We followed Marian back to the front counter and dumped the books on the re-stacking cart.

“Don’t believe everything you hear, Dr. Ashcroft.”

“Please. Marian.” I nearly dropped a book. Aside from my family, Marian was Dr. Ashcroft to nearly everyone around here. Lena was being offered instant access to the inner circle, and I had no idea why.

“Marian.” Lena grinned. Aside from Link and me, this was Lena’s first taste of our famed Southern hospitality, and from another outsider.

“The only thing I want to know is, when you broke that window with your broomstick, did you take out the future generation of the DAR?” Marian began to lower the blinds, motioning for us to help.

“Of course not. If I did that, where would I get all this free publicity?”

Marian threw back her head and laughed, putting her arm around Lena. “A good sense of humor, Lena. That’s what you need to get around in this town.”

Lena sighed. “I’ve heard a lot of jokes. Mostly about me.”

“Ah, but—‘The monuments of wit survive the monuments of power.’”

“Is that Shakespeare?” I was feeling a little left behind.

“Close, Sir Francis Bacon. Though, if you’re one of the people who think he wrote Shakespeare’s plays, I suppose you were right the first time.”

“I give up.”

Marian ruffled my hair. “You’ve grown about a foot and a half since I’ve last seen you, EW. What is Amma feeding you these days? Pie for breakfast, lunch, and dinner? I feel like I haven’t seen you in a hundred years.”

I looked at her. “I know, I’m sorry. I just didn’t feel much like… reading.”

She knew I was lying, but she knew what I meant. Marian went to the door, and flipped the “Open” sign to “Closed.” She turned the bolt with a sharp click. It reminded me of the study.

“I thought the library was open till nine?” If it wasn’t I would lose a valuable excuse for sneaking out to Lena’s.

“Not today. The head librarian has just declared today a Gatlin County Library Holiday. She’s rather spontaneous that way.” She winked. “For a librarian.”

“Thanks, Aunt Marian.”

“I know you wouldn’t be here if you didn’t have a reason, and I suspect Macon Ravenwood’s niece is, if nothing else, a reason. So why don’t we all go into the back room, make a pot of tea, and try to be reasonable?” Marian loved a good pun.

“It’s more like a question, really.” I felt in my pocket, where the locket was still wrapped in Sulla the Prophet’s handkerchief.

“Question everything. Learn something. Answer nothing.”

“Homer?”

“Euripides. You better start coming up with a few of these answers, EW, or I’m going to actually have to go to one of those school board meetings.”

“But you just said to answer nothing.”

She unlocked a door marked private archive. “Did I say that?”

Like Amma, Marian always seemed to have the answer. Like any good librarian.

Like my mom.

I’d never been in Marian’s private archive, the back room. Come to think of it, I didn’t know anyone who had ever been back there, except for my mom. It was the space they shared, the place they wrote and researched and who knows what else. Not even my dad was allowed in. I can remember Marian stopping him in the doorway, when my mother was examining a historical document inside. “Private means private.”

“It’s a library, Marian. Libraries were created to democratize knowledge and make it public.”

“Around here, libraries were created so that Alcoholics Anonymous would have somewhere to meet when the Baptists kicked them out.”

“Marian, don’t be ridiculous. It’s just an archive.”

“Don’t think of me as a librarian. Think of me as a mad scientist; this is my secret laboratory.”

“You’re crazy. You two are just looking at some crumbling old papers.”

“‘If you reveal your secrets to the wind, you should not blame the wind for revealing them to the trees.’”

“Khalil Gibran.” He fired back.

“‘Three can keep a secret if two of them are dead.’”

“Benjamin Franklin.”

Eventually even my father had given up trying to get into their archive. We’d gone home and eaten rocky road ice cream, and after that, I had always thought of my mother and Marian as an unstoppable force of nature. Two mad scientists, as Marian had said, chained to each other in the lab. They had churned out book after book, even once making the short-list for the Voice of the South Award, the Southern equivalent of a Pulitzer Prize. My dad was fiercely proud of my mom, of both of them, even if we were just along for the ride. “Lively of the mind.” That’s how he used to describe my mom, especially when she was in the middle of a project. That was when she was the most absent, and yet somehow, when he seemed to love her best.

And now here I was, in the private archive, without my dad or my mom, or even a bowl of rocky road ice cream, in sight. Things were changing pretty quickly around here, for a town that never changed at all.

The room was paneled and dark, the most secluded, airless, windowless room of the third-oldest building in Gatlin. Four long oak tables stood in parallel lines down the center of the room. Every inch of every wall was crammed with books. Civil War Artillery and Munitions. King Cotton: White Gold of the South. Flat metal shelving drawers held manuscripts, and overflowing file cabinets lined a smaller room attached to the back of the archive.