Arthur is even more sullen than usual that morning. The flesh beneath his eyes looks bruised and swollen, like overripe fruit, and he limps slightly when he walks away. I don’t ask about it, and I don’t mention Elizabeth Baine or her profitable arrangement.
It’s easy to forget about her while I work. I bury myself in dusting and sweeping, scraping mold off window frames and dumping mud dauber nests out of drawers. The only thought that surfaces, again and again, is that I am no longer the only person interested in Starling House.
NINE
I should head straight back to the motel after work, but instead I text Jasper working late again and take a right before the old railroad bridge. This is the best view of the power plant, the towers lined up across the river like the turrets of a castle, the ash pond like a tarry black moat. After that there’s a pitted, scrubby stretch of Gravely land, where nothing much grows.
Bev says that’s where they buried Big Jack, because it was against twenty or thirty regulations to do it on company land.12
I make it to the Muhlenberg Public Library an hour before closing time.
Charlotte is bent over the computer banks, blond braid draped over one shoulder, glasses perched on her head, explaining to a patron that color copies cost twenty-five cents a page. The tone of her voice suggests she’s explained this several times already, and expects to explain it several more, so I lurk in the New Arrivals section until she heads back to the front desk.
She greets me with a drawled “Well look who finally decided to turn up,” but there’s no malice in it, because Charlotte is constitutionally incapable of malice. She forgives late fees before the notices even go out and never calls the cops on drunks that fall asleep in the library armchairs; she personally tutored Jasper before his PSAT and she’s the one who marched into the principal’s office when one of his classmates told him to go back to Mexico. Even Bev sits up straighter and runs her fingers through her hair when Charlotte comes by.
“Hey Charlotte. How’s things? School treating you well?” Charlotte has been taking online grad classes for years now. God knows why—they hired her with nothing but an English degree from Morehead State, and after more than a decade in Eden it seems unlikely that she’ll be fired, no matter how many assholes complain about her rainbow decorations every June.
“Well enough. Where you been?”
I tuck my hair behind my ear. “Lots of extra shifts lately, is all.”
“And how’s Jasper?”
“Great. Fine.” I elect not to tell her about the weird mood he’s been in, or that we’re in between inhaler shipments, so he’s been waking up wheezing at two or three every morning, running salt water through his nebulizer until he can breathe again. Sometimes he can’t fall back asleep afterward, and I wake in the morning to find him hollow-eyed and wan, hunched over his laptop. He still hasn’t let me watch whatever he’s working on.
“Anyway, I was just wondering . . .” I walk my fingers across the desktop and bounce them on the stapler.
Charlotte slides the stapler out of my reach. “Yes?”
“Do you have anything on the Starlings? Like, local history stuff?”
I’m expecting her to faint with joy—she’s been working on a history of Eden for years now, and spends her weekends looking at microfilm and photographing old gravestones—but a pair of creases appears around her mouth. “Why?”
“Bev told me a story about it and I just got curious.” I do a casual shrug. Her eyes follow the expensive lines of Arthur’s coat, and the creases around her mouth are joined by a third between her brows. She taps a coworker’s shoulder. “Morgan, can you cover the desk? Come on back, Opal.”
I follow her to the oversized storage closet she refers to, somewhat aspirationally, as the archives. Craft supplies and book donations are piled between cardboard boxes and old issues of The Muhlenburger and the Greenville Leader-News.
Charlotte thumps a tower of plastic totes labeled Gravely Estate. “Do you remember when Old Leon Gravely died? It’s been ten or eleven years now—liver failure, I heard. Pretty sudden. Anyway, when his brother took over the company he gave all his papers to the Historical Society, along with a generous donation. If we’ve got anything about the Starlings, it’ll be in here. Both those names go way back.”
I look from the totes back to Charlotte. “Okay. Would you maybe like to give me a hand? Or some tips?”
“I don’t know, Opal. Would you maybe like to tell me why you’ve been working so much you can’t stop by to say hi, and now you turn up wearing a man’s coat and asking about the Starlings?” Charlotte is so sweet that I sometimes forget she’s smart.
I consider. “No?”
Charlotte stares back at me, and for a short middle-aged librarian wearing glasses with salmon frames it’s remarkable how much she resembles a concrete wall. “Then good luck.” She edges around me. “Put everything back when you’re done.”
Within the first five minutes, I know I’m not going to find anything. The first tote appears to contain the entire contents of an old man’s desk, only haphazardly gathered into folders. There are a lot of bills and letters between lawyers and accountants. There are stray buttons and family photo albums and corks that still smell faintly of Wild Turkey. There’s a few framed photos of various Gravelys cutting ribbons and shaking hands with mayors, men with hair the color of raw meat and women with mean smiles. None of them include a pale girl with wild black eyes.
The second tote is the same, and so is the third. I don’t even bother with the fourth. I’m shoveling everything back, feeling stupid and hungry, when I see it out of the corner of my eye: a wisp of paper poking out from between the pages of a Bible. It’s a receipt from the Elizabethtown Liquor Barn. I hold it with my head tilted, wondering why the sight of it sent a jolt of electricity through my entire body. Then I focus on the phone number written across the top in shaky pen: 242–0888.
I know that number.
My own breath rushes in my ears. It sounds a little like a river.
I fold the receipt in neat thirds and slide it into my back pocket. Then, very suddenly, as if I just remembered an important appointment, I leave. I shove out of the storage closet, leaving the totes open and messy behind me, fumbling with the doorknob to the break room. My hands feel numb and very cold, as if they’ve been submerged in ice water.
“Done already?” Charlotte is standing in the break room, pressing buttons on the microwave. Her eyebrows draw together as she looks me over; I feel like an animal caught clawing out of a trap, wild-eyed. “Opal, baby, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” The air is tastes thick and wet in my mouth. I can’t seem to get enough of it into my lungs.
“It doesn’t seem like nothi—” The microwave dings behind her, and I startle violently. We stare at each other for a long, taut moment before Charlotte says, even more gently, “Sit down.”
I sit. I stare fixedly at the Reading Rainbow posters while Charlotte microwaves a second cup of coffee. It’s all so normal—the clink of her spoon against the sugar jar, the slight stickiness of the tabletop—that I feel myself returning to my own skin. She sets a mug in front of me and I wrap both hands around it. The heat scalds the pads of my fingers.
Charlotte settles across from me. She watches me with her soft gray eyes. “Listen. I’ve written a whole chapter about Starling House. I can tell you anything you want to know. I’d just like to know what’s going on.”
I give her my best rueful, you-got-me-smile, but I can tell it comes out a little shaky. “The truth is that I’ve been taking a couple of online classes, too, and I want to write my final architecture paper on Starling House, and I need your help.” It’s a good lie because it’s the one Charlotte wants to hear; she’s always bugging me to get my GED or take some college classes.
Her eyebrows go very flat and her accent goes more eastern Kentucky than usual. “Oh, are we both telling stories now?”