“I’ll join you, then.”
She hesitated a moment before stepping back and allowing him to open the door for her. “Very well.”
Inside, the room was crowded and hot. A waiter came by with glasses of wine on a tray, and they each took one, sipped, and looked about the room.
“See any suspects?” she asked.
“At this point, I suppose everyone is a suspect. How long have you worked at the library?”
“Eight years. How long have you been a security consultant?”
His smile spread slowly, like he was trying to hold it back. “Five years. Before that, I was a cop, at the Twenty-Third precinct. When I retired, I started my own security firm. We’re brought in when something goes wrong.”
“May I ask, who are your typical clients?”
“Auction houses like Sotheby’s, high-end private families. That sort of thing.”
She nodded her approval. “So you’re discreet.”
“I am.”
“That will be helpful in this case. Often, libraries that are robbed prefer to keep the incident quiet so that donors and trustees”—she motioned with her glass around the room—“don’t pull their support. Which runs counter to the possibility of recovering the stolen object, unfortunately.”
“So you’re saying it’s a choice between protecting the institution or locating the artifact? Can’t we do both?”
Before she could answer, Dr. Hooper came barreling over, trailed by Claude.
“Mr. Adriano, Sadie,” said Dr. Hooper. “We have a problem.” He pointed to the door, and they all followed him outside, into the hallway. He looked around, as if checking to make sure they had privacy. “There’s been another theft.”
“What was stolen, and from where?” asked Mr. Adriano. He straightened up, his eyes bright.
Claude responded, staring right at Sadie. “A first edition of The Scarlet Letter. From the cage.”
Dr. Hooper leaned in to their small circle.
“It was taken from the cage for the Berg Collection?” Sadie repeated, her mind whirling.
Claude was gray. “Yes.”
“But it wasn’t missing when we did the shelf read.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Claude spoke fast, trying to explain, his voice rising. “I brought it up from the cage to my desk yesterday, to review it for the exhibit. I locked it back up before I headed home for the evening, I swear, but when I went back down this afternoon, it was gone.”
“Didn’t we have the locks changed?” asked Dr. Hooper.
“We did,” said Mr. Adriano.
Which ruled out Marlene.
Dr. Hooper turned to Claude. “I’m afraid, Claude, since you were the last person to have handled it, we’ll have to restrict your access. For now. Please hand over your key.”
Claude, looking sick, pulled it out of his pocket and did so.
Sadie was now the only person left standing, other than Dr. Hooper, who had access to the collection in the cage. Ultimately, she was responsible, as the book thefts occurred on her watch as curator. This was personal, as if someone had broken into her home and rifled through her own belongings.
“What’s the resale possibility for the edition?” asked Dr. Hooper.
Sadie jumped in to answer. “It’s probably much easier to sell than the Virginia Woolf diary, which is one of a kind. There are several first editions of The Scarlet Letter out there.”
“How much do you estimate it’s worth?” asked Mr. Adriano.
“Somewhere around ten thousand dollars.” The words stuck on Sadie’s tongue.
Dr. Hooper dismissed them and headed back in to the party, his mouth a grim line. Claude slunk off, hands in his pockets, leaving behind Mr. Adriano and Sadie.
“How much experience do you have dealing with rare book thefts?” she asked.
“We’ve run into a couple of incidents, but usually we deal with art or sculpture.”
“It’s not the same.”
“Obviously not.”
“Do you think Claude’s involved?”
He shrugged. “I couldn’t say at this point. Nor would I, to you.”
“I want to recover our property as much as you do.”
“Whose property?”
He’d caught her there.
“The library’s, of course.”
She had to make him see that a book could be as important as a Picasso. To not only know that, but to be emotionally invested in it as well. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to introduce you to the Berg Collection. Would that be all right?”
He agreed, and not reluctantly, which was a good sign. As they walked down the hallway, she asked, “What sort of books do you like to read?”
“I like nonfiction. And poetry.”
Now, that was a surprise. She’d been expecting to hear the name of the latest thriller. “What kind of poetry?”
“John Ashbery, Walt Whitman. ‘Resist much, obey little.’”
She paused just outside the door, smiling. “Come with me.”
In the Berg, she pulled out her key chain and stuck the key into one of the locks in the glass cabinets. She took out a box and placed it on the empty table, put on her gloves, and then carefully sifted through its contents until she found what she was looking for. “Do you know this one by Whitman? ‘You Lingering Sparse Leaves of Me.’”
“It was in the annex to Leaves of Grass.”
“Here’s an early draft, written in his own hand.” She slid it out of its protective shield and laid it on the table, stepping aside so he could see.
The paper was stained brown in places, like coffee had been spilled across it.
He leaned in closer. “But this is different from the one I’ve read.”
“Exactly. That’s what makes it special. We can see Whitman’s thought process, how the poem evolved. Look at the pencil marks.” She pointed without touching the page. “He’s written ‘final version’ on the top right corner, then crossed it out. Some of the lines are quite different in several places from the one that was eventually published. Like here, the phrase ‘You meagre little banners’ is changed to ‘pallid banner-staves.’”
“And the final line here reads, ‘My hardiest and my last.’” He looked at her. “What’s the real version again?”