The Ice Queen

I kept thinking about those strange books on Lazarus’s shelves. I’d been so sure that our stories were the same, and now I wasn’t sure of anything. I didn’t begin to sneak about until Frances went to get some takeout. She was picking up a salad for me as well. Something complicated, I made certain of that, so it would surely take a while for the coffee shop to prepare it for me. Feta and onions and fancy lettuce and olives. Not the kind with pimentos, the dark purple ones.

“Are you sure they have that, dear?”

Not at all. But I was sure my order would give me the time alone I needed. I was ready to dig; I was looking for blood and bones. I watched Frances drive away, then quickly looked up Lazarus’s card. Seth Jones had indeed taken out guidebooks. His interests were deserts, South America, Florence, Rome, and Venice. I held the card in my hand and stared at the titles. A normal enough card, except for a printed mark at the very top. continued. This wasn’t his only card on file.

I returned it to the catalog. As I did I noticed a card made out for Iris McGinnis; this must be Renny’s Iris, the girl of his dreams. What could she find here that wouldn’t be in the university library? Perhaps she’d only wanted to take her time — we allowed books to be taken out for a month, and the university had a cutoff of two weeks. She’d borrowed the Odyssey and the Iliad. A classics major? A slow reader? A woman who preferred mythological creatures?

Maybe I should have jotted down Iris’s phone number for Renny, but I was rushed. Frances would be back soon. It was nearing suppertime. I grabbed a flashlight and went down to the basement, to the storeroom. There were boxes of waterlogged books, from the time when the pipes had burst and Frances had enlisted people in town to help save what they could. In the back of the room, finally, I found the old cards. I opened the first box and sifted through the jumble.

Many of the names referenced residents at the home for the aged. Dozens of yellowing cards, lists of withdrawn books belonging to nearly everyone over the age of sixty-five who’d lived in the town of Orlon. And then, Seth Jones. I held his card up to the light that filtered in through the single rectangular window. More travel books, Africa, Hawaii, copies of National Geographic. Once again, impossibly so, continued.

I went on to the next box, the oldest records of all. Most of these cards belonged to people who had already passed on; deceased was marked on many in Frances’s neat script, then there was some handwriting I didn’t recognize, which I assumed belonged to the librarian before Frances. I looked through it all; at last, I found Seth Jones. The very day he’d taken out his first library book had been marked in blue ink, nearly forty-five years earlier. Surely, this was Lazarus’s grandfather. Seth Jones would be seventy years or older now, not a beautiful young man who rarely left his house, someone ten years younger than I, a man who was burning hot with eyes made of ashes, someone hiding something, everything, including who he was.

By the time Frances came back with our food, I’d tidied the boxes, piled them back one on top of another, then washed the dust off my hands. Seth Jones’s library card was hidden in my desk drawer. Frances had waited for twenty minutes while Renee Platt ran out to the Quickmart to pick up kalamata olives. Now, after all that effort, I couldn’t eat. I told Frances there was something wrong with my stomach. Maybe it was the heart monitor pressing down on me. Maybe it was that I was more confused by Lazarus than ever. Why did I still have the sense he was keeping something from me? Wives, bodies, donkeyskin, rooms that should never be entered, stairs that lead to a storeroom of diamonds and bones.

I thought of the mole blindly puttering around the roots of the hedge until there was a sudden rush of teeth and a sharp twist of its neck. I thought about the way I’d knocked at Lazarus Jones’s door. I thought of “Ring of Fire,” the song people in Orlon listened to against their better judgment. I was starting to have compassion for people who did stupid things. If Iris McGinnis had walked into the library, I would have gone right up to her, had I been able to recognize her, and slapped her. Don’t you know how miserable you’re making someone who loves you? That’s what I’d have said to her. Who do you think you are?

“Go home,” Frances told me. The library had evening hours, but she clearly felt I’d be of no help. I must have looked dazed; clearly I was overwhelmed. I hoped that I’d taped up the boxes in the storeroom correctly, put each in its proper place. I hoped Frances never found out how untrustworthy I was, or if she did, that it was long after I’d gone.

I drove home and stood in my yard. I didn’t want to think, really. The possibilities were too terrible. I thought of all those fairy-tale husbands who hadn’t known their true loves in the dark. Fools who’d slept with evil queens or murderous sisters while their real wives were chained to tower walls or thrown to the wild beasts in the woods to be torn apart and forgotten. As a child, I hadn’t believed such stories. Impossible to be duped in such a way. The lover would always know his beloved, certainly, certainly, without a doubt. I hadn’t understood what a mystery a human being was, how many forms love could take.