THIRTY-ONE
T
hat had been very interesting, Willow thought to herself as she worked.Or tried to.She was distracted as hell.
That proprietary hand Tripp had put on her shoulder.Almost as if he’d been claiming her in front of Blaine, after just having told her he wasn’t ready to be in a relationship with her.
Now she was even more confused.And annoyed.What the helldidhe want?
Beth, the head librarian, breezed into the room, looking a bit frazzled.“How’s it going?”
“Great.You good?”
“Yeah, just a bit run off my feet so far this morning, and I’ve got story time for thirty-plus four-year-olds starting in five minutes.Did you finish up inputting that last stack of new books yet?”
“Yes, about ten minutes ago.I’m just checking this next batch in, then I’ll shelve everything.”
“Oh, fantastic, I was hoping to read them the latest by a local author.”Beth’s smile was full of relief as she headed for the cart where Willow had organized all the new children’s books that had just come in.“You’re a godsend.Can you stay on forever?I’ll make them pay you, of course.”
She laughed.“Think you could put up with me for that long?”
“Only one way to find out, but I would endeavor to endure it somehow.”Beth winked at her and sauntered off with the cart to greet the incoming group.“Wish me luck.”
“You won’t need it.”Beth was the perfect local librarian.Organized, a voracious reader herself, and passionate about inspiring young readers, in addition to helping people find their perfect book.
Willow set a stack of books back onto the cart beside her desk and reached for the next.The one on top she recognized straight away because it had been checked in and out several times already since she’d begun volunteering here.
Pacific Northwest Guide to Local Flora and Fauna.
Not exactly a page turner.Odd that it was so popular.Maybe a scout or girl guide group were using it to earn badges or something?
She scanned the barcode on the spine.The computer pulled up the book information, along with the checkout history.
Sure enough, it had been checked out multiple times over the past three weeks by just a handful of people, according to the list of library card numbers listed next to each interaction.The same people, over and over, more than a dozen times this month alone.
Weird.
She opened the cover and flipped through the pages to check the condition as she did with every return.Stopped when a bookmark fluttered to the ground.She bent to pick it up, stilled when she flipped it over and saw the symbol stamped at the bottom of it.
The exact same one that had been on the laminated sheet in the ammo cache.And the lines of script scrawled on it looked the same as the coded language she’d seen on the sheet too.
Taking out her phone, she found her picture of the sheet to compare them, just to be sure.
