Page 24 of The Missing Pages
Violet inhaled the scent again. The smoke was inside her nostrils, it felt like it was hovering over her. She leaned over to a girl who’d just sat down across from her.
“Sorry, this may be a weird question. But do you smell someone smoking a pipe?” Violet whispered.
The girl shook her head and made a face like she didn’t know what Violet was talking about.
Violet looked around again. Not a single person in the library seemed to be distracted by the scent of smoke or anything else for that matter.
She shut down her computer and walked down the stairs toward the Memorial Room. No one seemed to notice the smell of smoke, but for Violet its scent grew stronger the closer she got to Harry’s former study.
The first thing Violet noticed when she stood outside the room was that Madeline had changed the book on display in the rotunda.
Under the glass casings was a first edition of Ingoldsby Legends, written by an eighteenth-century clergyman by the name of Richard Barham.
Only last week Madeline had mentioned she was considering showcasing this particular volume from Harry’s collection.
“There was a printer’s error in the first set they created,” Madeline shared. “A page was left blank in a few of the copies, so in one edition, the author used it as a dedication page to his friend, E.R. Moran. Come with me, I’ll show you.”
They left Madeline’s office at Houghton and headed over to Widener, taking the tunnel and elevator over to the Memorial Room.
“It never gets old for me.” Madeline smiled as she glanced over at Harry’s portrait and then pressed the alarm code on the panel beside the door.
Violet followed Madeline as she moved the sliding ladder to reach the exact edition she was searching for. She climbed the steps, opened the glass case, and retrieved the brown leather volume.
After slowly descending the wooden rungs, she took the book to one of the tables, opened it, and turned it to the first page.
“Look at this,” she said. Madeline’s finger lingered on the dedication written in opaque black ink, which read:
By a blunder for which I have myself to thank,
Here’s a page that has somehow been left blank,
Aha my friend, Moran, I have you. You’ll look
In vain for a fault in one page of my book.
“Reading that you can really feel the affection he has for Moran. Their deep friendship,” she remarked.
Violet gazed at the old-fashioned script, so perfect and precisely written. But it possessed its own humor, too.
“That’s what Harry was searching for in his collection. To have books that were not just rare and prized because they were old or first editions, but also had a special story behind them.”
“A fingerprint of another person. Someone who had loved it like he did,” Violet added.
“Precisely,” Madeline said. “I see you’re starting to understand what motivated him.”
Violet nodded. In truth, her patience had been wearing thin with almost everyone around her these days. Her suitemates. Hugo’s rowing buddies. But whenever she learned something new about Harry, it softened her frustration.
“I wish I’d gotten the chance to meet him.”
“I know,” Madeline said, nodding. “Sometimes I feel like he’s actually floating around in the stacks.
Making sure I’m doing a good job taking care of his books.
A few times, a book has randomly fallen off the shelf while I was standing perfectly still and it’s a book I never noticed before.
” She smiled at Violet. “I always learn something from it, so it feels like it’s a little reminder from him that we’re lucky to be here surrounded by so much knowledge. ”
Now as Violet stood in the rotunda outside the Memorial Room, she saw that Madeline had placed the Moran edition in one of the display cases along with a few other artifacts from the collection, behind a glass shield, opened to that exact dedication page.
She read the description Madeline had prepared detailing what made the book distinct.
As she gazed at the temporary exhibit that Madeline had curated, she was happy that she was privy to so much behind-the-scenes knowledge of Harry and his library.
Standing at the room’s threshold, just outside the rope barrier, she noticed the scent of tobacco had followed her there. It was undeniable. She put her bag down and lifted her arm to her nose. Had she recently been around someone smoking? Was it she who’d brought this scent into the library?
But her clothes just smelled of detergent. She looked around the room’s perimeter and the rotunda; there wasn’t a single other person in sight who could have carried the smell of burning tobacco with them.
She stood in the center of the doorway, her gaze focused firmly on Harry’s portrait. Years ago her grandma Helen had given her a book about ghosts, and she remembered reading that they supposedly sometimes communicated their presence beside someone by manifesting a certain smell.
Violet had a crazy thought. Was it at all possible that Harry’s ghost was trying to tell her that he was there?