That Night in the Library by Eva Jurczyk EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Eva Jurczyk
- Language: English
- Genre: Thriller / Suspense
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Davey
A building is a building. Sticks and stones. Concrete and steel. It wishes its
inhabitants no harm. A building doesn’t dream or weep or hope, any more
than the carved lions that stand in front of it do. It has no ideas, no opinions.
A library is a building full of ideas and opinions. A contradiction!
The William E. Woodend Rare Books Library, more alive than inanimate,
stood elbow to elbow with the other gray stone buildings that made up the
old campus, so often featured in university brochures. The first book had
been shelved nearly one hundred and twenty years earlier. It wasn’t a rare
books library then. At some point in the intervening century, the collection
of books was called “special” and the doors were closed to the public.
One hundred and twenty years for the books to whisper and scheme. If
given one hundred and fifty more, those books might find a way to make
those sticks and stones, that concrete and steel, tumble to the ground.
***
Davey Kebede signed in for his last-ever shift at the library at one o’clock
on the afternoon of Thursday, June 24. It had been Davey’s intention to
sleep in that morning, to gather rest for the long night ahead, but a tiny hole
in the screen of his bedroom window had allowed in one of Vermont’s
awful predawn mosquitoes, and after biting him in the fleshy crevasse
below his eyebrow, the thing continued to buzz near his ear until he finally
abandoned all hope of sleep at six thirty.
The library extended its hours until eight on Thursdays during the
academic year. Every other night it closed at five, and once the university
switched to summer hours it didn’t stay open late at all. The proper
librarians, those with tenure and business cards and health insurance, hated
working Thursdays, refused to work Thursdays. Shift work was for public
librarians. Let them run their seven p.m. romance novel book clubs for
working moms; the rare books specialists were going home in time to watch
the evening news.
Davey loved the late Thursdays. They were staffed by student library
assistants and, performatively, by Ronald, the chief librarian, who would
spend the time in his office reviewing invoices. No one had ever explicitly
told Davey he was in charge on Thursdays, but nature abhors a vacuum
(Aristotle believed that), so Davey would be a leader where he found none.
There was a Ge’ez manuscript on Davey’s desk, a nineteenth-century
prayer book in red and black inks, that he was supposed to be writing
descriptive metadata for, and the most difficult decision of his day was
whether he should reshelve it with the rest of the cataloging backlog or
leave it on his desk as winking confirmation of the inevitable.
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