Exit on 67. Come alone or he is a dead man.
The police sergeant repeated his earlier sentiment, “Elaine, I have known you for a while, and I realize that you are a pretty creative person, but come on, this is really out there. There are no codes hidden in books anymore, crafted by mysterious madmen who smudge their names on paper and forget about computer entries. It just doesn’t happen…”
Having spent more than two hours nailing down the ransom message contained in the Hawthorne novel, Elaine had to disagree with Officer Stud. “This message perfectly corresponds to every word that was cut from the pages of the novel, Julian,” she protested. “I went through the book again and again with a fine-toothed comb, and this ransom message fits the snipped words exactly. That kind of precision just doesn’t happen,” she emphasized.
“Maybe it was a joke?” the officer wondered.
“I believe that you are duty-bound to take every threat seriously,” the librarian countered.
Jumping Jules rolled his eyes, “But, what I’m looking at here is not a threatening message; it is a word puzzle that you constructed, and it barely even makes sense at the end.” The officer shook his head, “Leave it inside the front door of the Lost Road, Valley of Wonders. Exit on 67. How is a road supposed to have a front door? And where is this “Valley of Wonders” supposed to be? Even if I do take this message seriously, I do not know who to protect, where, or from what. The recipient of the threat is not even named!”
These were valid points on behalf of the officer of the law, but the librarian countered that he was the professional, and he ought to be able to piece together what little remained of the mystery, given her delicately executed handiwork. Julian merely groaned in reply as the radio on his belt garbled.
“Listen,” the sergeant explained, “I promise that I will look into this matter back at the station, and I will have one of my officers search the database for Tom Villard, but I doubt that he used his real identity to get a library card if he was planning on committing a crime. Without any definite victims, there is really not much I can do.”
Elaine was frustrated, but she saw the sense in the policeman’s words. Keeping a copy of her reconstructed ransom note for herself, she handed the damaged library book and some of her other notes over to Julian as evidence. “Do everything that you can,” she exhorted him. “Someone might be in real trouble.”
It was only after the police sergeant departed that Rachel revealed she had been listening in on the conversation from her post at the front desk. “Dang, Elaine, do you really think that someone cut a ransom note out of the pages of a library book?” The volunteer cautiously approached the professional librarian, her dark tee shirt and jeans sharply contrasting with Elaine’s shapely, coral-colored swing dress, pearl necklace, and silk day gloves. “And you figured out what the message said just by skimming the book?”
Elaine Thisbe wasn’t sure what to think. She felt like she had thoroughly and scientifically investigated the matter, but she couldn’t be sure she hadn’t jumped to conclusions. Maybe her mystery-infused mind was playing tricks on her, developing intrigues where none existed. “Maybe you can help,” Elaine extended an olive branch to the distant Rachel. “Maybe there is something that I missed.”
The volunteer accepted the librarian’s notepad and read the message again. Elaine felt certain that she had found all of the smaller words by now, in addition to the more obvious ones:
Your husband is fine for the time-being. Bring 100 thousand dollars in small bills or he is dead. Leave it inside the front door of the Lost Road, Valley of Wonders. Exit on 67. Come alone or he is a dead man.
“It seems pretty convincing to me,” Rachel considered as she read the concise message. “Except for the address, Lost Road, Valley of Wonders. You know, there is a Lost Valley Road about an hour from here, across the Idaho border…”
“Really?” the librarian’s curiosity flared up again as she considered Lost Valley Road…
“Sure. My family used to go fishing in the mountain streams around there,” Rachel explained, “we caught the best trout you’ve ever seen. Come to think of it, there was also a little, abandoned shack next to the turnoff from the highway onto Lost Valley Road; it used to be a roadside attraction called the Museum of Wonders.”
“Wonders?” Elaine’s mind darted through the string of all-too-familiar words, looking for logical combinations. “Lost Valley Road works, but there was no mention of a museum in the whole story…”
It was Rachel’s turn to play the sleuth now, “Maybe not in the story, but did you check the endpaper?” the volunteer asked, holding up the blank first page of an intact Hawthorne novel. “Look, these school editions are made using special, extra-durable pages. Did you check if this marking was missing in the clipped copy?”
The librarian read the final clue, squeezed at the bottom of an otherwise blank endpaper:
This Edition Printed on Museum-Grade Archival Paper
Elaine’s heart skipped a beat. The mystery was solved.
***
Your husband is fine for the time-being. Bring 100 thousand dollars in small bills or he is dead. Leave it inside the front door of the Museum of Wonders on Lost Valley Road. Exit 67. Come alone or he is a dead man.
This was the message that Elaine conveyed to Sergeant Julian’s answering machine before rushing out of the library in a hurry that Thursday afternoon in mid-April. Unable to get a hold of the one policeman she trusted with her outlandish story, she left Rachel in charge of the desk and bounded toward her 1960 cabriolet, shifting it into gear and slamming down the clutch. In a few moments, she was on the open highway, conspicuously zooming out of Spokane, Washington, and towards the Idaho border in her Audrey Hepburn sunglasses and driving headscarf. Elaine still did not know the time or date associated with the message she had deduced, but she knew “By Golly!” if there was something she could do to help a kidnapped man, she needed to try to do it.
Besides, she considered to herself as she passed mountain-surrounded Lake Coeur d’Alene, about halfway to her destination, this sort of thing could be good for your career as a mystery writer. Moreover, it might finally provide an excuse for that 1957 Smith & Wesson Model 19 you have had locked in the glovebox since the auction last year.
But, as the iris blue 1960 MG A sailed through the growing mountains toward the Idaho-Montana border, its driver began to make more serious considerations to herself: What if that threatening message has not yet been delivered, and nobody is currently at the museum? What if the ransom has already been paid, and you are needlessly heading into danger? What if the kidnapper really is there, and you need to use the revolver? Could you really shoot a man, Elaine? How much confidence do you have?
Nevertheless, the classic sportscar exited the Interstate just past Wallace, Idaho, in the deep fastnesses of the northern Rocky Mountains. The sun was setting prematurely in the Idaho Panhandle National Forest as Elaine rumbled along the eerie length of Lost Valley Road, shifting from fourth gear to third, and finally to crawling second. The so-called Museum of Wonders, a hewn log shack with an overshadowing hand-painted sign, appeared up ahead on the side of the road. Through its unshaded windows, Elaine could tell that the lights were on.
The librarian popped her manual shift into first gear and rolled toward the museum’s gravel parking lot without wanting to turn off the car entirely. She knew now that she was being stupid. She should have left this matter with the authorities; she should have stuck to her mystery books and word puzzles, and let handsome Sergeant Julian contact his rural Idaho counterparts. But just as she made up her mind to turn around and make the hour drive back to Spokane in defeat, Elaine noticed something familiar about her surroundings. There was an old truck parked outside of the museum, painted a distinctive color of orange and displaying an unusual bumper sticker, Wunderbar! written in all caps on a Bavarian blue and white background.
Yes, she did know the old woman’s favorite word.
Suddenly, a dark figure leapt toward the idling car and struck its occupant over the head with a segment of cast-iron pipe. As Elaine fell forward onto the steering wheel, her vision melted to blackness.
***
When Elaine regained consciousness, she instinctually knew that she was seated inside the tiny, defunct roadside attraction. Rustic timber walls closed in on her in all directions, inconsistent with the laptop computer and fluorescent light bar plugged into the nearby tabletop generator.
Turning away from these light sources, the librarian’s head swirled as she struggled to make out the shadowed objects deeper in the cabin—taxidermized snapping turtles and jackelopes with cobwebbed antlers, darkened cases of Indian arrowheads and pottery shards, and another kind of antique relic that did not belong with the others…
Slowly, Elaine recognized a small figure sitting in the corner of the dusty cabin. It was Ingrid Eichhorst, sitting thoughtfully beside a more sinister figure whom she could not place.
“Gute Nacht, Miss Elaine,” the innocuous German woman claimed from the corner, her voice dry and slightly haunting. “I am very sorry that my husband had to knock you over the head, my dear, but it seemed quite necessary at the time. Ach, Hans has always been a bit of a rough-houser, I am afraid.”
Now, Elaine’s azure eyes focused on the angry-looking figure as he crossed the room and began tapping at the computer keys. This was not Ingrid Eichhorst’s husband that she knew, Aiden, the absent-minded orthodontist who lived on Spokane’s South Hill. This man, Hans, was a tank of eastern European construction, his cold eyes focused on the laptop screen like a wrestler’s focused on an opponent.
The librarian could scarcely believe what she was seeing. Had friendly Mrs. Eichhorst, with her talk of bookworms and the Old Country, really been involved in a kidnapping plot? Had she and her first husband really gotten back together to write a ransom message from the pages of Nathaniel Hawthorne? Had she really drawn attention to the clipped words from the novel to lure Elaine out here—into the dark Idaho woods?
“There—there’s no kidnapped husband, is there?” Elaine trembled as she glanced around the claustrophobic cabin, her eyes searching its dusty glass cases and empty display shelves with growing apprehension. On one of the nearer shelves, she swore that she could glimpse the silver handle of a penknife and a pile of one word paper clippings. “I—I was the target all along…”
“Very good,” Mrs. Eichhorst nodded, following the librarian’s gaze. “You are a clever one, now aren’t you…”
“Please,” Elaine interrupted what might have been a longer monologue, “Please let me go. I can’t possibly imagine what you want with me.”
“Ach, but that is not quite true, now is it, my dear,” the German woman grinned. “You know exactly what we want—what we need. It is your money, of course. Hans and I finally decided that Aiden’s little practice was not generating enough for us; blackmail from botched surgeries can only go so far. But, when we considered you, quiet, vintage, precious Elaine Gullickson, with her penchant for mysteries…”
“I didn’t know that the message was for me,” Elaine swore. “I don’t have any money with me—maybe fifty dollars in the car. Look, I am just a librarian, and I have to be frugal with my limited salary…”
“That is lie!” Hans spoke for the first time, his voice more gravelly and accented than Ingrid’s. “You have more nine hundred thousand dollars in bank account, left you by Vater.”
Elaine was shocked that he knew the truth. She had never openly shared the secret of her wealth with anybody, but she supposed that it was obvious a librarian could not afford classic sportscars, custom frocks, and five-hundred-dollar fountainpens. She remained mute as Mrs. Eichhorst explained, “You will use the computer to transfer all of your savings into our Swiss bank account. You will do it now, or else…”
“You read note,” Hans commented in his broken English. “You get picture.”
Elaine was appalled. Her curiosity for the clues in the novel had put her in this position. Somehow, Mrs. Eichhorst had known that she would investigate the missing words in the novel; she had known that the clues would lure her out to the middle-of-nowhere; she had known, somehow, that she would be foolish enough to come alone.
“And Tom Villard?” Elaine wondered. He was the last piece in the puzzle.
“He was vagrant found under Monroe Street Bridge,” Hans grumbled. “I give him forty dollars to try steal library book. He certainly looked type, ja?”
Elaine nodded mutely. In the back of her mind, she remembered that she had left a message with Sergeant Julian just before driving towards the Idaho border. How long ago had that been, now? Perhaps, he was already enroute. Perhaps she just had to stall for time until he arrived at the dilapidated Museum of Wonders. But, stalling for time became more difficult by the second as Hans pulled what appeared to be the librarian’s own beautifully polished vintage revolver from his belt. Elaine’s eyes had wandered to the unshaded window, imagining that they had glimpsed a uniformed figure somewhere outside, but now they could not be pried from the black muzzle of her own, deadly weapon.
“Very nice gun,” the gravelly voice spoke. “I crave use it… maybe on feet… help convince you transfer money…”
Elaine put her nose in the air indignantly, “I am a vintage kind of girl, remember? I have no cell phone, no eReader… and no online banking account.”
This final fact had seemed crushing in the librarian’s mind, but Hans merely cocked the revolver, “Maybe I convince you sign up, Fräulein.”
The German goliath stood from his chair and angled the gun towards the librarian’s tiny feet, bound, as they were, in plasticky twine and encased in vintage shoes and hosiery. A sudden bang! made Elaine’s pounding heart stop, but she was shocked to find that she had not been hit.
Though her ears were now ringing as shattered glass rained into the room, Elaine recognized that her eyes had not deceived her a moment ago! Hans had been blasted through the shoulder by a well-aimed shot from outside of the log cabin. Rushing past her husband’s bleeding body, Ingrid Eichhorst scrambled for the dropped 1957 revolver, but Elaine moved faster than the old woman. Careening her chair onto its side, the librarian snatched the nearby penknife in her unbound right hand and plunged the full length of the blade into Mrs. Eichhorst’s side as she passed. The resulting wound was superficial, but its shock was sufficient enough to make the old woman trip over her prostrate husband and strike her head against the face of the door.
“That’s for cutting up a library book!” Elaine glared, seeing something poetic in her actions.
An instant later, the museum was invaded by a pair of Idaho state troopers, and soon two more arrived to provide medical treatment for the German couple as the panting librarian had her bonds removed. If Ingrid Eichhorst had succeeded in reaching the dropped revolver, things might have ended more tragically, but Elaine’s quick actions had ensured that nobody was killed in the nighttime engagement.
Arriving with the second set of Idaho state troopers, Julian Myers, now off duty and far outside of jurisdiction, was among the last to enter the defunct roadside attraction near midnight that Thursday in April.
“I expect that you are pretty rattled by this, Elaine,” he said after a while, offering a comforting arm to the young woman. “You know, it was both pretty brave and pretty foolish of you to come out here alone to help save a kidnapping victim.”
“I know it was foolish,” Elaine sighed as she looked down at her watch.
“But I also said that it was brave,” Julian reaffirmed, causing the librarian to raise her eyes with a smirk. He added, “Perhaps you would like a ride home?”
Elaine nodded hoarsely, “That would be nice.”
It was nothing like the idea of a date that Julian had had in mind originally, but he wanted to take what he could get. “I rode over here with the state troopers from their office in Coeur d’Alene,” the Spokane sergeant explained, “but, I tell you what, I think that there is a light blue convertible out front, and I would just love to get behind the wheel.”
“After the day I’ve had, I hope that you can drive a stick.” Elaine chuckled as her smirk developed into a more genuine smile, “She’s vintage, Julian—you’ve got to be gentle with her, and start things slowly…”
“Understood,” came the glowing response. And then, “You know something, Elaine Thisbe? You are a heck of a lot more than some ordinary librarian.”
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