Free The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins Page A

about your catalog was the one thing truly and enthusiastically forbidden to them. Father never said why, exactly, but he was
very
serious about it. The general thinking was that he didn’t want any one of them growing too powerful, but after what happened to David, no one ever dared ask.
    “It’s OK,” Jennifer said. “The rules are a little different for me. I can talk about medical conditions, about their symptoms, diagnosis, likely outcome, anything a patient might have a legitimate interest in. I just can’t go into any kind of technical detail about treatments.”
    “Oh? I didn’t know that.” She and Jennifer didn’t talk much, hadn’t in years. “So it’s…what? A bad valve, or something?”
    “No, no. Nothing physical. ‘Heart coal’ is just a term for the syndrome.”
    “Awfully flowery.”
    Jennifer shrugged. “Father has a poetic streak.”
    Carolyn stared at her. “If you say so. So, what’s wrong with her?”
    Jennifer pursed her lips, searching for the right words. “She makes ‘brah-neez.’ ”
    “ ‘
Brah-neez?’
You mean brownies?”
    “Right!” Jennifer nodded. “That! You
do
understand.”
    “Er…no, Jennifer. I’m sorry. I’m not following you at all.”
    Jennifer’s face fell. “She makes brownies,” she said. “She doesn’t eat them herself, but she makes them anyway. She does it every few days.”
    “I still don’t…”
    “Sometimes she sings when she does it,” Jennifer said. “That’s how I know. It doesn’t have to be words. Hearing someone sing or even just hum can tell me everything.”
    “About what?” Carolyn asked, utterly lost.
    “Her pathology,” Jennifer said. “The brownies aren’t for her. They’re for someone she lost a long time ago.”
    “Her husband?” Mrs. McGillicutty’s husband was a couple of years dead.
    “No,” Jennifer said. “Not him. He spent most of their marriage at work. That was what defined him. And he had other women. Once she tried to talk to him about it and he beat her for it.”
    “Lovely.”
    Mrs. McGillicutty bustled in the kitchen, her eyes far away.
    “But there was a child once. She doesn’t even know it herself, but the brownies are for him.”
    “What happened?”
    “The boy liked getting fucked in the ass,” Jennifer said. “This made his father very angry. One day the two of them came home and found him doing it on the couch. It was an older man, one of his father’s friends. She wouldn’t have minded, not much, but it made the boy’s father crazy. He beat the child rather badly, broke his left tibia and the mandible in two places. He was in the hospital for a long time, but the bones eventually healed. The damage to his spirit was catastrophic, though. The boy and his father had been close, when he was younger. The beating broke him. He started taking drugs—amphetamines, mostly, but anything he could get his hands on. He withdrew. He stayed away for days at a time. Then one day he didn’t come home. They spoke to him once or twice after that—” Jennifer pointed at the thing on the wall.
    “It’s called a telephone,” Carolyn said. She had gotten Miner to explain about telephones before she killed him the first time.
    “Right. That. They spoke twice on the tel-oh-phone, and once there was a note. He was in a place called Denver, then another one called Miami. Then they didn’t get any more phone calls. That was ten years ago.”
    “Where is he?”
    Jennifer shook her head. “Dead, probably. No one really knows. At first this was agony for her. Every phone call, every knock on the door ripped open the wound. She lay awake every night for years. Her husband recovered…moved on, forgot. He was a man who never felt anything very deeply, just as Mrs. McGillicutty’s own father was. But Eunice cannot move on. She lies alone in the dark and waits for her little boy to come home. The waiting is all that she has now.”
    Carolyn looked at the sad woman bustling about in her