An Imperfect Librarian - Elizabeth Murphy [27]
“Depending on the wind and the light, the water can look green, blue, grey, black, white, silver or any combination of those,” she says. “Very rarely, it’s smooth as glass. More often, the wind is savage and the waves are wild. This place sets more records for extremes of weather than any other place on earth.”
“I’ve been reading about the weather lately. Foggiest, windiest, coldest.”
“For Cliffhead, add wildest, fiercest, moodiest, and then, when we least expect it, the finest.”
She leads me through a French door to a study with wall-to-wall bookshelves that reach to the ceiling and a desk at the centre.
“I feel like I’m inside a book.”
She shows me a first edition of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland.“It’s insured for twelve thousand dollars. Nobody touches it unless their hands are clean as a surgeon’s.”
“I don’t suppose you lend them out?”
“You might as well ask a parent: ‘Do you lend your children?’”
I follow her back to the kitchen then to the living room. The stairway is so steep I’d call it a ladder. The top floor is a bedroom and sitting room combined.
“Welcome to the peak,” she says.
It reminds me of a wooden tepee. Six beams rise from the floor and join at the top. I tilt my head to look out through the windows.
“At night, with the lights off, you can lie in bed, gaze at the stars, constellations and the moon through the skylights. I call them star-lights. Sometimes I can see satellites.”
Her bed is a double mattress on the floor with a puffy duvet and more pillows than I want to count.
“Most nights, regardless of the weather, I leave the windows open while I sleep so I can hear the waves. When the winds are right, I can hear the foghorn.”
When I lie in bed and gaze up at the ceiling pipes, there are no stars or satellites visible. There’s a housefly that flits from corner to corner. I’ve watched him so much, I can almost predict his moves. As far as sounds go, there’s the occasional trickling of water through the pipes and Cyril’s snoring from the living room above.
We gaze at the sky through the star-lights. A patch of blue appears from out of the fog.
“Congratulations! You brought the fine weather,” she says. “Just in time for our hike.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
birds on crutches
ONE OF HER DOGS BOLTS past and knocks me over into the bushes. I climb to my feet, brush off my clothes, then another races by and nearly drives me into the branches of a tree. Norah waits at the crest of the hill. “We’re heading to Gull Pond, property of Ray Harding,” she says. “He had it stocked with trout a couple of years ago. People have been poaching from it ever since. He posted a no-trespassing sign but that didn’t stop them. Then someone convinced him that the poachers were actually the gulls, so now he sets traps for them on top of three- and four-foot poles around the pond. Most often, it’s other birds or small animals like squirrels that get trapped.” She turns her head to the side so I can hear her talk while she walks. “I found a dead crow in the traps once. Another time, a kingfisher. I put it in a box in the barn, gave it food and water. It died in two days.”
I follow close behind then stop to catch my breath. “What did you do then?”
She turns round to wait for me. “Held a wake, invited his buddies. Drank like fish, they did. Next day, everyone flocked to the funeral. Cremation, of course. I sprinkled the ashes over the pond, remained in control of my emotions during the ceremony, fought off the memories kind of thing.” She winks, smiles then goes on ahead of me again.
I try to keep up. The last time I went hiking was in the Pyrenees during an elementary school trip. My energy levels were higher then. The terrain wasn’t as unpredictable, nor as steep. Every so often I glance over my shoulder