The Mysterious Disappearance of the Reluctant Book Fairy Read Online Free PDF

trip to Monte Carlo had been achieved and she was even at this moment bearing witness to—as far as she herself was concerned—literature’s least romantic proposal of marriage. At least there was Manderley to consider, she thought. Whatever else, the narrator had that to look forward to when Maxim declared his intention to take her if only figuratively to his manly breast.
    She glanced at her watch. She worked out that, since Maxim had dipped into his breakfast before his proposal of marriage, what with all the chewing and swallowing and the fact that these were better days in which people had better table manners, it would probably take a good fifteen minutes for Maxim to get around the point. Given that amount of time and given a “Hey! C’n someone help me?” coming from the direction of the check-out desk, Annupurna thought it would be safe for her to leave Monie to her spate of time in Monte Carlo while she saw to whatever was going on in the bowels of the library itself.
    It was the internet user. He’d run into difficulty. The computer, he announced, was stalled or dead or confused or whatever computers were when everything “froze up on ’em,” he said. He was right in the middle of his research on a vacation to New Guinea—did anyone actually wish to vacation in New Guinea, Annapurna could not help wondering— when “the whole kit ’n’ caboodle of it just went to hell in a hand wagon.” And now he didn’t know what to do because his credit card number was apparently floating somewhere in cyberspace and he “damn well needed to get it back ’fore every Tom, Dick, and Harry gets their mitts on it and decides to book themselves on a slow boat to Antarctica.” Only, his pronounced it Anartica, which Annapurna decided not to correct. She hastened to his side in order to unfreeze the computer, murmuring all the while on the inadvisability of mixing his credit card information and a public computer. Identity theft and all that, she told him. He promised to “kick the fat posterior of anyone trying that kind of business with me , I tell you.”
    Annapurna was bent over the gentleman’s computer, attempting to sort out how he’d managed to make such a hash of merely looking up information when Monie began carrying on in the supply room. It was a little cry at first, which no one who did not know what was going on in that room would have even noticed had not it been followed by a series of yips and then a quite distinct, “But she didn’t mean to! She didn’t know! She was tricked!” that could not be ignored. Something had gone badly wrong with Monie’s journey to Monte Carlo, it seemed.
    Annapurna made short work of nothing with the ageing computer. She excused herself. To the gentleman’s cry of “But what about my credit card?” Annapurna said, “It’s a far, far better thing I do …” before she caught herself. She had to get to Monie before the Red-Hatted Ladies rose as one in protest. They could be an unruly bunch when it came to their book discussion group. They did not like interruptions and when it came to distractions … Most of them were not retired schoolteachers for nothing.
    Annapurna snapped open the supply room door without thinking about how abruptly this was likely to rouse Monie from her literary communion with Maxim and his newly beloved. Monie’s horrified scream as she was whisked from Monte Carlo to Langley, Washington, in an instant electrified everyone gathered in the library. Matters were not helped when Monie’s scream turned to sobs which turned to “It was so awful. It was so humiliating. How did she survive ?” which was the first clue that Annapurna had that something had gone very wrong.
    She tried to shush Monie. Monie was not to be shushed. She tried to console her. Monie was not to be consoled. She tried to lock her in the supply