The Ghost in the Third Row Read Online Free PDF

on!” she yelled over her shoulder. “Let’s get moving!”
    I, the fast sprinter, was wondering how Chris could talk so much and run so fast at the same time. She didn’t slow down until we started climbing the steps to the library.
    The librarian at the front desk sent us upstairs to the reference room. We had to climb a huge set of winding marble stairs to get there.
    In the reference room I got the second, but not the last, major shock of my day. The librarian sitting behind the desk was a hunk! I mean, who would have thought it? Librarians are supposed to be little old ladies. OK, I’ll admit a lot of them aren’t little and a lot more aren’t old. But how many of them are guys who look good enough to be models?
    The Hunk stood up as we crossed to his desk. “Can I help you young ladies?” he asked.
    â€œYes,” said Chris briskly. “We’d like to look—”
    â€œAt your eyes,” I finished, without realizing I was speaking out loud.
    Chris jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow. “At your files of local newspapers.”
    â€œIn the periodical room,” he said, swinging his arm to the right. We headed off in the direction he indicated.
    â€œBy the way,” he called after us, “do you know how to use the microfilm reader?”
    I shook my head vigorously. I hoped that if by some chance Chris had already learned how to use the thing she would have the good sense to keep her mouth shut.
    â€œBetter let me show you,” he said, crossing to join us. “It’s not hard, but there’s no sense in wasting a lot of time trying to figure it out.”
    He led us into a room that seemed to contain only three kinds of things. The first things I noticed were long shelves filled with sets of books that all looked alike. I couldn’t figure out why they had so many copies of each book, until I looked at their spines and realized they were magazines that had been bound into book form. I wondered for a minute why they bothered. I mean, who would want to look at a twenty-year-old copy of Ladies’ Home Journal? But then I remembered I was here to look at a fifty-year-old local newspaper. So why not a twenty-year-old magazine?
    Next I noticed dozens of squashed-looking file cabinets. Not squashed as if they had been sat on by an elephant—just squashed as in being about twice as wide and half as tall as the ones I was used to. You see people shaped like that sometimes, too. It’s always a real shock.
    The third things were these big glass and metal machines that looked like they had been made out of television sets and storm windows.
    â€œNow, what year did you girls have in mind?”
    We looked at each other blankly. “You just told me you’ve read the script five times,” Chris said. “What year is it set in?”
    â€œScript?” asked BBEG. (That’s “Blond, Blue-Eyed, and Gorgeous.”) “Are you girls doing a show?”
    â€œWe’re in The Woman in White, at the Grand Theater,” Chris said proudly.
    Talk about magic words! It turned out that the librarian, who told us we should call him Sam, was an actor, too. I could tell that in his eyes we had suddenly been transformed from underage nuisances to human beings. It was as if we had just found out we were part of the same family.
    â€œI really wanted to try out for that show myself,” said Sam wistfully. “I’d love to work in that old theater. But I just got this job, and they have me working three nights a week, so I could never have made rehearsals.” He sighed. “Anyway, tell me who else is in the cast.”
    Chris started listing people, and it seemed as if Sam knew half of them. He made us tell him everything we could think of about the show and what was going on with it. Somehow, we managed to answer all his questions without letting on about the real reason we had come to the library.
    We were having