Lena was waiting for me at the parking lot of the Gatlin County Library. The cracked concrete was still wet and shiny from the rain. Even though the library was still open for two more hours, the hearse was the only car in the lot, except for a familiar old turquoise truck. Let’s just say this wasn’t a big library town. There wasn’t much we wanted to know about any town but our own, and if your granddaddy or your great-granddaddy couldn’t tell you, chances were you didn’t need to know.

Lena was huddled against the side of the building, writing in her notebook. She was wearing tattered jeans, enormous rain boots, and a soft black T-shirt. Tiny braids hung down around her face, lost in all the curls. She looked almost like a regular girl. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to be a regular girl. I was sure I wanted to kiss her again, but it would have to wait. If Marian had the answers we needed, I’d have a lot more chances to kiss her.

I ran through my playbook again. Pick ’n’ Roll.

“You really think there’s something here that can help us?” Lena looked over her notebook at me.

I pulled her up with my hand. “Not something. Someone.”

The library itself was beautiful. I had spent so many hours in it as a kid, I’d inherited my mother’s belief that a library was sort of a temple. This particular library was one of the few buildings that had survived Sherman’s March and the Great Burning. The library and the Historical Society were the two oldest buildings in town, aside from Ravenwood. It was a two-story venerable Victorian, old and weathered with peeling white paint and decades worth of vines sleeping along the doors and windows. It smelled like aging wood and creosote, plastic book covers, and old paper. Old paper, which my mom used to say was the smell of time itself.

“I don’t get it. Why the library?”

“It’s not just the library. It’s Marian Ashcroft.”

“The librarian? Uncle Macon’s friend?”

“Marian was my mom’s best friend, and her research partner. She’s the only other person who knows as much about Gatlin County as my mom, and she’s the smartest person in Gatlin now.”

Lena looked at me, skeptically. “Smarter than Uncle Macon?”

“Okay. She’s the smartest Mortal in Gatlin.”

I could never quite figure out what someone like Marian was doing in a town like Gatlin. “Just because you live in the middle of nowhere,” Marian would tell me, over a tuna sandwich with my mom, “doesn’t mean you can’t know where you live.” I had no idea what she meant. I had no idea what she was talking about, half the time. That’s probably why Marian had gotten along so well with my mom; I didn’t know what my mom was talking about, either, the other half the time. Like I said, the biggest brain in town, or maybe just the biggest character.

When we walked into the empty library, Marian was wandering around the stacks in her stockings, wailing to herself like a crazy person from a Greek tragedy, which she was prone to reciting. Since the library was pretty much a ghost town, except for the occasional visit from one of the ladies from the DAR checking on questionable genealogy, Marian had free run of the place.

“‘Knowest thou aught?’”

I followed her voice deep into the stacks.

“‘Hast thou heard?’”

I rounded the corner into Fiction. There she was, swaying, holding a pile of books in her arms, looking right through me.

“‘Or is it hidden from thee…’”

Lena stepped up behind me.

“‘… that our friends are threatened…’”

Marian looked from me to Lena, over her square, red reading glasses.

“‘… with the doom of our foes?’”

Marian was there, but not there. I knew that look well and I knew, though she had a quote for everything, she didn’t choose them lightly. What doom of my foes threatened me, or my friends? If that friend was Lena, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know.

I read a lot, but not Greek tragedy. “Oedipus?”

I hugged Marian, over her pile of books. She hugged me so tightly I couldn’t breathe, an unwieldy biography of General Sherman cutting into my ribs.

“Antigone.” Lena spoke up from behind me.

Show-off.

“Very good.” Marian smiled over my shoulder.

I made a face at Lena, who shrugged. “Home school.”

“It’s always impressive to meet a young person who knows Antigone.”

“All I remember is, she just wanted to bury the dead.”

Marian smiled at both of us. She shoved half her pile of books into my arms, and half into Lena’s. When she smiled, she looked like she could have been on the cover of a magazine. She had white teeth and beautiful brown skin, and she looked more like a model than a librarian. She was that pretty and exotic-looking, a mix of so many bloodlines it was like looking at the history of the South itself, people from the West Indies, the Sugar Islands, England, Scotland, even America, all intermingling until it would take a whole forest of family trees to chart the course.

Even though we were south of Somewhere and north of Nowhere, as Amma would say, Marian Ashcroft was dressed like she could have been teaching one of her classes at Duke. All of her clothes, all of her jewelry, all of her signature, brightly patterned scarves seemed to come from somewhere else and complement her unintentionally cool cropped haircut.

Marian was no more Gatlin County than Lena, and yet she’d been here as long as my mom had. Now longer. “I’ve missed you so much, Ethan. And you—you must be Macon’s niece, Lena. The infamous new girl in town. The girl with the window. Oh yes, I’ve heard about you. The ladies, they are talking.”