The Weird Sisters - Eleanor Brown [126]
Doing as directed, Bean walked back into the hallway and turned into the kitchen. The sink was empty of dishes, but clean glasses and plates and a few groceries lined the counter. Above the door, a cuckoo clock ticked anxiously, waiting for its big moment. Bean pulled a glass pitcher from the door of the refrigerator and poured two glasses, unwrapped the plate of cookies and carried everything back into the living room.
“Thank you. I’ll tell you one thing, this hip replacement is a pain in the ass,” Mrs. Landrige said.
Bean, shocked by her language, laughed in surprise. “Or a pain in the hip,” she said.
“That too. Here, put these down so I can reach them.” She leaned forward, wincing slightly, and took a cookie and the glass Bean handed her. “Thank you. Coaster, please,” she said as Bean put her glass down on the table, and Bean’s hand shot out instantly and rescued it before the beads of water could drip onto the wood. “Now,” Mrs. Landrige said when they were settled, Bean perched on the edge of an armchair that threatened to swallow her. “I suppose you’re wondering why I called you here today.” She said this without a trace of irony, as though she were the President, calling an audience with a member of her Cabinet.
“Okay,” Bean said. She took a bite of the cookie, and genteelly put it down. Poisoned it was not. Unfortunately, neither was it tasty.
“I’m not coming back to the library,” Mrs. Landrige said. She put up her hand, palm out, though Bean hadn’t objected. “I’ve decided it’s time for me to retire. Recovering from this surgery is going to take months, and I’m no longer interested in spending whatever diminishing time I have left behind a desk.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” Bean said, unsure of the proper response. “Or I’m happy for you. I’m not entirely sure which I should be.”
“A little bit of both, probably. But that’s not why you’re here. You’re here because I want you to take over. You’re going to be Barnwell’s new permanent librarian.”
Bean nearly choked on her lemonade. This was a stopgap. A temporary thing. She wasn’t going to, forgive her for saying it, become Mrs. Landrige, whose only love did not seem to be her long-deceased husband but that aging little building and all the wonders inside it. After all, Bean was going to San Francisco. Or somewhere. Wasn’t she? “I can’t do that,” she said.
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Landrige said. She sipped at her lemonade, pinky up, leaving a faint lipstick mark on the glass. “You’ve been doing a wonderful job, everyone says so.”
Ah, the spies of Barnwell. Among the locals, at least, you never could keep anything secret for longer than it took the cashiers at the Barnwell Market to bag your groceries. “But I don’t have the right degree. They’ll never hire me.”
Leaning forward, Mrs. Landrige deposited her glass, still half full, neatly in the exact center of a coaster. “These cookies are dreadful,” she said evenly, taking another bite. “Don’t worry about the board. You’ll have to get your master’s eventually, of course, but they’ll hire who I tell them to hire. And it’s going to be you.”
“But I wasn’t going to stay,” Bean said weakly.
Mrs. Landrige narrowed her eyes, looked at Bean long and hard. Bean felt uncomfortable, shifted her eyes around the room. On the mantel, there was a picture of a couple emerging from St. Mark’s after their wedding. The picture was old and faded, the bride’s face going as white as her gown. Was it Mrs. Landrige and the mysterious Mr.? She wanted to get up and look, but Mrs. Landrige’s gaze held her in the chair, pinned like a bug on the cardboard display she had made for Coop’s science fair one year. “Back to New York?” Mrs. Landrige asked finally.
“Maybe. Maybe California. But not Barnwell—the plan wasn’t to stay in Barnwell.”
There was another long pause. “You’re not going back to New York,” Mrs. Landrige said finally. “You might have needed to go to begin with, but you’re not going back. I saw it the minute you came back into the library. You weren’t happy there, and something there bit you