He opened his door and got down to the ground as best he could. He felt as if he was climbing out of a child’s jungle gym, something he hadn’t liked to do even as a child. It really was much colder here than it had been in Philadelphia, but he was prepared. He was wearing a heavy winter coat. It was a city coat. Gregor felt it was wrong for the pickup truck, and possibly wrong for Main Street altogether.
On his feet and solid ground, Gregor took a moment to look around. There were churches everywhere. The most impressive one was all the way down at the end of the street, a big white and stone modern thing that seemed to have several smaller buildings behind it or maybe attached to it. It was hard to tell. There was a diner, called the Snow Hill Diner—not much to go on there. There was a tire dealership. There was what would have been the most impressive church in town fifty years ago, the Episcopalian one, all stone and arches. He checked one side of the street and then the other. There were a few news vans parked at the curb on the other side, but there was no more sign of the people who belonged in them than there was of the people who belonged to the town.
Gary Albright had come around to see what Gregor was doing. Gregor pointed vaguely up and down the street.
“Where’s the public library?” he asked.
Gary Albright looked embarrassed. “We don’t have one,” he said.
“You don’t?” That went against the grain of everything Gregor knew about American small towns, at least in the Northeast. Small towns always had libraries. In Gregor’s childhood, they had been staffed by women who had desperately wanted an education and been unable to afford one.
“Did you never have one?” he asked. “That’s unusual for Pennsylvania, isn’t it?”
“We used to have one.” Gary looked up one side of the street and down the other. “It wasn’t exactly public public. I mean, it was a public library. The town paid for it. But the town didn’t set it up. Miss Hadley’s grandfather did. It was known as the Hadley public library.”
“And then what?”
Gary shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe ten years or so ago, the town council decided it was too much money to go on spending. Not all that many people used it, you know. And there were always, well, you know, problems.”
“Problems?”
“With books,” Gary said. “And with the Internet. What you could do with them and what you couldn’t. What you could give to children. And then there was some lawsuit somewhere about the Internet, and about libraries not being able to use filters for the porn, or something, and so the town council decided it didn’t make sense to go on with it. Except I think the thing about the Internet was an excuse, really. Nobody could see the point.”
“Nobody could see the point of books?”
“People don’t read much anymore,” Gary Albright said. “It’s a fact. It might not be a good thing, but it’s a fact.”
“What became of the library building?” Gregor asked. “You didn’t just abandon it, did you?”
“Oh, no,” Gary said. “The thing was, it turned out the town didn’t own it. The way the original agreement was set up, when Miss Hadley’s grandfather turned the running of the library over to the town, it turned out he hadn’t deeded the building to the town. So it reverted to Miss Hadley and her brothers and all that.”
“What did they do to it?”
“They rented it to Nick Frapp,” Gary said. He turned around and pointed down the street to the big modern church Gregor had been so impressed with. “They only charge him a dollar a year. It’s part of that big complex of buildings now that the church has got. Anyway, Nick and his people took it lock, stock, and barrel, except they took out the computers. They’ve got computers in the school. They took all the books, though. Even the, uh, objectionable ones.”
Gregor didn’t want to ask what the objectionable ones were. “Is that your church?” he asked. “Is that the one where you and the other members of the board—”
“Oh, no,” Gary said quickly. “That’s a Holiness Church. The Holy Ghost people. You know. Hill people.”
Gregor drew a long blank, and then it hit him. “The people who handle rattlesnakes,” he said. “And drink poison, and that kind of thing? But I thought that was an Appalachian thing. I thought that was—”
“Hillbillies,” Gary said. “Exactly right. That’s what they are. Hillbillies. You’re in Appalachia, almost, in Snow Hill. We’re right on the edge of it. Except that Nick Frapp has this thing going. He got them to build that church. And most of them don’t live in the hills anymore, or at least not that far from town.”