Who in town was strong enough to rip a light pole out of its base?
Well, since we had an entire family of werewolves in town and a clan of vampires, not to mention most of the mythical or fantastical creatures the stories had ever dreamed up, probably half the town would have the strength or magic to do such a thing.
So maybe a better question was: Who would want to do such a thing? In the middle of a storm with night coming on?
That was where I drew a blank. Infrastructure just wasn’t that valuable to any of the people who lived here. I mean, everyone liked having functioning traffic lights and light poles, but no one gained anything from stealing them.
It was possible it was just a prank, a dare. Mrs. Yates’ penguin had been stolen on multiple occasions. Enough to grant it its own celebrity status that drew curious tourists into town to take selfies with it.
Those multiple thefts had begun with the high school seniors carrying off a prank.
This was bigger than just a prank.
The dragon pig was a possibility. It ate metal and had gotten its little piggy mouth around a fire hydrant once before we put the kibosh on that.
No, the dragon pig had been following the rules. Plus, a few days ago, we’d let it go to town on an old abandoned school bus on the outskirts of town.
It could be our local kleptomaniac, Bigfoot. But he tended to be nocturnal and wasn’t really a thief of all things. More like a sticky-fingered collector of light bulbs.
Light bulbs. Not whole traffic lights and poles. I mean, maybe he was upping his game, but in all the years he’d been in town, he hadn’t ever stolen anything bigger than a fluorescent tube. It wasn’t his style at all.
So who would need a light that big?
I had no idea. But I knew who I should ask.
I pulled off the street and texted my sister, Myra.
Where you at?
It only took a moment before she replied.
Library. Why?
Need to talk to you.
About your vacation?
I sighed.Work. The string of thefts.
We have a string of thefts?
We do now.
I’ll put on the coffee.
Be there in ten.
When Dad died, he’d left the job of being the Bridge to Ordinary to me. Along with that job came the family library which was the secret location of all the books, spells, scrolls, tablets, and knowledge the Reeds had accumulated over the generations.
I loved the library, but not nearly as much as Myra did. She basically lived and breathed books and scrolls and all magical information.
So Dad had left the library to her, and I couldn’t be happier about it.
From the road, the magical library looked like a little pump house set up in the trees. No one really went up here, as it wasn’t developed, wasn’t good for hiking, and offered no views of the ocean.
And if anyone did happen to wander by, the pump house would be, in fact, a pump house. That was part of the magic of the place.
The only time the big magic was triggered was when Myra visited. She didn’t have a key to the library, shewasthe key.
