“Tell you what, why don’t you go look at the library. Good people, although they may be kind of distracted by the library sale on this week. I showed you where the library was, didn’t I?”
Shadow nodded, and said so long. He wished he’d thought of the library himself. He got into the purple 4-Runner and drove south on Main Street, following the lake around to the southernmost point, until he reached the castlelike building that housed the city library. He walked inside. A sign pointed to the basement: LIBRARY SALE, it read. Thg library proper was on the ground floor, and he stamped the snow off his boots. ,
A forbidding woman with pursed, crimson-colored lips asked him pointedly if she could help him.
“I guess I need a library card,” he said. “And I want to know all about thunderbirds.”
Native American Beliefs and Traditions were on a single shelf in one castlelike turret. Shadow pulled down some books and sat in the window seat: In several minutes he had learned that thunderbirds were mythical gigantic birds who lived on mountaintops, who brought the lightning and who flapped their wings to make the thunder. There were some tribes, he read, who believed that the thunderbirds had made the world. Another half hour’s reading did not turn up anything more, and he could,find no mention of eagle stones anywhere in the books’ indexes.
Shadow was putting the last of the books back on the shelf when he became aware of somebody staring at him. Someone small and grave was peeking at him from around the heavy shelves. As he turned to look, the face vanished. He turned his back on the boy, then glanced around to see that he was being watched once more.
In his pocket was the Liberty dollar. He took it out of his pocket and held it up in his right hand, making sure the boy could see it. He finger-palmed it into his left hand, displayed both hands empty, raised his left hand to his mouth and coughed once, letting the coin tumble from his left hand into his right.
The boy looked at him wide-eyed and scampered away, returning a few moments later, dragging an unsmiling Marguerite Olsen, who looked at Shadow suspiciously and said, “Hello, Mister Ainsel. Leon says you were doing magic for him.”
“Just a little prestidigitation, ma’am. Say, I never did say thank you for your advice about heating the apartment. It’s warm as toast in there right now.”
“That’s good.” Her icy expression had not begun to thaw.
“It’s a lovely library,” said Shadow.
“It’s a beautiful building. But the city needs something more efficient and less beautiful. You going to the library sale downstairs?”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“Well, you should. It’s for a good cause.”
“I’ll make a point of getting down there.”
“Head out into the hall and then go downstairs. Good seeing you, Mister Ainsel.”
“Call me Mike,” he said.
She said nothing, just took Leon’s hand and walked the boy over to the children’s section.
“But Mom;” Shadow heard Leon say, “It wasn’t pressed igitation. It wasn ‘t. I saw it vanish and then it fell out of his nose. I saw it.”
An oil portrait of Abraham Lincoln gazed down from the wall at him. Shadow walked down the marble and oak steps to the library basement, through a door into a large room filled with tables, each table covered with books of all kinds, indiscriminately assorted and promiscuously arranged: paperbacks and hardcovers, fiction and nonfiction, periodicals and encyclopedias all side by side upon the tables, spines up or spines out.
Shadow wandered to the back of the room where there was a table covered with old-looking leather-bound books, each with a catalog number painted in white on the spine. “You’re the first person over in that corner all day,” said the man sitting by the stack of empty boxes and bags and the small, open metal cashbox. “Mostly folk just take the thrillers and the children’s books and the Harlequin romances. Jenny Kerton, Danielle Steel, all that.” The man was reading Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. “Everything on the tables is fifty cents a book, or you can take three for a dollar.”
Shadow thanked him and continued to browse. He found a copy of Herodotus’s Histories bound in’-peeling brown leather. It made him think of the paperbadc”cbpy he had left behind in prison. There was a book called Perplexing Parlour Illusions, which looked like it might have some coin effects. He carried both the books over to the man with the cashbox.