Louisiana Saves the Library (7 page)

“Under Ms. Louisiana's desk.”

“Goodness. Well, it's parish property. We can't just throw it away. We have to send it to surplus. I thought Mr. Foley had done that already.”

Hope lifted the box in her sturdy arms. “He shoved it in a corner instead. Typical.”

“Put it back there near the door. I'll make some calls and find out what we are supposed to do with it. Let's sit and talk for a bit.”

Hope rolled her eyes and deposited the box by the back exit. They moved into the kitchen area, where Mr. Henry poured a cup of coffee for himself and added a generous amount of nondairy creamer.

Louise, Hope, and Sylvia took chairs around the folding table. Mr. Henry lowered himself into the last seat like someone in pain. “I have arthritis, back problems—all the old-man afflictions,” he explained. “Not to mention the stomach. Can't drink coffee without all this whitener.”

Sylvia arched an eyebrow. Louise nodded in agreement with her friend's unspoken message. Everything in the place was breaking down, even the employees.

Mr. Henry sipped his coffee. “I'm really happy you all are on board. Mr. Foley and I are getting old. We need some fresh blood in here. No offense, Hope.”

“None taken, Mr. Henry. I ain't no spring chicken.” Hope scraped back her chair and poured herself a cup of black coffee. “I just hope these city girls stick around for a while. Last new person we had up in here skedaddled after a few months. Guess small towns ain't for everyone.”

Mr. Henry ignored Hope's comment. “There's a few things that need doing. A newsletter, like this one.” He produced a Saint Jude Parish Library flyer from the pocket of his tweed sport coat. “Someone needs to do programs for the young adults—the teenagers, you know. Hope here is in charge of the younger children, but we've never done anything for the teenagers. Then, there's interlibrary loan, cataloging, and adult programming. I know the Saint Jude Parish Libraries do book clubs and computer classes. I think our patrons would really like those.”

“Well, Mr. Henry, I would love to do your young adult stuff, if that's okay with Louise here,” Sylvia said.

“Great,” Louise said. Dealing with teenagers brought back too many memories of her own awkward, miserable high school experiences. Let Sylvia organize vampire games and read the
Divergent
books. “I can do computer classes, book clubs, and interlibrary loans.”

“This is going to work great. I know it.” Mr. Henry glanced up as Mr. Foley's office door opened. “I take it that y'all have met our director.”

Mr. Foley stopped at the head of the table. “Mr. Henry, don't you and these young ladies need to get to work?”

“We were just getting acquainted.” Mr. Henry got up, taking even more time than he'd needed to sit down, and washed out his coffee cup in the sink. Still moving like a man in pain, he walked out to the patron area.

Hope glared at Mr. Foley. He stared back at her for a moment before retreating to his office. When the door was closed behind him, Hope said, “I known that man all my life, but that don't mean I like his fat butt.” She dragged two chairs over to the computer near the worktable. “Well, the party's over. Now I got to teach y'all the ropes.”

An hour later, Louise's neck hurt from craning to see the computer screen around Sylvia's mass of red hair. Hope had taught them her cataloging method, which consisted of searching the Library of Congress Web site and copying their record. If the librarians at the nation's book depository hadn't yet classified the title, she tossed it back on the truck. It took willpower for Louise to resist pushing her out of the way and taking over. But she and Sylvia settled for shooting each other incredulous glances as Hope copied the records after giving them no more than a cursory glance.

Hope hit a button and a miniature dot matrix printer churned out the labels. She pulled the dust cover from the first book and stuck the label on the spine. Then, she rubbed the end of a heat gun over it, fixing the label in place.

“Did you ever think about leaving the dust covers on? Most public libraries do that now,” Louise said.

Hope shrugged. “We always take 'em off. Reckon they'd just get messed up anyhow.”

“You can cover them in plastic,” Sylvia said.

“Why?”

“Because it looks nice.”

Hope snorted and tossed the book onto the cart. “Y'all do the rest. I got paper flowers to make for the story time tomorrow.” She went back to her cubicle.

Sylvia picked up one of the books that Hope had discarded and moved into her chair in front of the computer. She'd just started typing in the title when there was a loud crash from inside Mr. Foley's office. It sounded like someone breaking a hundred glass bottles all at the same time. Sylvia dropped the book and it fell to the floor. “What the hell was that?”

“Bikers having a bar fight?” Louise said.

The miniblinds on the director's office windows were completely closed. Now, judging from the noises, someone was throwing the furniture against the wall. Mr. Foley had apparently gone crazy and decided to trash his own office.

A moment later, the director ran out, slamming the door behind him. He'd lost his glasses, and his forehead was red and slick with sweat. He collapsed on the floor, clutching his chest. Louise's own heart began to race. She had put her life in peril. Who would take care of the kids? Their father? Doubtful. Sylvia would have been her first choice, but now they were both going to die. After the rush of panic subsided, she realized that her boss wasn't bleeding. In fact, he seemed terrified but unhurt.

“Deer,” he said, his breath coming out in an old-man wheeze. “A deer in my office.”

Louise felt a wave of relief. An animal in the library wasn't good, but it was better than crazy people with firearms. “What do we do?”

“I'll take care of it.” Hope left through the back door.

Mr. Foley heaved himself up off the floor and lumbered into the employee bathroom.

Louise walked over to Mr. Foley's office. The miniblinds on the door had fallen down, probably when he slammed it shut. The window facing the street was shattered, and pieces of glass were scattered among the books and papers that littered the floor. After breaking through the window, the buck must have gotten confused, and now it couldn't figure out how to get out again. In the small, cluttered space, it ran in circles, tripping over its own legs, blood dripping from its side. The panic in the buck's eyes was haunting. As it whipped its head around frantically, its antlers caught the painting of flying ducks above the desk. The deer shook its head back and forth until the painting crashed down onto the desk.

“Poor thing,” Lily said. “I'll call Wildlife and Fisheries.”

“Hope told us she'd take care of it.” Sylvia's voice sounded unsteady, as though she was trying not to cry.

“I'm just going to see if there's anyone in the patron area.” Lily hurried through the door to circulation.

Hope returned with a rifle and a pair of orange plastic ear protectors. “All y'all get outside. That thing is dangerous. Is there anyone else in the library?”

“Mr. Foley's in the restroom,” Louise said. “Lily went out to the patron area to see if there was anyone around.”

Hope rolled her eyes and banged on the bathroom door. “Mr. Foley, you got to get out. I'm going to unleash some firepower here.”

Mr. Foley emerged, water dripping from the tufts of hair around his ears. At the sight of Hope with the gun, his eyes widened. “You can't shoot it.”

“You got a better idea?” Hope inclined her head toward the office, where the deer was butting its bloody head against the wall.

Mr. Foley waved his hands and disappeared out the back door. A moment later, a vehicle started and left the lot with a squeal of tires on asphalt.

Inside the office, the deer was still turning around and around with frantic energy. Hope watched with a frown, her eyes soft and sad.

Lily returned and tapped Hope on the shoulder. “All clear. I locked the front door.”

“All y'all get out,” Hope said, still focused on the deer. “I gotta open this office up and do this thing.”

Sylvia, Louise, and Lily left through the back exit. A moment after the door swung shut, Louise heard the shot. She sat down hard on the curb.

C
HAPTER
8

S
al stuffed the phone back in his pocket and surveyed the row of cabbages he'd been weeding. He wasn't surprised to get a call from his cousin. Hope always had some little job for him. Her own husband wasn't capable of hard labor anymore. Lewis had collected disability ever since a stint in the army left him with various health complaints. Sal suspected that some of the problems were mental. Lewis had hinted once that he'd seen things he wished he could forget during his tour in Afghanistan. His injuries were probably the reason that Lewis and Hope didn't have any children. Sal had never asked.

A herd of pint-size dogs followed Sal to his truck, and he gently shooed them away with his foot. He supposed he should make them go inside the trailer, but his parents had left him twenty acres and they wouldn't stray that far. Besides, the dogs were good at keeping rabbits and deer away from his crops. Not that Sal considered the Chihuahuas working dogs. Betta called them his furry children, and he had to admit that she was right. He was nearly forty and not yet married. He'd accepted that he wouldn't ever have any actual offspring. The thought made him feel even more alone than he'd been in Chicago. Returning to his hometown was his way of trying to ease the aching emptiness that seemed to grow every year. Being around Hope and Betta helped some, at least for a while. But lately, it wasn't enough.

He even found himself thinking about Chloe sometimes. She'd wanted a life he couldn't give her, though—charity balls, rich friends, and a mini-mansion by the golf course. By the time her parents finished planning the wedding, he'd already decided that he couldn't be a corporate lawyer anymore. Sure, he probably should have told her before he put in his letter of resignation. That wasn't fair; he saw that now. But the lines of communication were already breaking down at that point, and maybe he was scared or maybe just angry. He finally told her the night before the wedding, the absolute wrong time to break the news. So he wasn't completely surprised when she refused to walk down the aisle. Her parents were devastated. He felt terrible—but relieved at the same time.

As he leaned forward to start the pickup, his sweaty T-shirt clung to his back. He could have changed, but Hope would want him to bring the deer home and dress it. After a job like that, he'd need a shower anyway. He adjusted his John Deere cap, turned the truck around, and drove down the gravel driveway to the street. He knew who lived in most of the houses he passed on the way to the library. The town was changing, though. Sometimes the growth made him sad; land that used to be filled with trees was now broken up and mowed down for housing developments. The old school that he and Betta attended had served the whole parish—grades K through twelve. It had been replaced by three separate schools—elementary, middle, and high.

Sal turned onto Route 1 and headed toward the old downtown. At least that hadn't changed much. The Pig and the drugstore were the same, though both buildings had been expanded during a short-lived boom in the 1990s. When they were kids, he and Betta had ridden their bikes to the Icy Cone on sweltering summer days, peddling across asphalt hot enough to burn bare feet. She'd always ordered a cone covered in that weird hard chocolate that cracked when you bit into it. Sal preferred the plain vanilla.

The library had been built right at the time he'd discovered the pleasures of reading. Sal had loved the cold of the air-conditioning in summer and the Hardy Boys and Encyclopedia Brown books he checked out by the backpackful. Pulling into the parking lot, he realized that the place needed an update. He felt the same way about the whole town; he hated to see it change, but he understood that it was necessary. Towns grow or die. He didn't want Alligator Bayou to die. On the other hand, he didn't like the idea of it becoming a strip mall–infested suburb of Saint Jude.

Sal got out of the truck and walked up to the building. For some reason, the library had a picture window on the director's office. The glass had been shattered from the outside. He wasn't surprised that a deer could break through, but he wondered what had caused it to panic and crash through the glass. He'd seen frantic deer caught in fences and scared by headlights, but a buck breaking through a window was a new one on him. Through the hole, he thought he saw the animal lying in the mess of glass and books, but the darkness inside and the tint on the remaining window glass made it hard to tell.

He went in the front door of the library. Ms. Trudy was sitting on her usual chair by the periodical racks.

“Hey, Sal. I missed all the excitement because of my hair appointment. You heard about the deer?” The old lady set aside the celebrity magazine she'd been reading. Ms. Trudy's hair looked the same as it had as long as Sal could remember. She'd grayed early—a genetic condition and not the result of her job as a high school teacher—and it was always styled in wavy curls piled on top of her head. She wore pastel suits even after her retirement, along with nylons and thick-soled shoes.

“Yup. I'm here to pick it up. Hope called me.”

Ms. Trudy had taught Hope, Betta, and Sal. She knew more about them than their own parents did. She never told about how they'd smoked together behind the school building and skipped classes to swim in the little bayou behind the old courthouse. But Sal knew she knew. Nothing got past Ms. Trudy.

“They got a couple of new girls back there,” she said.

“Huh?” Sal took off his hat and attached it to his belt loop.

“Can't remember their names right now, but they just started today. Imagine that. City girls too.”

Sal wasn't sure what Ms. Trudy was talking about. He hoped she wasn't beginning to lose her faculties. She'd always been sharp as a tack, to use an expression his late father had favored. “Okay, well, I'm gonna go see about that deer.”

“I think the pretty redheaded one is married,” Ms. Trudy said, picking up her magazine again.

Still confused, Sal pushed through the circulation half-door and walked into the back room. Hope occasionally asked him to fix a leaky faucet or a refrigerator coil, so he'd been in the employee area of the library before. Every time, the director's office had been closed, miniblinds covering every inch of the windows. But today, the door hung open and the sight made him uncomfortable.

“Took you long enough to get here.” Hope walked up to him, hands on hips.

Beneath her bluster, his cousin was upset. She must have shot the deer herself. Naturally, Hope would have a gun in her pickup truck.

“Let's get that deer out of here,” Sal said.

She nodded and gestured to the open office door. The mess was as bad as Sal had imagined. The deer had knocked down the cheesy painting above Foley Hatfield's desk and leaked blood all over the books and papers on the floor. Glass crunched under Sal's work boots as he approached the carcass. Hope had done the job with one shot to the buck's head. Amazing, considering that the animal had clearly been flailing around frantically. It had to weigh at least two hundred pounds. Seeing the magnificent buck lifelessly lying among the junk of the office, Sal felt lonely emptiness again, like a hole in his gut.

Hope came up behind him, uncharacteristically silent. She grasped the back legs of the deer and Sal lifted the front. It was awkward, but he thought they'd make it to the truck. His cousin was the strongest woman he knew. She'd competed in shot put at the state level during high school. The sport suited Hope—slow and methodical. The grim line of her mouth as she held the deer reminded him of her father's funeral. She'd helped him carry the casket. Though her brother and cousins also served as pallbearers, Sal and Hope could have done the job alone. Sal's uncle had weighed less than half as much as the deer, his body eaten away by the cancer. He'd spent his last year of life on a foldout bed in Hope's living room, quietly deteriorating into a living skeleton.

Sal backed out of the office. It was hard to keep the deer's antlers high enough off the ground not to snag on the carpet. He kept his eyes on the buck as they negotiated the cubicle area and headed for the back door.

Hope paused at one of the cubicles. “Hold the door, would you?”

Someone ran around them to the exit. Sal glanced up from the deer just long enough to see that it was a woman wearing a navy suit. Maybe she was one of the “girls” Ms. Trudy had mentioned. He backed toward the exit. The buck was like a huge sack of lead. Sal adjusted his grip on the furry legs and stepped out into the sunlight. By unspoken agreement, he and Hope turned so that he could walk forward, and they both quickened their pace to the truck. Lifting the deer, they slid it into the pickup bed. Sal shoved the legs farther in so he could close the back. Only then did he turn around and look at the librarian standing against the brick wall of the library.

“Hey, Louise,” Hope said, dusting her hands on her pants legs. “This here's my cousin Sal.”

Sal was too shocked to do anything but nod. He'd occasionally thought about Louise after seeing her in the library, but he'd never looked her up as Lily suggested. No reason to think a professor at A&M would be interested in dating a strawberry farmer. He started to run his hands through his hair, then remembered that they were filthy.

“This here's Louisiana Richardson, one of our new librarians,” Hope said. “Reckon the cat got her tongue.”

“I'd shake hands, but I better wash 'em first,” Sal said. He gave Louise a half-smile. She smiled back and his heart gave a little jump.

The back door opened, and a tall, red-haired woman appeared. “Hey, y'all. Got the deer taken care of?”

“Yup. Sylvia. Our other city girl,” Hope said.

The married one. So Ms. Trudy wasn't losing it. He disagreed with her judgment, though. Clearly, Louise was the prettier of the two. “Pleased to meet you both,” Sal said. “I wouldn't say no to a cup of coffee if you've got some.”

“Oh, absolutely,” Sylvia said, nudging Louise as they went back inside.

“One cup,” Hope said. “But then you best get back and dress that deer for me.”

“I thought you were gonna do that,” Sal said, ribbing his cousin reflexively. He headed straight to the kitchenette and squirted soap on his hands. He wanted to look at Louise, but he forced himself to focus on his hands instead.

Hope stomped in after him and leaned against the counter next to the coffeepot. “I got work to do here.”

“Yeah, well, I got work to do on the farm.” Sal grabbed a paper towel. “I'll just make me a cup of coffee and get out of your hair.”

“No, you let me do that,” Hope said, washing her own hands before filling the coffeepot with water and scooping a generous amount of grounds into the machine. “I ain't that busy. You dress that deer, I'll give you some sausage.”

“All right, but only because you're my sweet little cousin.” Sal sat at the table and stuck his legs out in front of him. “So what's a deer doing in the library? Checking out the new Stephen King?”

Sylvia sat down and gestured for Louise to take the chair nearest to Sal. She was close enough for him to touch. He deliberately folded his hands.

Hope switched on the Mr. Coffee. “Now, you know deer can't read. It was lookin' at the picture books.”

“My cousin ought to do stand-up,” Sal said. “So, the boss is gone.”

“Took off,” Hope said. “Didn't know the man could run that fast.”

“Mr. Foley shook his chunky little butt, that's for sure,” Sylvia said.

Louise laughed. Her shiny milk-chocolate-colored hair obscured her face, and he wanted to reach out and push it back behind her ear. She turned slightly, and her gaze met his for a moment.

Hope got up and fetched her cousin a cup of coffee. “Y'all want some?” Without waiting for a response, she poured two more mugs and put them in front of Louise and Sylvia.

“So, where y'all from?” Sal asked.

“I grew up in New Orleans. Went to St. Francis of Assisi. Louisiana's from Minnesota,” Sylvia said. “Sorry, I always wanted to say that.”

“How'd you end up named after our wonderful state?”

“My dad was from Lafayette and he always wanted to move back, but he had a job in Minnesota,” Louise said, drinking some of her black coffee.

“Well, now he can visit you here.”

“He's deceased. Anyway, my parents hated to fly. That's why we never came down here when I was a kid.”

“I'm sorry about your father. Both my parents are gone now too.” Sal gulped half his coffee. It was still hot and burned going down his throat. “So you are named after Louisiana, but you've never been here?”

“Not until I got the job at A&M.”

“My cousin here pretends he's just a country boy, but he done worked as a lawyer in the frozen north,” Hope said.

“Chicago,” Sal said. “But I didn't like it much, so I came back here.”

“Are you kidding? I love Chicago,” Louise said. “If I could get a job there, I'd never leave.”

“Reckon you might if you were a country boy working in corporate law,” Sal said. “I never wanted to do that. It was all my dad's dream, God bless him. I wanted to be a strawberry farmer. Wish I'd gotten a horticultural degree 'cause all that JD's gonna do is collect dust.”

“Education is never wasted,” Sylvia said. “If nothing else, you might have always wondered what it was like. Now you know.”

“Still wish I'd got that plant studies degree. Oh, well, at least I know how to dress Hope's deer. Thanks for the coffee.” Sal took the cap from his belt loop and put it on. “Very nice meeting y'all.”