Sadie thanked her profusely and they said goodbye, promising to stay in touch. She checked her watch and headed down to the stacks, to the section that was devoted to overflow from the Berg, two aisles encased in chain-link fencing and secured with a lock. She fished the key out and opened the door, closing it tightly behind her. Today, she would be going through Virginia Woolf’s diaries, which were a requisite for inclusion in the exhibit. The diaries consisted of twenty-eight volumes dated from 1915 to 1941, the year Woolf committed suicide. Marlene had wanted to include the last volume, the final entry of which was written four days before Woolf filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the River Ouse. Sadie always wondered what it was Woolf couldn’t bear to write down during those four days.
Sadie put on her white gloves and pulled out the gray box at the bottom of the stack, the one holding the diaries from the year 1941. Opening it up, she took out the stationer’s notebooks that Woolf had filled with her thoughts, both mundane and agonizing.
There should be five in each box. She counted and then recounted. Only four.
The missing one was the one she wanted. She put the box aside and went through the next one on the shelf. Five notebooks, all accounted for. Same with all the other boxes of Woolf’s diaries. By the time she checked the final one, her heart was pounding. She looked around, as if it might be lying out on a shelf somewhere. But no one else had access to this room other than Marlene and Claude. And they would never have done such a thing.
A couple of pages walked by, not even noticing her as she stood frozen.
The final Woolf diary was gone.
* * *
“When was the last time you saw the diary?”
Sadie pulled Claude aside to a corner of the Berg and kept her voice low. The rules stated that an employee of the library had to be in the main room at all times when a patron was present, and currently three researchers sat at the tables. Which meant this conversation couldn’t be held in their offices. For all she knew, there was a plausible answer to where the book was, but without Marlene to turn to, she was at a loss for who to ask other than Claude.
Claude rubbed his chin, considering Sadie’s question. “The diary notebook? Marlene and I brought it up here a few weeks ago. Then I returned it to the cage.”
“You’re sure you didn’t leave it out somewhere, or put it in the wrong box?”
“Of course not. I’d never do that.”
The patrons looked over, curious at the fuss.
“You know what we need to do, don’t you?” She couldn’t bear to say the words out loud.
A shelf read, where the librarians worked their way along every shelf of the collection, studying the call numbers one by one to make sure the books were in the right position. More often than not, a missing book had simply been put away in the wrong place. With the diary, it could have been returned to the wrong box. Which meant they also needed to go through each box in the Berg Collection and make sure the contents matched the label. A shelf read was exhausting and boring, but it was the only way to track down a missing book and determine if it was truly missing or simply misplaced.
“I do understand what we have to do.” Claude didn’t say the words out loud, either. “But I have plans tonight. Can it wait until tomorrow?”
She didn’t answer, just waited for him to wise up. If he was the last person who touched it, the onus was on him to find it.
He relented with a loud sigh. “Fine.”
“We’ll start up here while the library is open, and then move to the cage after closing time. It’s going to be a long night.”
She had plans as well, but she called Lonnie to say that she wouldn’t be able to make dinner at his place.
Late at night, the library vibrated with a quiet hum, but the lack of pages’ footsteps and chattering made her uneasy. Claude had taken one aisle and Sadie the other, and by three in the morning the call letters and numbers began swimming before her eyes. One by one, they placed each box on a library cart and checked the contents before putting it back and moving on to the next. As she neared the end of her last shelf, the reality of what had happened began to sink in.
Virginia Woolf’s final notebook, with its last entry dated March 24, 1941, was nowhere to be found. Sadie had first read the Woolf diaries in college, as if they held the answer to her own deep-seated grief at the loss of her father so many years ago. One entry, “I will go down with my colours flying,” was followed by another about what to cook for dinner—haddock and sausage meat.
So heartbreakingly mundane.
The library had been entrusted with the diaries, to keep them safe and in good condition so that future scholars could see the actual pages, the words as they were written, not as a typed copy. The documents were crucial to examining the state of mind of the artist. Nothing else came close.
And the final volume was gone.
She reached the very bottom of the last row. From where Claude stood, he must be close to the end as well.
Sadie had been in charge less than a week, and already there was a crisis brewing. However much she wanted to put it off, she had to tell the director right away.
She and Claude finished up, discouraged. He headed home, while she caught some sleep on the sofa in the back office. She kept a long cardigan in the closet, and she could wear that over her dress today and not be so obvious about not having gone home. She woke, groggy and confused, and hit the deli on Thirty-Ninth Street for coffee. Claude showed up barely looking human at nine on the dot, and together they trudged into the director’s office.
Dr. Hooper arrived a few minutes later, the newspaper tucked under his arm, and stopped cold when he saw them. She could only imagine how unprofessional she looked, with bags under her eyes, her wrinkled skirt and messy hair.
“Who’s watching your room?” he asked.
“I’ve put up a notice that we’ll be back at nine thirty,” replied Sadie. “We have an issue.”
He ushered them in to his office and closed the door. “What is it?”
For a moment, Sadie wished Claude had gotten the curator’s job so he would have to deal with the director’s wrath. “Yesterday, I went to look at one of the items for the exhibit, and it’s gone.”
“Which is it?”
“The last Virginia Woolf diary.”
Dr. Hooper expelled a breath. “Are you sure it’s not misplaced?”
“We did a shelf read overnight. It wasn’t anywhere.”
“When was it last seen?”
Claude spoke up. “I examined it with Marlene a couple of weeks ago. We brought it up from the cage, and I replaced it back a few hours later. I know I put it back in the right box, I’m sure of it.”