It was when Gregor got past that arched doorway and into the main reading room that he first sensed that something was wrong—not wrong wrong, not menacing, but off. He looked around at the long tables with students studying at them and the carrels with computers where students were doing everything from academic work to playing computer games, and for the longest time he couldn’t put his finger on it. It was a college Gothic library. Schools all over the country had them. Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia hadthe one he liked the best. He turned around and around, and then it hit him.
There weren’t any books.
No, that wasn’t quite right. There were some books, there just weren’t very many of them. Where any other school library would have had tall shelves full of volumes, dividing the tables from each other in rows along each wall, or crammed in without tables between them at all, this one had the minimum number of bookcases, and most of those cases were at least half empty. Of the books he could see, most looked old and oddly bound, like textbooks, or library editions of standard classics. There were a lot of things other than books around: framed posters for African art exhibits and South American cultural festivals; row on row of audiotapes and videotapes and DVDS; CDs and CD players, with headphones, to listen to them on. Gregor didn’t know what to think. He had seen elementary school libraries with more and better volumes than this. He was sure Father Tibor had more all by himself.
He had just about decided that he must have made a mistake, the real library was somewhere else, complete with the standard academic collection, when he felt a tug on his sleeve and looked down to see a smallish woman in the Windsor Main Street Uniform trying to get his attention. The Windsor Main Street Uniform consisted of a print skirt and a standard twinset. Gregor thought he was about to be ushered politely back into the quad, and that at any moment he would need to pull out those credentials he hadn’t wanted to show anyone just yet.
The small woman saw she had his attention and smiled, anxiously. “It’s Gregor Demarkian, isn’t it? I’ve seen your picture in magazines. Everybody’s been wondering when we’d see you on campus.”
“I was looking for something called the catwalk,” Gregor said. He wasn’t about to apologize for his presence before he had to.
The small woman looked around. “It’s up there,” she said, pointing above their heads. “You take the spiral staircase up to get there. But I don’t know what you’d want that for. Nothing has happened there.”
“There’s supposed to be a window at the end of it,” Gregor said. “I wanted to look out that window.”
“Ah, I see,” the small woman said. “Of course, that’s one of the places Mark likes to go to be alone. He’s supposed to have supervised study hall every night because his grades are awful. He’s very irresponsible. But he ducks out of it and goes up there where nobody can see him. He probably plays video games.”
“Are there facilities up there to play video games?”
“Of course not,” the small woman said. “We don’t approve of video games at Windsor. There’s not a lot we can do to eradicate them, but we do try to keep them out of the library. But Mark probably brought his Game Boy or something like that. It’s the kind of thing he would do. He had no dedication to work. I never did understand how he’d managed to get admitted to this place. He wasn’t serious.”
In Gregor’s memory Mark was one of the most seriously dedicated teenagers he’d ever met, but he let it go for the moment. He looked around again. “Where are the books?” he asked. “Is there another room, more stacks somewhere, something?”
The small woman bristled. “We have a perfectly adequate collection,” she said. “We don’t spend the kind of money some schools do on volumes, it’s true, but there’s a public library right across Main Street, one of the best in the state, and the students are welcome to use that one whenever they need to. That leaves us with the budget to invest in truly innovative teaching tools, interactive learning, that kind of thing. It’s all very state-of-the-art.”
Gregor suppressed his immediate need to tell this woman that the state of the art for schools was and always would be books, and said instead, “You know my name, but I don’t know yours. You are—?”
“Marta Coelho,” the small woman said. “I teach history. I teach history to Mark DeAvecca, to tell you the truth. And it’s only my first year here, but I find it very easy to understand what the problem has been—with Mark. I realize that we were wrong, you know, to think that he was taking drugs. There’s been talk all day about how they found out in the hospital that that wasn’t true, but you can see how we thought so.”