The Silver Bough Read Online Free PDF

pipeline at long last. Appleton Public Library would be the last in the county to go online, but the day was coming—although he wouldn’t be drawn into giving a specific date. He’d stressed that, although the salary was low compared with what she’d been making in London, she shouldn’t imagine she was walking into an undemanding job. The library was at present antiquated and underequipped, and, despite funding problems, it had to be brought up to date and into line with modern needs. Should she accept the job, Kathleen would be in the enviable position of presiding over the dawning of a new era in Appleton.
    But since she’d taken on the job more than three months ago she’d not heard another word from him on the subject. She decided to say nothing about it to Miranda now, but to raise the issue with Fraser next week. She was well settled in now, and it was time to look to the library’s future.
    “I get my news from the radio,” she said, bringing the conversation back to their original point. “I can even get Radio Four if I put it on the windowsill in the living room and point the aerial just exactly
so.
But I didn’t hear about the sunshine in Glasgow. I don’t hear much of the Scottish news, I’m afraid; I’m kind of a ‘Today’ addict. Very London-centric of me, I know.”
    “My dear, you don’t have to apologize to
me
!” Miranda was English, and still had a rather posh, home-counties accent despite having lived in Appleton for eighteen years.
    Kathleen glanced up at the clock and saw it was only half an hour until closing time. “I’d better go check on the buckets again.”
    “I’ll write the notices so I can post them on my way home. Somehow, I don’t think I’ll be interrupted.”
    They both gazed around the empty library and sighed. It was a day for sitting indoors with a good book, not going out in search of one, she mused, as she went out of the main room of the library into the imposing foyer. It was a large, echoing space with a high, vaulted ceiling, and felt as grand as a cathedral. Her eyes were naturally drawn upward, even when she wasn’t concerned about leaks. But she could hear the sound of splashing, and so for once did not pause to admire the magnificent stained-glass depiction of Adam and Eve and the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil above the front entrance, but instead snatched up the mop she’d left close at hand and dealt with the puddle that had spread around the red plastic bucket.
    Next she marched off to monitor the problem in the Ladies’ Reading Room. Although it had not been reserved for the use of females only since before she was born—it was now officially “the reading room”—she preferred to think of it by the name etched into the beautiful, glass-paneled door. It was not the coziest of rooms, although she imagined that it might have been, once, when fires were lit daily in the big fireplace (now boarded up). And there would have been a regularly changing display of magazines, and at least a dozen newspapers hanging from the reading poles instead of the three the current budget allowed for. The many-paned, leaded-glass windows, rattling under the assault of wind and rain, gave a view of the wide, palm-tree-lined Esplanade and, beyond it, the harbor. Today the view was a murky one, the sea and sky both grey and practically indistinguishable. She turned her back on the depressing sight to admire the panel above the fireplace. It was a mixed-media work, an oil painting on wood inset with colored glass and metal, depicting the Judgment of Paris in the faintly eerie, elegant Art Nouveau style that had been all the rage when the library was built.
    Neither of the two leaks in this room seemed any worse than in the morning, when she’d discovered them. There was no mopping up required, and the buckets would likely be all right until morning. Much relieved, she went back to the counter in the main library where she found Miranda gazing thoughtfully at