I rang the doorbell. A minute later, Margaret peeped through the curtain. It took another minute for her to decide to answer it. Even then, she only opened the inside door, keeping one hand on the knob of the screen door.
"You shouldn't be here," she whispered.
"I know."
I wrenched the screen door open and stepped inside. Rude, I know, but I didn't have time for courtesy.
"Where's Savannah?" she asked.
"She's safe. I need to talk to you about some grimoires."
She peered over my shoulder, scanning the yard, as if I'd brought an entourage of reporters with me. When she didn't see anyone, she closed the door and ushered me farther into the living room, which was filled with boxes of books.
"Please ignore the mess," she said. "I've been organizing the donations for the library book sale. A nerve-wracking task. Absolutely horrible."
I thought of offering to switch places, let her handle the Black Masses and walking dead for a while, but clamped my mouth shut and settled for a quasi-sympathetic nod.
Margaret was the volunteer head librarian at the East Falls library (open two evenings per week plus Saturday afternoons). She'd taken the position after retiring as librarian at the East Falls high school. If this gives the impression that Margaret Levine was a timid little old lady with a steel-gray bun and wire-rimmed glasses, let me correct that. Margaret was five foot ten and had, in her youth, been pursued by every modeling firm in Boston. At sixty-eight she was still beautiful, with the kind of long-limbed, graceful beauty that her gangly great-niece showed every sign of inheriting. Margaret's one physical flaw was a blind insistence on dying her hair jet black, a color that must have been gorgeous on her at thirty, but looked almost clownish now.
The one librarian stereotype Margaret did fulfill was that she was timid. Not the studious timidity of the intellectual, but the vacuous timidity of the, well, the ... intellectually challenged. I've always thought Margaret decided to become a librarian not because she loved books, but because it gave her a chance to look intelligent while hiding from the real world.
"Victoria is very angry with you, Paige," Margaret said as she cleared books from a chair. "You shouldn't upset her so. Her health isn't good."
"Look, I need to talk to you about a couple of grimoires I borrowed from the library." I tugged the knapsack from my shoulder, opened it, and removed the books. "These."
She frowned at them. Then her eyes went wide. "Where did you get those?"
"From the library upstairs."
"You aren't supposed to have those, Paige."
"Why? I heard they don't work."
"They don't. And we shouldn't have them, but your mother insisted we keep them around. I forgot all about them. Here, give them to me and I'll see what Victoria wants done with them."
I shoved the books back into my knapsack.
"You can't take those," she said. "They're library property."
"Then fine me. I'm in enough trouble with Victoria already. Keeping these books isn't going to matter."
"If she finds out--"
"We won't tell her. Now, what do you know about these grimoires?"
"They don't work."
"Where did they come from?"
She frowned. "From the library, of course."
Okay. This wasn't getting me anywhere. One look at Margaret's face and I knew she wasn't holding anything back. She wouldn't know how. So I explained what Eve had told Savannah about the books.
"Oh, that's nonsense," Margaret said, fluttering her long fingers. "Absolute nonsense. That girl wasn't right, you know. Eve, I mean. Not right at all. Always looking for trouble, trying to learn new spells, accusing us of holding her back. Just like ..."
She stopped.
"Like me," I said.