Shadow wandered to the back of the room where there was a table covered with old-looking leather-bound books, each with a library 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 paperback copy 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.
“Buy one more, it’s still a dollar,” said the man. “And if you take another book away, you’ll be doing us a favor. We need the shelf-space.”
Shadow walked back to the old leather-bound books. He decided to liberate the book that was least likely to be bought by anyone else, and found himself unable to decide between Common Diseases of the Urinary Tract with Illustrations by a Medical Doctor and Minutes of the Lakeside City Council 1872–1884. He looked at the illustrations in the medical book and decided that somewhere in the town there was a teenage boy who could use the book to gross out his friends. He took the Minutes to the man on the door, who took his dollar and put all the books into a Dave’s Finest Food brown paper sack.
Shadow left the library. He had a clear view of the lake, all the way to the northeastern corner. He could even see his apartment building, a small brown box on the bank up past the bridge. And there were men on the ice near the bridge, four or five of them, pushing a dark green car into the center of the white lake.
“March the twenty-third,” Shadow said to the lake, under his breath. “Nine A.M. to nine twenty-five A.M.” He wondered if the lake or the klunker could hear him—and if they would pay any attention to him, even if they could. He doubted it. In Shadow’s world, luck, the good kind, was something that other people had, not him.
The wind blew bitter against his face.
Officer Chad Mulligan was waiting outside Shadow’s apartment when he got back. Shadow’s heart began to pound when he saw the police car, to relax a little when he observed that the policeman was doing paperwork in the front seat.
He walked over to the car, carrying his paper sack of books.
Mulligan lowered his window. “Library sale?” he said.
“Yes.”
“I bought a box of Robert Ludlum books there two, three years back. Keep meaning to read them. My cousin swears by the guy. These days I figure if I ever get marooned on a desert island and I got my box of Robert Ludlum books with me, I can catch up on my reading.”
“Something particular I can do for you, Chief?”
“Not a damn thing, pal. Thought I’d stop by and see how you were settling in. You remember that Chinese saying, ‘You save a man’s life, you’re responsible for him’? Well, I’m not saying I saved your life last week. But I still thought I should check in. How’s the Gunther Purple-mobile doing?”
“Good,” said Shadow. “It’s good. Running fine.”
“Pleased to hear it.”
“I saw my next-door neighbor in the library,” said Shadow. “Miz Olsen. I was wondering…”
“What crawled up her butt and died?”
“If you want to put it like that.”
“Long story. You want to ride along for a spell, and I’ll tell you all about it.”
Shadow thought about it for a moment. “Okay,” he said. He got into the car, sat in the front passenger seat. Mulligan drove north of town. Then he turned off his lights and parked beside the road.
“Darren Olsen met Marge at UW Stevens Point and he brought her back north to Lakeside. She was a journalism major. He was studying, shit, hotel management, something like that. When they got here, jaws dropped. This was, what, thirteen, fourteen years ago. She was so beautiful…that black hair…” He paused. “Darren managed the Motel America over in Camden, twenty miles west of here. Except nobody ever seemed to want to stop in Camden and eventually the motel closed. They had two boys. At that time Sandy was eleven. The little one—Leon is it?—was just a babe in arms.
“Darren Olsen wasn’t a brave man. He’d been a good high school football player, but that was the last time he was flying high. Whatever. He couldn’t find the courage to tell Margie that he’d lost his job. So for a month, maybe for two months, he’d drive off early in the morning, come home late in the evening complaining about the hard day he’d had at the motel.”
“What was he doing?” asked Shadow.
“Mm. Couldn’t say for certain. I reckon he was driving up to Ironwood, maybe down to Green Bay. Guess he started out as a job hunter. Pretty soon he was drinking the time away, getting stoned, more than probably meeting the occasional working girl for a little instant gratification. He could have been gambling. What I do know for certain is that he emptied out their joint account in about ten weeks. It was only a matter of time before Margie figured out—there we go!”
He swung the car out, flicked on the siren and the lights, and scared the daylights out of a small man with Iowa plates who had just come down the hill at seventy.
The rogue Iowan ticketed, Mulligan returned to his story.
“Where was I? Okay. So Margie kicks him out, sues for divorce. It turned into a vicious custody battle. That’s what they call ’em when they get into People magazine. Vicious Custody Battle. Always makes me think of lawyers with knives and assault weapons and brass knuckles. She got the kids. Darren got visitation rights and precious little else. Now, back then Leon was pretty small. Sandy was older, a good kid, the kind of boy who worships his daddy. Wouldn’t let Margie say nothing bad about him. They lost the house—had a nice place down on Daniels Road. She moved into the apartments. He left town. Came back every few months to make everybody miserable.
“This went on for a few years. He’d come back, spend money on the kids, leave Margie in tears. Most of us just started wishing he’d never come back at all. His mom and pop had moved to Florida when they retired, said they couldn’t take another Wisconsin winter. So last year he came out, said he wanted to take the boys to Florida for Christmas. Margie said not a hope, told him to get lost. It got pretty unpleasant—at one point I had to go over there. Domestic dispute. By the time I got there Darren was standing in the front yard shouting stuff, the boys were barely holding it together, Margie was crying.
“I told Darren he was shaping up for a night in the cells. I thought for a moment he was going to hit me, but he was sober enough not to do that. I gave him a ride down to the trailer park south of town, told him to shape up. That he’d hurt her enough…Next day he left town.”
“Two weeks later, Sandy vanished. Didn’t get onto the school bus. Told his best friend that he’d be seeing his dad soon, that Darren was bringing him a specially cool present to make up for having missed Christmas in Florida. Nobody’s seen him since. Non-custodial kidnappings are the hardest. It’s tough to find a kid who doesn’t want to be found, y’see?”