The Silver Bough Read Online Free PDF Page A

She had discovered three since the rain began, and her supply of buckets was now exhausted. She didn’t know what she’d do if a fourth one appeared. She’d reported the leaks to the head office, faxed through as
urgent,
but her hopes were not high. In a building as large and old as this one, repairs could be expensive, and everybody knew the county council was strapped for cash; they’d been cutting corners and eliminating “nonessential services” for more than twenty years.
    Things were tough all over; having worked for nearly a decade in locally funded libraries, Kathleen was used to being on the receiving end of budget cuts, but Appleton had, in addition, its own particular problems, in consequence of its situation: “the farthest from anywhere, the closest to nowhere” as the local description had it. It had seemed a wonderfully distant and romantic place on her first visit. She’d been bewitched by the scenery, charmed by the clean, bright emptiness of the landscape and the peaceful, old-fashioned little town, and three months of living here had only made her fondness for it grow. But there was a price attached to living so far from everywhere else—a hundred miles from library headquarters, the farthest-flung of all council outposts. Even the most basic supplies cost more and took longer to arrive. The drivers of delivery vans didn’t like going to Appleton. It was the end of the road; nothing to do when you got there but turn around and go back. There were no alternative routes—nothing but a private airfield used mostly to ferry patients to hospitals in Glasgow—and the only road was no motorway but a narrow, winding, often badly rutted track that ran along the sea, where it was swept by high waves during storms, except when it climbed to higher, rocky ground, where there were a couple of tight and dangerous bends.
    “Hear the weather report this morning?” Miranda asked when they were alone again.
    “Let me guess: set to continue.”
    “Worse, actually.” She put on a broadcaster’s voice: “Bad news for listeners in Scotland, with the fine, bright weather coming to an end as a heavy band of rain sweeps in from the west, affecting all parts by early Saturday morning.”
    “
What
fine, bright weather?”
    “That’s what they’ve been having in Glasgow, apparently. A real Indian summer. It was even on the news. Sunbathers outside the People’s Palace, didn’t you see—” She stopped, giving Kathleen a slightly wary look. “Um, do you
have
a television?”
    “Oh, yes. But the reception in the Library House is terrible—the walls are too thick or something. I can’t get cable, because you’re not allowed to fix a satellite dish to the wall of a listed building; there’s even a problem with putting an aerial on the roof—it might pose a risk to the museum skylights…” She frowned. “You’re looking relieved. That’s not kind.”
    “I was worried in case you were like Mr. Dean, with a
thing
against television.” Mr. Dean was the previous librarian. He had died six months short of his anticipated retirement, and seemed to have been an eccentric character, not generally adored.
    “Of course, television wasn’t the only thing he disapproved of,” Miranda went on. “Although he was always railing against
old-fashioned superstition,
he also hated anything
too modern.
It was all decadence to him; I’m sure we could have had computers in the library by now—I’m sure there were central government funds available for that Millennium project to get everybody online—but, thanks to Arnold Dean, Appleton Public Library remains stuck in the past.” She picked up a date stamp and crashed it down savagely onto a pad of pink Post-its. “We’ll
never
get funding for it now; not from the council.”
    Fraser Mann, the head of library services for the county, had told Kathleen before he hired her that both a computerized checkout system and Internet access for the public were in the