Readers' Advisory

Mark Page, Finder of Lost Books, in: The Mystery that Wasn’t There

David Wright, Guest Columnist

As readers’ advisors and reference librarians know, library users don’t always have their citation information correct when they come seeking help at
the desk. Readers can be particularly difficult when they come in looking for “that book with the lawn chair and the martini glass on the cover” or “the blue book that used to be right here on the shelves.” Matching readers to books not only requires an understanding of genres and appeal factors, but also demands the skills of a private detective in unraveling the knots in the reader’s query. The range of tools that readers’ advisors have at their disposal has increased dramatically over the past decade, with the expansion of both print and online resources. This expansion of resources has demanded an equivalent expansion in the strategies that librarians use to answer a particular question. Readers’ advisors are increasingly called upon to exercise their detecting skills in working with readers.

David Wright embodies the spirit of the literary detective. Wright is the readers’ services librarian at the Seattle Public Library, where he staffs the fiction desk and hones his searching skills. He is also an active participant in the Fiction-L electronic discussion list, whose members are constantly posting and answering reading questions. Wright also contributes to the NoveList database, developing author readalikes and a quarterly essay for What We’re Reading. He is a coauthor of Booklist’s “He Reads / She Reads” feature. Wright is also acting chair of the Readers Advisors of Puget Sound.

In this essay, Wright uses the form of the hard-boiled detective story to examine both strategies that readers’ advisors can use in working with scanty or incorrect citations from readers as well as suggesting resources, both print and electronic, that can assist in the search. —Editor

There are a million stories in the naked city. The one I was looking for had a red cover. People lose track of books for lots of reasons. Maybe they’re just forgetful, or they don’t catch the title when some friend or spieler tells them about it. Some had left them half-read on planes, trains, or buses earlier that day, while others read them a year or a lifetime ago, and wanted to find their way back to some lost horizon or forgotten dream. They needed a story to tell themselves in the dark, to gather up the chance events of life into something with a beginning, a middle, and an end. It might be made-up or true, but what it added up to was more than dry facts. What they were looking for beat with a pulse of experience that would not be ignored, and when the pressure got too great, they came to me. The sign on my door reads “Library,” which makes me that curious hodgepodge of headshrinker, gumshoe, stevedore, and traffic cop known as a librarian.

It was a slow Thursday evening. A hard rain had set in early, scattering most of the citizenry back to their holes, leaving just me and the regulars, and some poor sap going in and out of the fiction aisles like a French farce, looking about as agitated as a blind dog in a meat shop. I extended a feeler.
“Help you find something tonight? Missing umbrella?”

“Oh, well, no, I don’t think so.” He was as tentative as a one-legged sparrow. A lot of fiction readers had no idea we were there to help them, too. I flashed him my pearly whites.

“C’mon, try me.”

He bit. “I’m looking for something I saw in a book store, a novel, there was a stack of them . . . I don’t know what it’s called or who it’s by, but the cover was red.” The guy had a face like a can of condemned veal. “Can you help me?”

“That depends. You remember what shade of red this was?”

“It was . . . the color of . . . of blood.” He said it the way a sick man pronounces the name of his disease.

“Was there a small man on the cover, in silhouette?”

“Why, yes, now I think of it . . . yes indeed, how did you . . . ?”

“No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy—it just came out. I’m afraid we won’t have any copies on hand, but I’d be happy to reserve one for you. In the meantime . . . ” After ten minutes of soothing reader’s advisory, he headed out into the wet with a gratified expression on his mug, a few suggested titles under his arm, and my promise that he’d get the book he came in for in a month or so. The hooks were in. He’d be back.

How had I known about the red book, you ask? I read the papers. That’s my part of job, to cover the literary waterfront. No, I didn’t have time to read every book review rag that crossed my desk—not even close, although I skimmed what I could. But I had sources— eyes and ears on the street—so no high-profile book search was going to catch me flat-footed. Not with handy online news scanners, such as Arts and Letters Daily, the Yahoo! Books News, or the Arts Journal, which cased a slew of papers and magazines and gave me just the literary dirt. Using a free RSS service like Bloglines, I could even access these sources in one spot. And how much time did it take to cop a gander at an online prepublication alert such as Library Journal digital, so that I was tipped off to what was coming around the next bend? Or to visit the Starred Reviews section of Overbooked, which skimmed off just the strongest raves from all those review journals jamming up my inbox, adding blurbs and sorting them into handy genre and thematic boxes; or Overbooked’s Hotlist section, which gave me much the same info at a glance? The way I saw it, a book dick like me couldn’t afford not to take advantage of tipsters like these. I also scanned online book reviews in the local media—both the legit mastheads, and those alternative rags that turned out a steady stream of snipes catering to disaffected squirts with more piercings than Custer at Little Big Horn. Sure, it took time to stay hip to the score, but it paid off in spades with most of the book identification questions that came in. With a little literary street smarts, it didn’t take a busload of brains to tumble to the fact that someone seeking Dr. Scarpocket was really after medical examiner Kay Scarpetta, or that the fellow insisting he wanted McDonald’s Sunday was really after McEwan’s Saturday, or that the knuckle-dragger who walked in the door blinking like a toad in a sand heap, and hazily articulated that they were looking for that book, was likely headed for the back of the line marked The Da Vinci Code. Nobody is quite the individual he thinks he is.

Pride goeth before the fall guy. You’re only as good as your last question, and my next last question would be about as easy as opening an oyster with a bus ticket. After straightening the displays, I returned to the desk to find it watched over by the expectant form of a superb brunette with a contralto voice like hot damp fur.

“I wonder if you could help me,” she purred.

“Shoot,” I said, disarmed.

“I’ve been looking for this book for the longest time, but I just can’t seem to come up with the title.” She had eyes as shallow as a cafeteria tray or as deep as a hole to China—whichever you like.

“I think you’ve come to the right place. Tell me what you remember about the book.”

“Well, there’s just this one odd detail. The hero, he has a parrot named Lorna, and he becomes involved with a woman whose name is also Lorna.”

“Quite a coinkydink. Do you recall anything else?”

“I’ve racked my last brain, but that’s all I can come up with. I only remembered that because, you see, my name is Lorna.”

I proceeded to take her over the hurdles, asking if she recalled where the book was set, when it took place, what genre it was, any words from the title or character names, the hero’s profession, any other characters, anything that happened in the story, either specific scenes or the overall plot. I even asked what color the book was. You never knew what detail would ring the dinger, or what combination of details. Take the kid from that morning looking for something called Tales of Broccoli for a school assignment. It was only when I coaxed from him that he thought it was really, really old that I pulled Boccacio’s Decameron out of the bag. Usually getting answers was like getting olives out of a bottle—the first was difficult but the rest came easier. With Lorna, each question dropped like a pebble into a bottomless pit, with not a ripple in those pond-water eyes of hers. She was Vogue on the outside and vague on the inside.

“Is there anything else you can recall, no matter how small or insignificant it seems?”

She lowered her lashes until they almost cuddled her cheeks and slowly raised them again, like a theater curtain. “Wait—there was one thing—just a word, something like metal, some kind of . . . fictional metal . . . I really don’t know.”

“Was that part of the title?”

“No, no, I’m almost positive it wasn’t.”

I gave her my card and she gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket, and flowed toward the farthest exit, her footsteps echoing away like a woodpecker falling asleep. I watched her go. A full minute later I snapped out of a reverie of metaphors and similes and looked around. An hour before closing, and the library was almost empty. With any luck, I’d have this sewed up well before quitting time. I didn’t have much to go on, true, but the keywords I had were pretty unusual: let’s see if they fit any locks.

I led off with the NoveList database, which was conveniently limited to fiction, and gave me keyword access to recent reviews from Booklist, Library Journal, and Publisher’s Weekly. I knew of no single better resource for identifying fiction: as often as not, I’d find my answer here. While I didn’t expect NoveList’s enhanced subject headings to have my answer, a parrot named Lorna might have caught some reviewer’s eye. Heading straight for the “Boolean Search” interface, I began plugging in combinations of Lorna and Parrot, Lorna and bird, and just plain Lorna. Mostly, I learned that Lorna was not an uncommon name for literary characters, authors, and even book reviewers, but with Eric Kraft’s Herb and Lorna: A Love Story, I thought I might be onto something. The reviews didn’t mention a parrot, but there was a love interest, and Kraft’s feel for of quirks and everyday oddities seemed about right for the parrot plot. Although our library had a copy, I made tracks to Amazon.com, where my pleasure at finding I could search for my keywords within the text of Kraft’s book was stamped as dead as last Christmas when I found that the book contained no parrots, and hardly any mention of birds. It looked like NoveList had turned up a big fat goose egg, and not a golden one.

Usually I’d have more to go on, like some snatch of plot, a locale, a genre, or a word from the title, and constructing a search was a truly creative task, calling for the open eye of the open mind. Some jobs call for a stiletto, but this was shotgun work, and I was used to mixing and matching varied terms in a scattershot approach. Don’t get so caught up looking for a murdered priest that you step right over the killed clergyman, slain prelate, and ecclesiastical homicide. My gal Friday was a thesaurus. This time out I had so little to go on, there weren’t many combinations I could try. I substituted Lona for Lorna a few times, but that was firing blanks into the dark. I dropped “metal” into the equation without much hope. Something didn’t smell right there—it hardly seemed the kind of thing you’d remember. “Fictional metal,” she had said. The mind can play funny tricks, and my gut told me this reference to metal was a blind alley. NoveList seemed to agree.

It was time to broaden my search. You never know what’s behind any door, and experience had taught me that sometimes the answer was waiting behind the ninth door, or the nineteenth. I was already in Amazon, and so I ran the same searches there, which could be powerful stuff considering I was doing full-text searching of many of the books themselves. It became clear that author Lorna Landvik wrote the occasional parrot into her works, but otherwise I got zippo for my pains. I might have searched within the text of older works in the public domain at a site such as The Online Books Page or Bibliomania, but something told me this story hadn’t been around that long.

Genius is an infallible capacity for not being satisfied. I read that in a detective novel somewhere. I quickly ran the same searches through some big periodical databases such as Proquest and Expanded Academic Index, adding in “book review” as a limiter. Unlike NoveList, these sources would work for nonfiction as well. Now I was searching a larger pool of reviews, and while this yielded a lot more hits, none of them turned up my book. I expanded my canvass again to include Books in Print and OCLC WorldCat. When the latter snared an old blurb for a rare kids book that contained both Lorna and a parrot, I swept past it like so much underbrush, possessed by the thrill of the chase. The hunting way of life is the only one natural to man. Millennia ago, I would’ve been running down a deer or wooly mammoth; now I was chasing an imaginary parrot named Lorna, but the glint in my eye might well have belonged to my spear-wielding forbear. I careened forward to the National Library for the Blind and Physically Handicapped’s online catalog like a wild-eyed gambler. Just last week I had seen a colleague identify a twenty-year-old paperback romance novel, the kind of ephemeral pulp that would have been as lost as a lump of butter in a greyhound’s throat, but for a blurb in the NLS catalog for an extant Braille edition. No Lornas there, and I began to get a taste in my mouth like poisoned fruit. If she’d given me a bum steer in the first place, then I was baiting better mousetraps with rubber cheese.

I decided to take one last stab, and cast my search terms onto the mean, sleazy streets of the Web like orphans into the red-light district. Google was a desperation ploy, and I knew it. Yet with fortitude and creative searching, I had found plenty of books before out on the Web. Often there would be some blogger or small-time reviewer out there who would mention the book in passing. For all I knew, the author might have a cult following with Web sites devoted to his or her works or sub-sub-sub-genre, or some bookworm birder might have compiled an extensive annotated bibliography of parrot fiction. Stranger things had happened: a lot of good info gets passed around under the official radar. But tonight, even with my unusual search terms, the Web proved about as useful as a chocolate teapot. Oh, the next twenty minutes of Googling and Dogpiling were entertaining. I saw some pretty interesting Lornas doing interesting things with disinterested parrots, but sadly for the parrots, none of them were fictional. Adding in trusty terms like “review,” “novel,” “fiction,” or “bibliography” didn’t help. I had played the field, and wound up six feet under it.

The library had been closed for fifteen minutes, and it was starting to look like I had about as much chance of answering this question as a celluloid dog chasing an asbestos cat in hell. I simply didn’t have enough to go on, or didn’t have the straight dope. But a peek at my email as I went to logout changed all my plans. There in my inbox, new as a peeled egg, was a message from Lorna_99@ffatale.net.

“Mark—I did recall something else about the book—it was a mystery, a detective story. Hope this helps! Nighty-night! Lorna.” That was all. Cool as a slice of chicken in aspic. How she’d forgotten the book was a mystery was a mystery to me, but I decided to grab a cup of mud and knock around the angles a little more. The taste of the coffee reminded me of the shellacking I’d been taking on Lorna’s query so far, but this added detail opened up new possibilities, and closed others. Maybe I had a shot at redemption. A chance to make the question go away. A chance to make Lorna a very happy woman.

At end of day, I needed someone who had read Lorna’s book, and that wasn’t me. Nobody can read everything; the last guy I know who tried went nutty and wound up catching the white jacket express to the bughouse. I couldn’t ask my colleagues here at the library, they had all gone home. But what if I could ask a hundred avid readers, or a thousand? The electronic discussion lists! The Web was lousy with them, large or small, on any topic you could think of and then some. Science fiction, romance, all kinds of mysteries, children’s books— you name it, there was a discussion list or message board for it. This wonder of the modern age let me question hundreds of real readers at the push of a button, but there was a right way and a wrong way, and before I put the screws to the virtual man on the virtual street, I needed to pay a visit to the morgue.

Many of these discussion lists had searchable archives, and for the next few minutes I dug through the files at Dorothy_L, a mystery discussion list; RARA-Avis, a group dedicated to hardboiled mysteries and noir; and Fiction_L, a useful, long-established discussion list made up mostly of librarians like me, exchanging advice on various aspects of reader’s services, and helping each other out of fixes like the one I was in. The archives overflowed with thousands of answered questions easily searched by keyword and ranked for relevance, but it didn’t take long to see that Lorna’s book hadn’t come up on any of these discussion lists before. I tried the archives of the more general Stumpers_L as well—you never knew what you’d find there—and then I hotfooted it over to a commercial site that worked on much the same principle: ABE Booksellers’ Booksleuth. Here were scads of questions and a fair number of answers, arranged by type: fiction, children’s books, mystery, romance, science fiction, nonfiction. For children’s book searches, you could visit the message board over at Loganberry Books, which operated on a similar principle. They charged a couple of sawbucks to post a question, but the archives were free. These various archives held a jackpot of information on lost and forgotten book titles, but I was rolling snake eyes. It was time to tip my mitt and put my question on the line.

I belonged to umpteen electronic discussion lists, though I was only really active in Fiction_L. In my line of work, it was handy to be in touch with about a kajillion readers in various genres. I handled what might have been a crushing amount of e-mail by using a separate, dummy e-mail account just for discussion lists. There were various free Web-based e-mail accounts—I used Yahoo! Mail because they’d been around awhile, and allowed me to have my various lists presorted into handy folders that could be quickly tossed, and all for zippo. At times I might join a smaller electronic discussion list, say one frequented by fans of a particular author, just to ask a question and dust out as soon as I’d gotten the goods. But when it came to a regular source like Fiction_L, it was important to give a little quid pro quo. You don’t want a rep as a moocher. Not only was it a stand-up thing to do, but answering electronic discussion list questions was a lot of kicks and a great workout for slewfoots and seasoned gumshoes alike. Before posting my question, I browsed through recent postings on Fiction_L to see if there was anything down my alley. There was one old posting for a kid’s book that hadn’t had a nibble all day, and I replied off-list to the poster suggesting she might have better luck posting to PubYac or searching over at Loganberry. After passing a few other requests for books on a topic, or readalikes for this or that author, I saw an old posting labeled “Noir Short Story,” and pounced on it like a skinny cat pouncing on a fat canary.

Short stories were a whole other kettle of fish, and they called for different tools. Detailed descriptions of a story’s plot were harder to come by, although they did pop up in many of the resources I’d searched tonight. In addition, I might search The Short Story Index by subject, or Gale’s Litfinder database by subject and full-text keyword. But I wasn’t searching any of them, because I knew that story. I had read it. “My patron is looking for a story he read a few years back. What he remembers is that it had kind of a film noir feel to it, and at the very end, the narrator leaps to his death. Thanks, Desperate in Detroit.” Here was another strength of the discussion lists. None of the other sources I had searched tonight—reviews, articles, bloggers—would give away the end of a story like that, and yet it was often these spoilers that would lodge in the mind. If this librarian had posted to some hardboiled discussion list like RARA Avis, she’d have been answered hours ago, but here today on Fiction_L, in seemed like I was the only one who’d read The Plunge by David Goodis. This had to be her story, a classic noir tale that first came out in 1958, but had be republished since then in a couple of anthologies. Sure, it was written in the third person, but a very subjective third person who stepped off a ledge at the final moment of the story in a sublime act of desperation prefigured right in the title. Feeling as sharp as a box of ferrets, I brought up OCLC WorldCat and tagged the anthologies in which the story appeared, even noting that the poster’s own library in Detroit owned one of them. I hit “Send” with shaking fingers, certain I’d nailed this one, even as a new message headed “re: Noir Short Story” popped into my inbox just a little too quickly, and I felt a cold chill down my spine as I looked at the Sender and saw a familiar name that wasn’t mine. Somewhere in cold dark reaches of Minnesota was a preternaturally well-read librarian with the mental dexterity of a well-heeled octopus and a memory like Fort Knox who had pulled a fast one and hit the buzzer right before me. Oh, this guy was good. I was glad he was on my side. My answer limped along a few minutes later, about as effectual as being savaged by a dead sheep. Not my night.

I constructed a snappy message to post to Ficton_L and Dorothy_L. The subject line for my posting read “Mystery (?) w/ Woman & Parrot named Lorna.” It was important to be clear and concise up front, if I was to have a snowball’s chance in hell of catching the eye of some busy librarian deleting her email. A clear subject line would also pay off down the road for anyone searching the archives, making the subject of my posting clear without opening the message. Subject lines like “Book Stumper” or “Help!” were the mark of a rube. My message read: “I’m looking for a book—probably a mystery—which features a Man with a parrot(?) named Lorna, who becomes involved with a Woman of the same name. This is all I have to go on at this point. Thanks for any help, my apologies for cross-posting.” This last bit was for hardcases like me who subscribed to multiple discussion lists and would get my question twice. Even as I hit send, I realized how slim a thread I was following. I felt like the guy who went to lock the barn after the horse had been stolen. And found the barn missing. I couldn’t decide whether finding this book was more like trying to grasp the small end of a hardboiled egg, or trying to eat clear soup with chopsticks. And what was that nagging detail about metal, metal fiction? With a shrug I logged off, grabbed my coat, and headed home in the rain.

Next morning the sun gleamed on the wet tarmac like some kind of redemption, but the coffee tasted like the socks of the Forgotten Man. When I entered the library by a side entrance, I saw a tough customer in a monkey suit waiting at the library doors, an hour before they were to open, his bulldog face not six inches from the posted hours. So much for adult literacy. It was still early here on the coast, but the librarians back east were getting ready for lunch, so I wasn’t surprised to see a couple of replies to my posting on Fiction_L. One librarian wrote “There’s a book called The Loop by Joe Coomer, which has a guy with a parrot—unnamed—who becomes involved with a librarian named Fiona. Could this be it?” Hmmm . . . Fiona. Lorna. I had to admit they were close. I had read The Loop, but my tired pumpkin hadn’t caught the similarity, and neither had any of the online searches. Computers don’t think that way, only people do, which was another strength of the discussion lists. It took one imperfect human mind to untangle the fuzzy thinking of another. I filed this one away as a possibility, and went on to the next post, from a law librarian in Altoona.
“I know this one—this is definitely The Alabaster Box, by James Lane Allen!” The Alabaster Box came out back in 1923 according to OCLC WorldCat, and had never been reprinted. Neither the Web nor Gale’s Literature Resource Center had much to say about the book, and while it might be in the public domain, nobody had scanned the text and put it online. It looked like microfiche might be in the cards, but a brief review in the good old Book Review Digest put some cracks into The Alabaster Box, and when I pulled up a PDF of a review of the New York Times Historic Backfile, it broke it into a million useless shards. Allen’s dreary little book sounded nothing at all like what I was looking for. “Thanks, Altoona,” I grumbled aloud, only to look up and see a solid wall of pinstripe large as life and, in fact, twenty pounds larger. It was the patron I’d seen waiting at the door an hour ago, and all that fresh air hadn’t improved his outlook. He carried a chip on each shoulder, like epaulettes.

“Da name’s Alphonse. I’m lookin’ for dis book about a dawg,” he barked.

“A dog, huh. What else can you tell me about it?”

“Nuthin’—I jest know its about ‘dis dawg, is awl.”

I grilled the guy like a nice piece of fish, but his eyes remained as blank as a haddock’s, until I lobbed this zinger:

“Where did you hear about this dog book, anyway?”

“Aw, my bruddah tole me about it.”

I’d been in enough close shaves with Occam’s razor to know that hoofbeats generally meant horses, not zebras. There’s more ways to kill a cat than throwing a grand piano at it.

“Your brother — and where might he be found at this time of day?”

“Aw, he’s laid up at home wit’ busted kneecaps—it’s for him dat I’m gettin’ ‘dis book.”

“I see. Let’s give him a call, shall we?”

Forty seconds later, we had our answer, which was about as far from the question as Venice from Venus. The guy wanted a cassette recording of The Five People You Meet in Heaven, which, how it’s about a dog I’ll never know. It was the old refrain. People were often looking for a book they knew diddly about, on the recommendation of some friend or relation. Maybe they’d half-seen something about it on TV, or not-quite-heard it mentioned when they were somewhere between dreamland and the clock radio. Cases like these, with almost nothing to go on, were the perfect time to get lazy, which a good librarian spells s-m-a-r-t. Consider the source, and if the way back looks easier than the way ahead, wise up and keep it simple, sweetheart. I had NPR, CSPAN’s BookTV and other popular local and national media sources bookmarked on my computer for easy access. Often I could identify a title by searching the archived transcripts or abstracts searching for nothing more than the day and time the program had aired. And I was never shy about calling friends or relations if it meant getting the book into a patron’s hands.

As for Lorna’s book, I didn’t know any of that, and seeing as the road ahead looked about as clear as the inside of a blackberry pie, I fired her off an e-mail mentioning The Loop, and asking her where she’d heard about the book and how long ago she’d read it. The rest of the day I was as busy as a one-legged tapdancer, and it was late that afternoon that I noticed her reply. What I read made so mad, I didn’t have a simile for it:
“Hello, Mark. No, I don’t think it is The Loop. Nice try, though. I did remember a couple other details. It was a short story—not a novel, and the man in it—he was a librarian. As for where I heard of it, I don’t recall. And I can’t say when I read it, because I haven’t. I’ve just always wanted to. XXOX, Lorna.”

Something was definitely wrong here, and it wasn’t my search skills. How could she have forgotten it was a story, and if she’d never read it, why didn’t she know where she’d heard of it? What part of her mind were these new details coming from? I had a headache a yard wide and a sudden lurch in my gut as the floor seemed to lurch from under me like an elevator to hell and I bit my cheek and tasted blood and the blood tasted like metal and the sky cracked open and it all became suddenly, blindingly clear. I replied to Lorna’s e-mail telling her I’d found her story, and to meet me at the library on Monday. Then I headed for the door, grabbing a few old mysteries on the way out for inspiration, and drove toward the coast where the sea air would clear my head. On the way I stopped at a liquor store and a pet shop. It was going to be a long weekend.

The following Monday I came to the library carrying something big and square, covered in cloth. Lorna showed up around noon, sidling up to my lone outpost as stealthily as an iguana. Her eyes looked like strange sins.

“You’ve found my story?” she said.

We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesman.

“‘No one wants to be part of a fiction, and even less so if that fiction is real.’ Know who wrote that?” I gave her a look like a dentist’s drill.

“I can’t say as I do,” she said.

“Fellow name of Paul Auster—he writes odd, postmodern stuff, pretty good if you like that kind of thing. You know, books about writing books about writing books, sort of like a funhouse mirror. What the academic types might call . . . meta-fiction.”

“Meta- ah, I see. Not metal fiction. And you think he’s the one who wrote my story?”

“Nix, kid. Smarten up—we both know that’s a lie. Stop playing me for a sap and spill it! The story doesn’t exist. You made it up. What your reasons were I don’t know—maybe you’re bats, or maybe this is your idea of getting your tax dollar’s worth. But I’ve got news for you sister, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. It does exist, your story.”

She looked at me as if I had just come up from the floor of the ocean with a drowned mermaid under my arm.

“What’s it called?”

“It’s called 'The Mystery That Wasn’t There,' and you’re reading it right now. It’s almost over. As soon as you finish it, I’d appreciate it if you’d stop wasting my time and yours, and be missing, if not missed.”

“But wait, what about the . . .”

I lifted the cloth from the cage by my side. “Lorna, meet my new friend, Lorna.”

“Lorna, meet Lorna,” echoed the parrot in a voice as silky as a crust of burnt toast. It was almost as if she’d been locked in a cabin all weekend, with a man at a laptop, muttering that very phrase over and over and over.

“Then, it’s . . . quits? I won’t be seeing you again?”

“You’re welcome to come and use the library anytime you like, of course. As for the rest, well. I figure one Lorna in my life is about all I can take.”

And I picked up my parrot and went to lunch.

“I steal, and I admit it.”—W. R. Burnett.■