Free Thunderstruck & Other Stories by Elizabeth McCracken Page B

love poems, textbooks on abnormal psychology. All useless. The newspaper articles said that he admitted nothing, including love. “He’s scared,” said his lawyer. We never heard him speak, and maybe we never would.
    The bitter head of reference read newspaper articles, sick that he’d ever distrusted Juliet. At night, he had dreams of Suzanne Cunningham standing on the reading-room balcony. He saw himself presenting her things, back issues of magazines, rare tax forms, the best-reviewed books. Anything to win her back.
    The bunny was dead. Perhaps the children’s librarian had killed it, but she claimed the rabbit was simply old, and she was the only one who knew anything about rabbits. That day with the bunny beneath its cloth, we thought weshould have a funeral behind the library, out by the staff parking. We could turn it into something educational and useful, a children’s program on death. Didn’t parents always bury pets with a small lecture, a made-up eulogy, a somber taps played on a hand held to the mouth like a trumpet? Maybe—
    “It’s a fucking rabbit,” said the children’s librarian, in full hearing of Preschool Arts and Crafts. “It doesn’t stand for anything.” Then she sighed. “I’ll miss Jessica,” she said.
    Jessica? She must have meant Juliet.
    “Jessica,” she said. “Jessica Rabbit.”
    Tommy Mason had three sisters who looked like him, all of whom seemed to be about the same age, twins or Irish twins or a combination of both. They were tall and blond and had beautiful skin with rosy, radishy cheeks, red with white beneath. They started coming back to the library with the grandfather’s card. He still needed books.
    For a while, they rotated duty. Then one started coming in week after week. She was a thin girl, the oldest Mason kid, someone said. Perhaps twenty years old. Pretty, like Juliet—like Suzanne—but pale, a mirror image. They could have been allegorical pictures in an old painting, or sisters on a soap opera, even though Suzanne Cunningham had been years older. Tommy Mason’s sister carried the grandfather’s library card and never spoke to anyone.
    Somehow, we loved her. She seemed brave; she nodded when we nodded at her. We almost forgot who she was, the same way we almost forgot that Janice had ever been a nervousyoung man with a robot obsession and a faint, endearing mustache. She had become herself.
    Ours had been a fine building until the mid-1970s, when it had the misfortune of being introduced to the wrong sort of architect. He knocked down the grand marble staircases that had led from the entrance to the reading room, and sealed off the first floor from the upstairs; he installed coarse brick walls and staircases that were only staircases, only transportation. It was possible for the people who worked in the first-floor departments—children’s, circulation—to go days without seeing their upstairs colleagues.
    So the day the children’s librarian went up to reference and ran into Tommy Mason’s sister might have been the first day the two had met at all. Circulation knew the Mason girl well; reference saw her as she deliberated among the mysteries. The children’s librarian rarely left her room, its puppets, its jigsaw puzzles. Somebody else had taken over feeding the finches and the fish.
    She recognized Tommy Mason’s sister from news reports or neighborhood gossip. She stared for a while, confirmed the identity with the head of reference. No harm in answering, he thought.
    Tommy Mason’s sister was in the mysteries, because that’s what her grandfather still read. Maybe he needed to read them especially now, to know that murders happened in this way: someone was killed, and there were clues and an explanation, and at the very end a madman or bitter wife was led away, and nobody but the murderer wept. She looked at the books, at the skull-and-crossbones stickers the cataloging department stuck on the spines of mysteries.She selected three and