When I reached Salem, I pulled off the road into a small park and dialed 411. There was no Laura Scott listed in the Salem phone directory. There was one unlisted number for an L. P. Scott. I asked for the main number of the Salem Public Library. Ten minutes later I found the big concrete building between Liberty Street and Commercial. It was only a short drive from
Willamette University, just south of downtown. On the north side there was a big open courtyard that connected the library to City Hall. Too close to the bureaucrats for my taste. Once inside, you forgot how ugly the outside was. It was airy, lots of lights, the floor covered with a turquoise carpeting. The shelves were orange. Not what I would have picked, but it would keep students awake. I walked to the circulation desk and asked if a Ms. Scott worked there.
“Ms. Scott is our senior reference librarian,” a man of Middle Eastern extraction told me in a thick accent, pointing to the right corner of the main floor. I thanked him and headed in the direction of his finger.
I paused a moment beside the Renaissance art section and looked at the woman who was speaking quietly to a high school student with bad skin. He looked ridiculous to a man of my advanced years with his pants pulled down to nearly the bottom of his butt, bagging to his knees and beyond.
The student moved away, ambling toward the magazine section. I got my first good look at Laura Scott. Paul had said she was painfully shy and withdrawn, that she disappeared, like a shadow. My first thought was: Is the idiot blind? Truth was, I took one look at her and felt a bolt of lust so strong I had to lean against the nineteenth-century English history section. How could he say that she was nondescript? She was slender, tall, and even though her suit was too long and a dull shade of olive green, it simply didn’t matter. She’d look great in a potato sack. Her hair was made up of many shades of brown, from dark brown to a lighter brown to an ash blond. It was all coiled up and smashed close to her head with lots of clips, but I could tell that it was long and thick. Lovely hair. I wanted to throw all those clips in the wastebasket under her desk. I understood how Paul had taken one look at her and lost his head. But why had he said she was plain? Had he said it so she’d hold no interest for me? So I’d dismiss her?
Actually, Laura Scott looked restrained, very professional, particularly with her hair scraped back like that, and she shimmered. I leaned against the English history section again. Shimmered? Jesus, I was losing it. Was her unremarkable presentation to the world calculated? To keep men in line around her? Well, it evidently hadn’t worked with Paul.
It wasn’t working with me. I said to myself three times: She and Paul betrayed Jilly. I said it a fourth time to make sure it got through.
I waited until the high school student in his low-slung jeans disappeared behind an orange shelf, a magazine in his hand.
I approached her slowly and said, “High school students today-sometimes I just want to grab their jeans and give them a good yank. It wouldn’t take much. That boy you were speaking to, I think if he coughed his jeans would be around his knees.”
Her face was smooth and young and she didn’t change expression for about three seconds. She just stared at me blankly, bland as rice pudding, as if she hadn’t heard me. Then she looked to where the boy was leaning down to pick another magazine off the shelf, the crotch of his pants literally between his knees. She looked back up at me and after another three seconds, to my surprise, she threw back her head and laughed, a big full laugh. That laugh broke through the silence like a drum roll.
The Middle Eastern guy at the circulation desk looked over, his mouth opening, his surprise evident even from across the room.