The Story Collector--A New York Public Library Book Read online

  “He’s the only one with a key to that closet. No one else has a key like that.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “That’s where he hides the evidence. That’s where he takes the bones of his victims, Red! That closet of his is a graveyard.” John Jr. had cackled wildly, licking his fingertips as if he’d just enjoyed a tasty meal.

  “It’s not true,” Viv had said, shaking to the tips of her toenails.

  “Still, it could be true, couldn’t it?” John Jr. had asked her.

  That was a favorite saying of their papa’s: It could be true. And could danced around in Viviani’s mind as solidly as probably, which was nearly definitely. “Just watch where you wander, Red, or else … PLOP!” John Jr. had jumped and stamped his foot then, and Viviani and Edouard had yelped.

  Viviani was not thick. She knew John Jr. was just teasing her. It was what older brothers did, after all. But once John Jr. said it could be true, things became all too real for Viviani Joffre Fedeler.

  Viviani’s teeth squeaked, she ground them so hard. She gulped a second time. She pushed off the wall and opened the door to head inside the apartment.

  Better to help with a cooking pot than to end up inside one!

  CHAPTER THREE

  Superstitions,

  Dewey Decimal 133.43

  SEE ALSO: amulets, charms, talismans

  Story collectors tend to be superstitious. Knock on wood, black cats, four-leaf clovers … that sort of thing. After all, superstitions are the little stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our chaotic world.

  Every morning, Viviani would hop down the front steps of the library, counting backward as she did, starting at twenty-eight: “Twenty-eight! Twenty-seven! Twenty-six!” until she reached “Three! Two! One!”

  Next, she would rub the mane of the lion to the north and bellow, “Good morning, Leo Lenox!” Then she would wave to the lion across the way and holler, “Good morning, Leo Astor!” before running to meet Eva so they could walk to school together.

  The reason Viviani did this every morning was simple: two years ago, Viviani performed this morning routine and found a dime while crossing Park Avenue. A whole dime! Granted, this marvelous luck had never repeated itself, but it could. And could was as good as definitely.

  This morning’s plan was no different. But as Viviani began to hop, she saw that the Doughnut Sisters were back. The Doughnut Sisters! Out on the front steps of the library perched the twins Gladys and Irene McIntyre, all hawkish noses and clawlike fingers. The stodgy duo rang tiny bells and peddled boxes of doughnuts. “Buy a box of doughnuts and—” Gladys shouted.

  “—support the Salvation Army!” Irene finished.

  “Only one dollar per box to—” Gladys shouted.

  “—help the poor and the destitute!” Irene finished.

  “You two go fetch your change,” John Jr. said as he and Edouard bounded down the steps to join Viviani.

  Viviani knew full well that John Jr. was a cheapskate; he could afford to buy three boxes of doughnuts if he wanted. But the only way he’d share was if Edouard and Viv chipped in. After some scrambling, they scraped together ninety-six cents.

  Gladys and Irene shook their heads in unison.

  “We’re only four cents short!” John Jr. pleaded.

  “Oh, but it’s four cents for the—” Gladys started.

  “—poor and destitute, you see.” Irene glowered. “Have pity, child.”

  John Jr.’s lips flattened. He dug deeper into his pocket, where miraculously he found a nickel. “I want that penny change, too.”

  The twins eyed him with a beady glare and handed over a box of doughnuts and a penny. “Thank you for—”

  “—supporting the Salvation Army.”

  Viviani and Edouard and John Jr. raised their sweet, doughy pastries into a triad. “To your health!” And oh! How light and fluffy and melt-on-your-tongue sugary those doughnuts were. The Doughnut Sisters were vinegar, but their wares were pure honey.

  “What a great way to—” Edouard started around a mouthful of dough.

  “—start off the day,” John Jr. interrupted. And they all laughed.

  Except.

  Except Viviani forgot all about her superstitions.

  Perhaps her lack of rituals might have been exactly why things changed so drastically that day.

  * * *

  Licking her fingers, Viviani crossed Fifth Avenue, then pulled on her mittens. She met Eva at the corner. Together, they walked to school, mitten in soggy mitten, over Madison, Park, and Lexington, past the Hotel Belmont (“Good day, George!” Viviani shouted to the doorman, who saluted in return), under the rumbling elevated train tracks on Third, until they reached Public School 27. It was a fine and sturdy redbrick school building with a grand edifice, but lacking in the elegance of front-stoop lionry, which in Viviani’s opinion every stoop should offer.

  Viviani fidgeted throughout her morning classes: Latin (yawn), math (yay!), and needlework (yuck). While Viv knotted colorful threads into a tapestry of a fox outwitting some hounds, Eva crocheted. Or attempted to.

  “I’m … getting better, don’t you think, Viv?” She held up her blanket and peered through one of the many wide holes in her creation.

  “You are, Eva,” Viviani said encouragingly.

  Eva scrutinized her handiwork. “I am getting better … better at making fishing nets.”

  The girls exploded with laughter until Miss Hutch shushed them with a single arched eyebrow.

  The classroom door creaked open, and a girl with sleek, dark hair and wide, nervous eyes peered in.

  “Class!” Miss Hutch quieted them with a loud handclap. “We have a new student joining us today. Merit, come in, come in! Tell us about yourself.”

  Merit glided to the front of the room, eyes lowered, and it was easy to see she had the heebie-jeebies. Viviani had been in this same boring old school building her whole life and thought it must have been hard to start at a new school. When Merit tucked a strand of her long (not pinned-up!) hair behind her ear, Viviani saw that she wore shiny gold hoop earrings. Viv sat up straighter. Anyone with pierced ears was probably worth listening to.

  “I’m Merit. Merit Mubarak. My family just moved here from Giza, Egypt.”

  Merit’s accent was melodic, crisply chopped, like a British accent. Viviani decided in that instant that Merit would be a fine third musketeer to her and Eva.

  “Tell us a little about Giza, Merit,” Miss Hutch said.

  Merit toed the linoleum with her very fashionable shoe, and the shiny gold buckle on it gleamed. These weren’t your everyday Mary Janes. Merit was not your everyday Mary Jane.

  “Well,” Merit said slowly, “it’s very hot. And dry. And flat. But there are lots of palm trees and fun things to do, like climb the pyramids.”

  “You can climb the pyramids?” Jake Joseph shouted. He sounded impressed. And Viviani knew firsthand that Jake Joseph was hard to impress.

  “Raise your hand, please,” Miss Hutch reminded the class.

  “You can climb the pyramids?!” Jake Joseph shouted again as his hand shot skyward. “How tall are they?”

  Merit’s eyes lit up as she thought of her home. “Tall. About like a four-story building here. I’ve never made it to the top, but my father has.”

  “Wow!”

  “Nifty!”

  “That is the bee’s knees!”

  Viviani couldn’t remember the last time she’d said something about herself that was the bee’s knees.

  Merit’s chin lifted a little more. “And my family had two camels. They were mainly to carry things. We didn’t ride them very often.”

  “You’ve ridden a camel?” Viviani shouted. When she saw Miss Hutch scowl at her, she raised her hand while waiting for Merit to answer.

  Merit laughed. “Yes. It’s not much different from riding a horse.”

  Viviani’s cheeks felt hot. She’d never even ridden a horse. Behind a horse, in a carriage, sure. Fake ones on a carou
sel, sure. But she’d rarely left the eight-block radius around the library. As big as her home was, it didn’t have real, live pyramids and camels and gold earrings. Did she even have a single story of her own worth sharing?

  Merit’s adventures were what real stories were made of. At that moment, Viviani determined to wedge herself inside Merit’s tale, too. Surely then, her story would be as exciting and adventurous as a true storybook character’s.

  This was where her Once Upon a Time would start.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Inventions,

  Dewey Decimal 609.2

  SEE ALSO: inventors, technological innovations

  “Twelve gulps! Beat that, Eva!” Viviani had just proved she could slug from the lion-headed water fountain twelve whole times before her belly began to slosh. Viviani stepped aside and shook out the front of her soaked dress. Eva approached the water fountain and jogged in place, like a prizefighter in training. Viviani laughed. Until Eva undertook the challenge: twenty-one gulps!

  “Wow!” Viviani said, clapping her friend on the back. “Twenty-one! You’re swimming from the inside out, Eva!”

  Eva panted and nodded and swiped her dress sleeve across her mouth.

  It was Saturday at last, which was the niftiest and slowest-arriving and fastest-passing day of the week. Viviani and Eva had already raced the elevators up and down the top three floors, spied on the lecture about life on Mars that was taking place in the first-floor auditorium, and climbed and leapt off the bases of the ornately carved flagpoles outside. Yesterday, Viviani had asked Merit to join them, but she shook her head, saying she needed to go to the market with her uncle to translate for him. Viviani felt a bit jealous when she learned that Merit spoke two languages. Imagine how many stories you could collect with double the words!

  “I’m bored,” Viviani declared almost immediately. “Let’s go invent something.”

  Viviani was rather determined to make good on her promise to live a more exciting and adventurous life. She thought of her literary heroes. Robert from Five Children and It. Sahwah from the Camp Fire Girls. Alice and Dora Bastable from The Wouldbegoods. They were always inventing and exploring and adventuring.

  “Invent? Where?” Eva asked.

  “My papa’s workshop,” Viviani said.

  “The workshop?”

  “The workshop.”

  Eva chewed on her bottom lip. “I thought you weren’t allowed in your papa’s workshop.”

  “That was when I was younger.” Viviani shrugged. “He hasn’t said not to go in there in at least six months.”

  Eva shot Viviani a bit of the old side-eye, but Viviani was already tugging her toward the stairs. Viviani was always tugging Eva somewhere.

  The basement—at least the part where the workshop was located—was far from cheery. But Viviani knew that sometimes one must face unpleasant things for the sake of conquering crushing boredom.

  The two girls tiptoed down the solid stairs, hands knotted. They crept slowly up to a heavy metal door, which Viviani heaved open with a grunt. This part of the basement was cold and dark, with a lonely dripping sound echoing off the stone walls—drip, drip, drip—and the sound brought to Viviani’s mind the idea of pooling blood. She shook that thought off—she’d recently read Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Miss O’Conner had forbidden her from reading it, saying it was much too scary for little girls, which naturally meant Viviani couldn’t resist devouring the blood-curdling tale in one sitting. Oh, that terrifying heart! Viviani swore she could hear it thumping as she’d read the story. (Or perhaps it had been her own racing pulse?) Now every sound in the library made Viviani jump.

  The basement was, in fact, the site of an old city reservoir, and the walls were from the old basin. They had a cave-like look to them, worn by years of holding water prior to their years of bolstering books. Viviani felt like a spelunker on a cave exploration the few times she’d been in this section of the building, and she often thought she might see stalactites and stalagmites and hordes of bats. And bat guano.

  She and Eva crept between the chiseled rock walls, under the low-hanging, pipe-strewn ceiling. They tiptoed down a long, narrow hallway, lined on both sides with tables, chairs, molding—all broken, all needing her papa’s attention.

  Viviani and Eva continued making their way to the workshop, passing the fiery boiler room through a hissing blast of dry heat. It had the distinct chalky smell of coal, and the air felt gritty and particularly full of darkness in this spot. It was the coal dust, Viviani knew, but it felt like walking through a grimy shadow.

  In a dark nook at the bottom of the basement stairs stood the one place in the whole library where Viviani had never been: the custodian’s closet. The one that belonged to Mr. Green, the one that was always locked tight. Always. Viviani’s blood ran cold, thinking of what John Jr. had told her, thinking of what might be locked away behind that thick iron door. Nests of snakes? Vials of poison? Bones from his victims?

  “Viviani.”

  The two girls squeaked and turned toward the voice: Miss O’Conner. The children’s area was also in the basement, but in a far cheerier spot, with yellow-painted walls and an outside door and sunlight. Here, in the shadows-and-coal portion of the basement, Miss O’Conner loomed over them like a giantess.

  Her glasses slipped to the tip of her nose, and she crammed them back up the bridge with a knobby knuckle. “We are missing several picture books from the children’s section of the library,” she said. “Would you and your … fellow baseball players”—here she glared at Eva, who gulped—“know anything about that?”

  “Picture books? I haven’t read picture books in years.”

  Miss O’Conner scoffed, which caused her glasses to slip again. “One is never too old for picture books, Viviani.”

  Viviani huffed. Just because she enjoyed a game of baseball with her brothers didn’t mean she was a thief. “I don’t know anything about the missing picture books, Miss O’Conner. Sorry.”

  Miss O’Conner shoved her glasses to the top of her head, into her nest of hair. “I should hope not, but of course I had to check. Good day.” She turned smartly on her heel and clackclackclacked away, back toward the hallway lined with staff lockers.

  Nearby, pistons hummed and one popped, making both girls jump. The churning pistons powered elevators and lights and a small, jazzy radio in the Fedeler apartment overhead, so Viviani was grateful for them, even though they sounded like a racing heartbeat. A spiderweb of wires and pipes hung overhead, pointing the way to her papa’s workshop.

  Inside the workshop, all sorts of inventions in various states of assembly crowded the tables. Tools, metal bits, electrical wire, Bakelite, fan blades—all of them teetered in haphazard piles about the room.

  Papa’s workshop was the home of his many tinkerings; he was a man with as many ideas for inventions as there were stars in the sky, or so Viviani thought. But the difficult part in having that many shiny things to tinker with: it was difficult to pick just one. Papa fiddled with everything from indoor cooling units to blowtorches, and they all lived beside one another in his cluttered space.

  The workshop was a dimly lit, low-ceilinged room with tools and pliers and shards of metallic things strewn about. Eva toed a saw blade. “This place looks like a dungeon.”

  “It is,” Viviani whispered. “It’s where Miss O’Conner puts children who are late with library book returns.”

  Eva giggled despite herself.

  Viviani loved that her best friend was always so ready with a laugh. Eva and her family lived in the Rogers Peet department store across from the library on Forty-Second. When she moved in across the street, Eva and Viv became friends “as fast as a pigeon can poop,” Viv would always say. Eva and Viviani would play Hollywood starlet and dress up in the fancy clothes at the department store until Eva’s dad scolded them in Armenian.

  “Are we even allowed in here?” Eva asked, her eyes scanning the sharp things, the pointy things, the thin
gs that slice.

  “Of course!” Viv said, though Viv said of course to a lot of things that most likely did not fall into the of course category. “But first, we need to hang a sign for our Inventors’ Club.”

  Eva grinned. “Inventors’ Club?”

  “Yep.”

  Viviani scrawled a quick sign on a yellowing piece of paper torn from a crumbling book, one that the binding department down the hall had decided was beyond repair. Old book pages were what all the library folks used for scrap paper. One supposes there are worse ways for a book to perish than to end up carrying one final message:

  INVENTORS’ CLUB!

  Stay away if you are:

  —John Jr. or Edouard

  —Unimaginative

  —Not Inventive

  Viviani chewed on the tip of her pencil, thinking of the locked closet at the end of this very hallway. She hastily added:

  —Cannibals!

  Then Viv realized that likely wasn’t specific enough, because while she did indeed wish to keep out cannibals, she wanted to fend off one in particular. Miss Hutch was always telling them to be specific in their writing. So she struck through that and wrote:

  —Cannibals! Mr. Green

  Viviani tacked the note to the door, then picked up a small telegraph machine whose wiry guts spilled through its removed back side. “Let’s invent something to talk to Martians!”

  Eva found a few small, valuable knobs of tinfoil, and they fashioned a bowl out of it, connecting wires and clamps all around. Soon, their creation looked like a rather proper tool for communicating with Mars.

  “Let’s see if we get a signal!” Viviani stretched and stretched and stretched, but the cord didn’t quite make it to the plug box. After some table shifting and heavy lifting, they plugged in their invention with great anticipation, and …

  “Nothing,” Viv said, blowing on the exposed copper wire ends and jiggling the contraption. “Rats.” She looked up at Eva. “Looks like we won’t get to chat with any Martians today.”

  Eva’s eyes were wide. She lifted her chin toward the doorway. Before Viviani even turned to see what might be there, a chill raced over her skin. She felt eyes on her, like she was being watched.