The Lake and the Library Read Online Free PDF Page A

boards kept it shut up tight, and even when I slipped the hook of the crowbar into a loose seam, the barriers wouldn’t give. I shouldn’t have expected to just walk in the front door, anyway. But the back . . .
    The rain pelted down with sudden violence, and the sky shifted from milky to bruise purple. The dark and the wet worked seamlessly to make the discarded garbage and old car husks in the building’s backyard look monstrous, like they were reeling back to spring on me at any second. The nearby trees of Wilson’s Woods weren’t faring as well as the building. They swayed and buckled, bending at impossible angles against the wind. Prairie storms came and went, but I couldn’t remember a tempest like this one in Treade. It was like I’d stumbled into an arena where a battle of colossal gods was underway, and I was holding only a crowbar. I was having a hard time even moving against the breath-stealing gusts, and I wondered if the wind could make my own body bend the wrong way, like the trees.
    I stuck close to the building’s back wall, clinging to the siding until I came up to one of the large bay windows, the boards covering the glass hiding underneath. I hadn’t been the first to try this, it seemed. The bottom seam of the boards looked chewed up in the places where other improvised tools had attempted to dislodge them. Someone had even tried battering their way in underneath the window, digging out the wall. I reeled back, tightening my hands and muscles, and gave the worn-in impression a
smack
that reverberated in my veins. Shards and splinters flew back at my face with every hit I tried, but I wasn’t going to get in any day soon. I’d have to be at this for weeks before seeing results — which I’m sure the previous attacker concluded before giving this all up and going home, pretending it never happened. As I moved up and tried to work the boards away, my adrenaline started to wear out. What chance did I, with the upper-body strength of a raccoon, have against the elements? Against time? Against this building which seemed to flinch every time I came at it with my crowbar? I eventually lost my patience, beating the remnants of that wall like it had besmirched my name, feeling helpless and alone and soaked, like the world itself was closing around me in a rain-soaked fist.
    The thunder hurled so hard above me that I felt suddenly queasy. And after that there was a horrible
crack,
like a symphony of broken spines, and for a second I thought I had done it, thought maybe I’d split the very building in two and it was about to come crashing on my head. I wasn’t far off. I had enough sense to turn, pivot, and dive, as one of the biggest and oldest trees on the property came down on my handiwork. I choked up a mouthful of mud once the air came pulsing back into me, and when I turned over, I saw that the giant trunk had cleared my feet by only a few inches. The building was not so lucky.
    This
was my sign. And for the longest second, as I got shakily to my feet and cleared the muck from my eyes, I thought maybe I had died under that tree, and I was now floating above the scene.
    Because the gaping hole in the wall that the tree had just created seemed like a far more impossible outcome.
    I crouched down and cleared the busted wall away by the handfuls, kicking the bigger, more stubborn pieces into desperate oblivion. And finally, there it was: my struggle had produced a me-sized hole, big enough to shimmy through, I figured, after measuring its width to my hips.
    I got in close and peered inside. It was a tangle of shadows and nothingness, and I could feel a cool breeze reach out and touch my face, almost tentatively, before it withdrew and vanished. But whatever was in there — be it a mound of treasure, a band of misfits, or horrible disappointment — I was meant to find it. It could have been our moment; mine, Tabitha’s, Paul’s . . . and it