"Huh," said Lavonne, exactly as Kwiatek had said it, and did not look up again.
The main branch of the Fallon Public Library was on Seventh Street, six blocks from the square, a limestone building from the 1920s with two stone lions out front that some long-ago civic committee had named Patience and Fortitude in imitation of New York, and that everyone in Fallon called Pat and Fred. Lloyd had driven past it ten thousand times. He went home first and changed out of his uniform into jeans and a gray sweater, and then he sat on the edge of his bed for half an hour doing nothing, and then he drove to Seventh Street and parked at a meter and walked up the steps between Pat and Fred at a quarter to four in the afternoon.
The first floor was bright and noisy, children's books on one side and new releases on the other and a long circulation desk in the middle. He stood in the lobby for a while, not sure what he was doing. Then he went to the desk.
"I need a card," he said to the young man behind it.
The young man gave him a form on a clipboard. Lloyd filled it out with a library pen on a little chain. Name, address, phone, date of birth. He signed it at the bottom, the L like a hook, and it occurred to him that this was the first form he had filled out in a long time where he was the subject and not the officer, and the thought made him feel strange and exposed, standing there at the counter in his sweater with his reading glasses on. The young man typed for a minute and printed a plastic card and slid it across.
"Anything else?"
"A Wrinkle in Time," Lloyd said. "It's a kids' book."
"Children's is right over there. W, for the call number, Madeleine L'Engle is L." The young man pointed. Then, perhaps because of something in Lloyd's face, he said, "Is it for a grandkid?"
"No," Lloyd said. "It's for me. It's the first one on a list."
He found it on the shelf in the children's section between a stuffed bear in a reading chair and a display of Halloween picture books. It was a smaller book than he expected, with a cover showing three figures flying over some kind of strange planet, and it had a plastic jacket and a barcode on the spine, and when he held it in his hand he thought of the canvas tote bag on the frosted gravel, and of a man folding a blanket in halves and then in thirds.
On the way out he stopped at the information desk on the second floor. There was a woman behind it in her sixties with short silver hair and a cardigan the color of mustard and a name plate that said R. HUANG. She looked up at him over her glasses.