Something wasn't right, like Amma said. But I had a feeling it wasn't me. "You know anything about a guy named John Breed?"
She stiffened. "Ethan Wate, don't you make me give that pork chop to Lucil e."
"No, ma'am."
Amma knew something, and it wasn't good, and she wasn't talking. I knew it as sure as I knew her pork chop recipe, which didn't have a single onion in it.
6.14
Bookworm
If it was good enough for Melvil Dewey, it's good enough for me." Marian winked at me as she puled a stack of new books out of a cardboard box, sniffing deeply. There were books everywhere, in a circle around her almost up to her head.
Lucil e was weaving through the towers of books, prowling for a lost cicada. Marian made an exception to the Gatlin County Library's no-pets rule since the place was ful of books but empty of people. Only an idiot would be in the library on the first day of summer, or someone who needed a distraction. Someone who wasn't speaking to his girlfriend, or wasn't being spoken to by his girlfriend, or didn't know if he even stil had one -- al in the space of the two longest days of his life.
I stil hadn't talked to Lena. I told myself it was because I was too angry, but that was one of those lies you tel when you're trying to convince yourself that you're doing the right thing. The truth was, I didn't know what to say. I didn't want to ask the questions, and I was scared to hear the answers. Besides, I wasn't the one who ran off with some guy on a motorcycle.
"It's chaos. Dewey decimal is mocking you. I can't even find one almanac on the history of the moon's orbital pattern." The voice from the stacks startled me.
"Now, Olivia ..." Marian smiled to herself as she examined the bindings of the books in her hands. It was hard to believe she was old enough to be my mother. With not a streak of gray in her short hair, and not a wrinkle in her golden-brown skin, she didn't look more than thirty.
"Professor Ashcroft, this isn't 1876. Times do change." It was a girl's voice. She had an accent -- British, I think. I'd only heard people talk that way in James Bond movies.
"So has the Dewey decimal system. Twenty-two times, to be exact." Marian shelved a stray book.
"What about the Library of Congress?" The voice sounded exasperated.
"Give me a hundred more years."
"The Universal Decimal Classification?" Now irritated.
"This is South Carolina, not Belgium."
"Perhaps the Harvard-Yenching system?"
"Nobody in this county speaks Chinese, Olivia."
A blond, lanky girl poked her head out from behind the stacks. "Not true, Professor Ashcroft. At least, not for the summer holidays."
"You speak Chinese?" I couldn't help myself. When Marian had mentioned her summer research assistant, she hadn't told me the girl would be a teenage version of herself. Except for the streaky, honey-colored hair, the pale skin, and the accent, they could have been mother and daughter. Even at first glance, the girl had a vague degree of Marian-ness that was hard to describe and that you wouldn't find in anyone else in town.
The girl looked at me. "You don't?" She poked me in the ribs. "That was a joke. In my opinion, people in this country barely speak English." She smiled and held out her hand. She was tal , but I was tal er, and she looked up at me as if she was already confident we were great friends. "Olivia Durand. Liv, to my friends. You must be Ethan Wate, which I find hard to believe, actual y. The way Professor Ashcroft talks about you, I was expecting more of a swashbuckler, with a bayonet."
Marian laughed, and I turned red. "What has she been tel ing you?"
"Only that you're incredibly bril iant and brave and virtuous, quite the save-the-day sort. Every bit the son you would expect of the beloved Lila Evers Wate. And that you'l be my lowly assistant this summer, so I can boss you around al I like." She smiled at me, and I blanked.
She was nothing like Lena, but nothing like the girls in Gatlin either. Which was in itself more than confusing. Everything she was wearing had a weathered look, from her faded jeans and the random bits of string and beads around her wrists, to her holey silver high-tops, held together with duct tape, and her ratty Pink Floyd T-shirt. She had a big, black plastic watch with crazy-looking dials on the face, caught between the bits of string. I was too embarrassed to say anything.
Marian swooped in to rescue me. "Don't mind Liv. She's teasing. 'Even the gods love jokes,' Ethan."
"Plato. And stop showing off." Liv laughed.
"I wil ." Marian smiled, impressed.
"He's not laughing." Liv pointed at me, suddenly serious. "'Hol ow laughter in marble hal s.' "
"Shakespeare?" I looked at her.
Liv winked and yanked on her T-shirt. "Pink Floyd. I can see you've got a lot to learn." A teenage Marian, and not at al what I expected when I signed on for a summer job in the library.
"Now, children." Marian held out her hand, and I pul ed her up from the floor. Even on a hot day like today, she stil managed to look cool. Not a hair was out of place. Her patterned blouse rustled as she walked in front of me. "I'l leave the stacks to you, Olivia. I have a special project for Ethan in the archive."
"Right, of course. The highly trained history student sorts out the stacks, while the unschooled slacker is promoted to the archive. How very American." She rol ed her eyes and picked up a box of books.
The archive hadn't changed since last month, when I came to ask Marian about a summer job but stayed to talk about Lena and my dad and Macon. She had been sympathetic, the way she always was. There were piles of old Civil War registries on the shelf above my mother's desk, and her col ection of antique glass paperweights. A glistening, black sphere sat next to the misshapen clay apple I made for her in first grade. My mom's and Marian's books and notes were stil stacked across the desk, over yel owed maps of Ravenwood and Greenbrier spread open on the tables. Every scribbled scrap of paper I saw made it feel like she was here. Even though everything in my life seemed to be going wrong, I always felt better in this place. It was like I was with my mom, and she was the one person who always knew how to fix things, or at least make me believe there was a way to fix them.
But something else was on my mind. " That's your summer intern?"
"Of course."
"You didn't tel me she'd be like that."
"Like what, Ethan?"
"Like you."
"Is that what's bothering you? The brains, or is it perhaps the long blond hair? Is there a certain way a librarian should look? Big glasses and hair in a graying bun? I would have thought between your mother and me, we would have disabused you of at least that notion." She was right. My mom and Marian had always been two of the most beautiful women in Gatlin. "Liv won't be here very long, and she's not much older than you are. I was thinking the least you could do would be to show her around town, introduce her to some people your age."
"Like who? Link? To improve his vocabulary and kil off a few thousand of her brain cel s?" I didn't mention that Link would spend most of his time trying to hook up with her, which I didn't see happening.
"I was thinking of Lena." The silence in the room was embarrassing, even to me. Of course she had been thinking of Lena. The question was, why hadn't I? Marian looked at me evenly. "Why don't you tel me what's real y on your mind today?"
"What is it you need me to do in here, Aunt Marian?" I didn't feel like talking about it.
She sighed and turned back to the archive. "I thought maybe you could help me sort through some of this. Obviously a great deal of the material in here relates to the locket and Ethan and Genevieve. Now that we know the end of that story, we might want to make some room for the next one."
"What's the next one?" I picked up the old photo of Genevieve wearing the locket. I remembered the first time I looked at it with Lena. It felt like years since then, instead of months.
"It would seem to me that it's yours and Lena's. The events on her birthday raised a number of questions, most of which I can't answer. I've never heard of an incident when a Caster didn't have to choose Light or Dark on the night of their Claiming -- except in the case of Lena's family, when the choice is made for them. Now that we don't have Macon to help us, I'm afraid we're going to have to search out the answers ourselves." Lucil e jumped up onto my mother's chair, her ears perking up.
"I wouldn't know where to start."
"'He who chooses the beginning of the road chooses the place it leads to.' "
"Thoreau?"
"Harry Emerson Fosdick. A bit older and more obscure, but stil quite relevant, I think." She smiled and put her hand on the edge of the door.
"Aren't you going to help me?"
"I can't leave Olivia alone for long, or she'l reshelve the entire col ection, and then we'l al have to learn Chinese." She paused for a moment, watching me, looking so much like my mom. "I think you can handle this one on your own. At least the beginning."
"I don't have a choice, do I? You can't real y help me since you're a Keeper." I was stil bitter about Marian's revelation that she had known my mother was involved with the Caster world, but she would never explain why or how. There were so many things about my mother and her death that Marian had never told me. It always came back to the endless rules that Bound Marian to her job as a Keeper.
"I can only help you help yourself. I can't determine the course of events, the unraveling of Darkness and Light, the Order of Things."
"That's such a load of crap."
"What?"
"It's like the prime directive on Star Trek . You have to let the planet evolve at its own pace. You can't introduce hyperspace or warp speed until they discover it for themselves. But Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise always end up breaking the rule."
"Unlike Captain Kirk, there is no choice in my case. A Keeper is powerful y Bound to act neither for the Dark nor the Light. I couldn't change my destiny, even if I wanted to. I have my own place in the natural order of the Caster world, in the Order of Things."
"Whatever."
"It's not a choice. I don't have the authority to change the way things work. If I so much as tried, I might destroy not only myself but the very people I was trying to help."
"But my mom stil ended up dead." I don't know why I said it, but I couldn't understand the logic. Marian had to remain uninvolved to protect the people she cared about, but the person she cared about most died anyway.
"Are you asking me if I could've prevented your mother's death?" She knew I was. I looked down at my sneakers. I wasn't sure I was ready to hear the answer.
Marian put her hand under my chin and pul ed my face up to meet hers. "I didn't know your mother was in danger, Ethan. But she knew the risks." Her voice was uneven, and I knew I had gone too far, but I couldn't help it. I'd been trying to get up the courage to have this conversation for months now. "I would have gladly taken her place in that car. Don't you think I have wondered a thousand times if there was something I knew or could have done that might have saved Lila ..."