He yanked hard, pulling her over to a tenement across the street. Laura followed, trying to ask questions but to no avail. She looked back at the building where her fellow classmates had disappeared. Perhaps this would make a better story, and she could be of assistance in some way at the same time. The boy’s blue eyes reminded her so much of Harry’s.
Inside, when he pointed out a dead rat at the bottom of the narrow stairs so that Laura could avoid stepping on it, she shuddered. He looked at her, curious, and continued up the stairs to the third floor. The light grew dimmer as they climbed.
He opened a door and she stepped inside. She’d seen photos of tenement life in the newspapers, of children huddled on mattresses on the floor, coal ovens and cruddy sinks. This apartment wasn’t so terrible: the curtains seemed clean, and the dishes and pots had been stacked with care on the open shelves.
A group of children ranging from what seemed to be four to fourteen looked up from their work at a large table in the front room, piled high with black strips that Laura recognized as garters. The mother didn’t stand as Laura entered, just wiped her forehead and pointed to one corner, where a baby lay swaddled on a blanket on the floor.
“I put the baby there so she doesn’t get stepped on,” said the mother.
“I—I’m sorry?”
“She didn’t eat last night or this morning. Don’t know what’s wrong.” The woman went back to sewing, and barely raised an elbow toward the child. Her son, the boy who’d fetched Laura, seemed more concerned than his mother, gently lifting the child from the floor and carrying her over. As he did, the baby let out a soft bleat.
“Keep her quiet,” ordered the mother. “If my husband wakes up, we’ll all be in trouble.”
“Too late for that,” a man’s voice boomed from the kitchen. The husband, a barrel-chested man with thinning hair that stuck straight out from the top of his head, appeared soon after. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”
Should she say she was a student reporter? No, probably not. She needed to get out of there. The baby in the corner looked up at the ceiling, mute and expressionless. She didn’t seem to be in pain, but at the same time, the baby lacked vitality, as if she had never been held a moment in her life.
“I’m sorry, there must be a mistake. I’ll go.”
“No. You disturb my sleep when I just got done with the night shift, I think you owe me something.”
“Money?”
“That’ll do.”
With shaking hands, she opened her satchel.
“In fact, give me that bag. That’ll do even better.”
The one with her finished essay for the law class, all of her notes, all of her money. “No, I can’t.”
He stepped toward her with a growl, reaching for the satchel with a hand the size of a baseball mitt, the nails rimmed in black.
She’d made a terrible error. What a stupid idea to come up here alone.
CHAPTER FIVE
New York City, 1993
One afternoon when Sadie was a little girl, walking hand in hand with her mother down Fifth Avenue, they passed by the colossal library. “Like Buckingham Palace,” Sadie said, having seen an image of the queen of England’s home on the television the night before.
“I lived there, once,” her mother had said, her mouth in a tight line. “When I was a little girl like you.”
“Buckingham Palace?” Sadie asked, unsure.
“No. The library. In an apartment built deep inside. It was even written up in the newspaper, back when we first moved in.” When pressed, though, she’d refused to provide any other details. At the time, Sadie figured her mother was teasing her. After all, who lived in a library?
Soon after Sadie started working there, she’d met Mr. Babenko, a longtime employee and the building’s de facto historian, and had been surprised to learn that, yes, there had indeed been an apartment included in the architect’s plan, designed specifically for the superintendent and his family. He’d directed her to the mezzanine level, accessible by a private staircase off the first floor. To Sadie’s dismay, the area had been converted into storage, full of boxes and janitors’ supplies. It was hard to imagine a family of four living there.
She’d spent a Saturday going through old newspapers on microfiche and found a short article written in 1911 about the apartment’s inhabitants. A black-and-white photo showed a handsome man with ears that stuck out standing next to a dark-haired woman whose face was blurry. She’d been caught looking down at her children, not at the camera. The children, a boy and a girl, smiled proudly in front of their parents. Sadie recognized her mother by the lightness of her hair and eyes, like she was an angel. The boy, Harry, was Sadie’s uncle, who had died before Sadie was born.
Invigorated, Sadie had stopped by the Rare Book Room and requested any superintendent records from the years the family had lived there. After a ten-minute wait, the librarian lugged over two boxes filled with ledgers, letters, invoices, and other paraphernalia. Sadie’s grandfather’s name, Jack Lyons, was on every one. As she sifted through them, she marveled at how large a job he’d held. It was a bit like running a ship or a small city, keeping the library going. An entire ledger was filled with the monthly payroll, from electricians to porters, all neatly typed out in rows with Name, Position, and Amount, then a handwritten total at the very bottom. To think her grandfather had written those numbers, so long ago, and here she was working at the very same place. Excited, she’d told her mother and brother what she’d discovered. Her mother had responded by turning up the television volume, drowning her out.
Back then, Laura Lyons’s legacy hadn’t yet been resurrected. Only in recent years had Sadie’s and her brother’s checks from the executor of the estate—Laura Lyons’s former secretary in London—gradually increased, as their grandmother’s collections of essays were reissued. Yet even when the Berg Collection acquired Laura Lyons’s walking stick, Sadie hadn’t mentioned her connection, knowing that Marlene would be curious and ask questions she wouldn’t be able to answer.
Today, with Dr. Hooper’s new interest in Laura Lyons, Sadie figured it might be time to acknowledge her family tie as a way to get into his good graces and secure the position of curator permanently. Claude wouldn’t think twice if he was in the same position—she had no doubt about that.
First, though, she had some homework to do.
After her shift was over, she requested the administrative records of the library from 1911, hoping there might be some record of the Lyons family there. A starting point, at least. Inside a dozen boxes, Sadie found the usual—letters, files, a few photos of stiff-looking men standing stiffly—but also several newsletters, which had been written for the library staff at the time. The first began with a letter from the director, a Dr. Edwin H. Anderson, followed by several short articles about upgrades or exhibits. The second edition, though, caused her to let out a squeak of glee. Inside was a column written by Mrs. Jack Lyons. The tone was whimsical and airy, about the travails of raising two children in the library, her favorite books of the month, and what she was reading to her children, Harry and Pearl, before bed.